It is a continual temptation to adopt tactical sourcing practices, because it comes with short term gains. One overlooks that these gains come at the cost of optimizing the company’s supplier base. Companies focusing on key strategic suppliers for a long term engagement will gain a competitive advantage in their sourcing practices. Having said this, it is however not possible for a company to carry out all of its sourcing strategically.

For many procurement executives, strategic sourcing feels too prolonged and wearying.  Especially when one has a requirement of making a low dollar or an emergency purchase. There might be bids where one needs to add new suppliers who are not registered in their system and they don’t want to undertake the whole cycle of creating a new supplier in the system. Some bids might be reasonably straight-forward and would not need a complex sourcing tool.

In such scenarios, despite having state of the art e-Sourcing applications, one evades the typical e-Sourcing drill and initiates discrete supplier communications through emails or other channels. They feel that this simplifies the process, however unaware of the fact that such spends are often lost in email trails and are missed from their company’s spend reports. Thus, leading to maverick spending.

In addition to these reasons, there are assumptions made by buyers like – low cost country sourcing is always preferred for manufacturing, believing that supplier prices are primarily driven by negotiation leverage and so on. Of course one cannot be blamed for opting to make a tactical purchase – after all the use cases are different from any strategic purchase. So the question is, how does one ensure that tactical spend is mapped to the company’s reports? How does one adopt an automated process for tactical sourcing, a process similar to yet simpler than strategic sourcing?

Zycus, in addition to its end to end comprehensive eSourcing capability  that can support complex, strategic and scalable sourcing needs of an organization, introduces the differentiating functionality called ‘Quick Source’ within its eSourcing solution. Quick Source will provide an easy to use, single page RFP creation capability for tactical, unique and time sensitive purchasing activities. It will have a single page supplier response mechanism for the suppliers to respond to bids circulated by the buyer.  Additionally, the buyer will be able to add new suppliers, customize and track events on the fly, without engaging in any complex procedures.