What is eSourcing? A Best Practice Guide from Ivalua

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What is eSourcing?

Simply put, eSourcing is a collection of digital tools that help streamline, simplify and improve strategic sourcing activities and Procurement processes performed by an organization’s Procurement team. eSourcing tools improve Procurement’s ability to generate value for the organization by managing ALL spend and ALL suppliers, reducing supply chain risk and increasing savings.

How is “Sourcing” different from “eSourcing”?

At the most basic level, Sourcing and eSourcing really aren’t that different. In both cases Procurement professionals are working to locate the best product from the best suppliers with the best price and terms. The key difference between Sourcing and eSourcing lies in the tools used to execute both day to day and strategic sourcing activities.

Traditional sourcing limits efficient collaboration with internal & external stakeholders and suppliers with tools such as email, phones, spreadsheets, PDFs and even faxes. In addition to collaboration, these tools limit transparency, standardization, scale and automation. All of these elements serve as the foundation for effective eSourcing:

two people looking at shared computer screen

Collaboration

With eSourcing, collaborative sourcing is good sourcing. Collaborative sourcing involves stakeholders in gathering requirements, reviewing & rating supplier proposals and selecting the best strategic option that yields significant benefits, such as enhancing the understanding of products, services and requirements. Improved supplier collaboration increases engagement and can generate new and differentiated product and service offerings.

Transparency

Traditional Sourcing tools provide limited scheduling, data, analysis and execution transparency. eSourcing, on the other hand, provides global teams and stakeholders with an opportunity for complete transparency. Transparency improves efficiency, enables collaboration, and streamlines strategic initiatives and spend management. Ultimately leading to better outcomes.

Ivalua Solutions - Collaborate Across the Supply Chain

Standardization

Often procurement buyers are left with little structure or support throughout the sourcing process. This can lead to process differences across the organization, leading to confusion across procurement teams as well as suppliers and ultimately impacting data quality, decisions and results.

eSourcing provides sourcing personnel with template based Projects and eRFx (RFQ, RFP, RFI, Auctions) which reduces effort and the overall sourcing cycle time needed to initiate and manage sourcing processes. For global organizations, standardization makes an even bigger impact on data and analysis quality and coordinating joint initiatives.

Scale

Traditional sourcing includes manual and inefficient management, analysis and coordination activities across cross functional teams that can span multiple regions. Traditional sourcing tools lack the automation required to manage large volumes of sourcing events and those that are or complex and consume significant time and effort to analyze results.

eSourcing provides teams with the ability to manage multiple projects simultaneously and transparently view project status and activity. It also provides procurement with the ability to seamlessly manage more complex projects. eSourcing also enables eAuctions and other advanced sourcing tools, which can dramatically speed up the negotiation time for all manner of products and services. Furthermore, reporting and analysis can be completed rapidly with a push of a button, saving hours or even days of work for a single project.

business woman on phone overlooking factory

Automation

Traditional sourcing tools lack automation, requiring significant manual effort to assemble RFx information and processes, alert & manage suppliers, eSourcing enables automated notifications and reminders for buyers, stakeholders and suppliers. The RFx setup & process can also be largely automated based on preset templates, seamlessly copying data from repositories, contracts, and requisitions rather than manual data entry.

Another automation benefit comes towards the tail end of the RFx process, during submission reporting and analysis. eSourcing reports can speed up analysis and calculations across extremely large volumes of line items, products, goods, services, etc. can be handled with ease.

Let Ivalua eSourcing Solutions Software Streamline Your Sourcing Process

Ivalua can help you fulfill your sourcing needs effectively, efficiently and affordably with our e Sourcing software. We cover all sourcing projects and RFX, auctions, category management, and BOM Lifecycle Management. Contact us to let us know how we can help you get the supplies you need with as little stress and cost as possible.

There are many eSourcing benefits to an organization.

The most notable include:

Making it not only possible, but much simpler, to implement impactful best practices across the entire sourcing organization that help create lasting value.

Improving spend management across all major spend categories (indirect, direct, services and CapEx), and with this comes cost reduction.

Increased levels of supplier engagement and management greatly contributes to the reduction of risk and increased access to innovative products and services that provide value to the organization.

Great efficiency and effectiveness in building strong sourcing pipelines and executing category based strategies to generate savings.

Ivalua offers you an eSourcing process that helps you identify your needs for goods and services, quickly and effectively.

Here are a few ways that our sourcing solution helps:

We provide various strategies that we implement to find suppliers that best meet your business’s needs.
Our program helps to negotiate a contract with a supplier, finding something that is favorable both financially and logistically for your company.
The contract can be signed electronically for ease and convenience and, with Contract Lifecycle Management, you can also monitor supplier compliance and manage risk.

With Ivalua, we have accelerated our sourcing life cycle and are able to consistently meet and exceed savings targets. We can measure cycle times for various project types and identify and eliminate bottlenecks to make sourcing more efficient and drive better outcomes. Quote - Right - White

Ben Lizak

Manager, Sourcing Life cycle Management

Sprint

Technology - Meeting between Procurement professionals

SOURCE ALL SPEND

Source any category across All Spend types: direct, indirect, services and CapEx

MANAGE PROGRAMS & PROJECTS

Manage Programs, Projects and take advantage of industry leading BPM & workflow capabilities

CONNECT TO S2P

Minimize manual effort and increase automation, efficiency and transparency, because Ivalua eSourcing is natively integrated with the full S2P process