During the past year, shoes have been a topic that has been on the agenda both here at Purchasing Transformation and on Spend Matters. While both of these posts have dealt with the TCO and lack of (personal) sourcing, today media in Sweden has reported another aspect of the TCO of shoes (in Swedish) that can be used as an analogy on the business climate of today.
While shoe sales in Sweden are down (about 3 percent according to Handelns utredningsintitut), business for cobblers (who repair shoes) are up by nearly 20 percent according to some cobblers that Dagens Nyheter has spoken to. Instead of buying new shoes, it seems that people on the street are doing their utmost to get greater mileage out of their current footwear.
This trend can be analyzed from two angles; first, as one business (new shoes) falter another will step into it’s place (cobblery); and second, getting more from what you already have might be a better strategy than trying to replace or re-launch failing initiatives.
We discussed the first angle a few days ago so let’s take a closer look at the second angle. Getting more mileage from your investment.
Revitalizing your e-sourcing initiative
Many e-sourcing initiatives (well most initiatives to be frank) tend to slump after a few good years, and there are numerous reasons for this. To get a stumbling initiative back on track, one can take this four-fold approach:
- Benchmark and best practice
- Training
- Revitalization
- Target projects
While the first two are rather self-explanatory and used by many high performing organizations on a regular basis, the latter two are more interesting and are the real organization boosters.
Revitalization can be a way to challenge current methods and models by analyzing new business dynamics to establish a redefined e-sourcing roadmap. In many cases this re-charges the batteries of staff that find it harder and harder to deliver savings that are experienced to be as high and mighty as the initial results (which were often based on new approaches which increased competition tremendously thus generating savings previously unheard of – pre-e-sourcing). The re-defined e-sourcing roadmap feeds into targeted e-sourcing projects which are used to accelerate and invigorate the entire e-sourcing initiative.
