My Top 10 Success Factors for Strategic Sourcing

Based on my experience – of course! – but also on an excellent paper written in 2000 by Tim Duffie’s (UPS) about the difference between sourcing AND strategic sourcing and following the recent post of David Bush ‘Strategic Sourcing Success Factors‘, you will find on this post what I consider as the top 10 Strategic Sourcing’s critical success factors (CSF). As you will see, it is tightly linked to enabling the 7-step methodology I always refer to.

So, let’s come to it. Below are listed factors you should enable or develop as much as you can in order to run successful strategic sourcing projects:

  1. Powerful Spend visibility and analysis capabilities,
  2. Top Management clear objectives, strong leadership and organizational commitment,
  3. A best-in-class sourcing-team structure with a clear separation between Sourcing and Procurement roles,
  4. Competitive Supply Market analysis; in depth for the top 20% trading partners,
  5. Total Cost review and evaluation,
  6. Sourcing strategies adapted to your business requirements and to your supplier selection capabilities and strengths;
  7. Usage of best-of-breed ASP – on demand – technology to ensure fast-access, easy-check, robust and risk-proof content and processes,
  8. Contract management capabilities for contract-compliance measurement; Culture/Processes for continuous improvement enablement.
  9. Collaborative relationships with your trading partners
  10. Benefits from a supplier pre-qualification database (private or preferably public including financial, organisational, quality, commercial and sustainable business (CSR) rating capabilities…), saving time and helping managing risks better in our time of globalisation.

I could provide more detail for each of those CSFs but I think they are as easy to understand as their impacts are clear; additionally, they are – for most of them – well covered in the documents I mentioned in the first lines of this post.

One Response

  1. Michael Lamoureux 29 March 2007

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