Discover practical ways to measure the success of eSourcing initiatives through procurement efficiency, supplier relations, and cost saving. Elevate your strategies with expert insights, ensuring lasting excellence in your procurement journey.
It’s great that more and more businesses are adopting eSourcing strategies to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their supply chains. Now, they need to measure their initiatives’ success, and that extends far beyond sourcing cost savings.
To determine the overall performance of your eSourcing strategy, you need to set Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Different steps in the supply chain have different KPIs. In eSourcing, KPIs include supplier ratings, compliance, and supplier defect rates.
We will look specifically at eSourcing KPIs and how you can boost your business’s performance using KPI results.
ESourcing Key Performance Indicators
We’re going to look at four primary KPIs that will help your eSourcing management.
1) Strategic Sourcing
Strategic sourcing reduces redundancies to create a more streamlined eSourcing system. Redundancies occur when needs and operations overlap. Strategic eSourcing software doesn’t allow that to happen and this automatically cuts wasted time and resources. As a result, sourcing processes move smoothly along.
Strategic eSourcing comprises several metrics with its own KPIs, including procurement ROI, contract compliance, supplier performance, and purchase order cycle time.
2) Supplier diversity
Supplier diversity can be divided into two broad categories:
The number of suppliers: This is the actual number of suppliers you use and can be anything from one to ten or more. It’s also the number of local, regional, national, and global suppliers. The number of suppliers affects things like risk management, supplier overlap, and single vs. multiple suppliers.
Equal opportunity employment: This is the adherence to non-discriminatory employment practices, for example, employing those with disabilities and chronic physical and mental health conditions, ethnic minorities, and older people (over 50 years old, for example).
3) Supplier ratings
This is about supplier performance and includes response times, timely delivery, quality of materials, adherence to ethical principles, and budget management. It separates the wheat from the chaff so you can concentrate on highly rated suppliers and let the others go.
4) Product quality
Product quality ties in with supplier ratings. Suppliers who continually provide poor performing or defective products must be removed from your supplier list. It also includes products that vary from specifications and have an unreliable performance record.
How To Measure eSourcing Success
KPIs are the things (metrics) you should measure, here we’re going to look at the ways in which you can measure your success.
Use an eSourcing platform
An eSourcing platform provides many benefits for public sector buyers, not least of which is a central hub from which buyers can coordinate their eSourcing strategies. The platform collects, stores, and organises all data related to the sourcing process, and makes it easily accessible to buyers who need instant information to make insightful sourcing decisions.
In fact, an eSourcing platform from an experienced company like Delta eSourcing has features that make it easy to measure the success of eSourcing initiatives. Let’s look at some of the features below.
- Data analysis
You can pull data on all manner of metrics from the platform, including contracts, supplier performance, supplier products, works, and services, and feedback (from suppliers to you).
Some platforms, including Delta eSourcing, provide analytics, which enables you to make strategic decisions based on in-depth reporting. This is essential when you want to reduce supplier risk and optimise eSourcing and eProcurement strategies.
- Market comparison
It’s important to know how you stack up against your competitors. Market analysis, buyer audits, or benchmark performance gives you valuable information about your position in public sector procurement, allowing you to improve where necessary, strengthen where possible, and enhance your supplier acquisition methods.
- Automation
Automation plays an essential role in eProcurement, including data collection and analysis. Automation improves the accuracy of data, as well as correct data storage based on pre-set categories and criteria, supplier risk management, and supply chain management, which speeds up transactions and overall eSourcing process cycle time.
With all pertinent information to hand, automation can simplify metric measurement, helping you determine the success of your eSourcing initiatives.
- Communication
Communication is the key to successful buyer and supplier relationships and internal operations. For instance, you can easily communicate success to senior management and eSourcing teams to keep motivation high and encourage ongoing engagement.
It also facilitates feedback among all parties, particularly between buyers and suppliers. In this way, potential problems are identified early and action is taken to avoid pitfalls in the first place.
Feedback also includes how successfully the eSourcing process works for both parties and how success can be enhanced by taking comments and suggestions on board and integrating them into planning future initiatives.
ESourcing Initiatives Supported By Technology
ESourcing is just one component of public sector procurement, but it’s a very important one. Without effective eSourcing strategies, much of the supply chain falls apart. One of the best ways to stop that from happening is to embrace technology, specifically eSourcing platforms.
Platforms support every aspect of eSourcing and procurement, facilitating transparency in all operations. When you choose Delta eSourcing, you have access to an eTendering portal used by over 500K public sector organisations and over 100K public sector suppliers, which embraces transparency and collaboration and enables buyers to easily manage their supply chains.
Market analytics features provide a deep look at buyer performance, allowing them to measure their success across various metrics and against their competitors. If you want to see how it all comes together simply book a free demo and we’ll show you how your eSourcing and procurement can be optimised for outstanding performance.
