Source One’s Headquarters House A Center of Excellence

 

In April, Source One quietly moved to its new corporate headquarters in Willow Grove, PA. The relocation served as an indicator of our continued growth over these past 20+ years, but also reflects our ability to stay ahead of the continuing shifts in the strategic sourcing playing field and enhance the performance and profitability of our clients.

As you might have seen in the AberdeenGroup’s whitepaper titled “The CPO’s Agenda for 2012 …and Beyond”, which was circulated late last year, the priorities of CPOs across the U.S. are shifting in terms of how they plan on improving their organization’s spend management. This shift in priorities resulted in Strategic Sourcing, which has historically proven to be the most efficient and productive method of managing a business’ spend, being ranked last on the list, overshadowed by “increased focusing on spending categories” and “aligning procurement’s strategy with the organization’s goals as a whole”. This shifting to the organizational center by procurement departments reflects the success of companies like Apple, whose supply chain optimizations and supplier management practices under Tim Cook’s time as CPO helped make the company the most valuable corporation in the world.

In our providing of consultative services concerning strategic sourcing and cost reduction, we have been building relationships with companies across a broad range of industries for more than two decades. Last year, our growth accelerated and hasn’t slowed as a result of our emphasis shift from cost-cutting to a consultancy that offers value-add services related to supply chain management, which includes supplier relationship management, project management, and top-line revenue growth.

Our rapid growth required us to relocate to our new headquarters, but this relocation also served as the final step in our organizational restructuring. To support the demand for a more comprehensive service offering, Source One created a Supply Chain Center of Excellence within our new headquarters, with Source One now acting as an incubator for the development of new ideas and best practices for category management, supplier relationship management, and Supply Chain/Finance Integration. The initial focus includes curating a stakeholder engagement process to allow procurement to effectively support their marketing groups, while crafting thorough & accurate spend analyses and opportunity assessment tactics for IT.

To get an idea of how this works, we were able to flex our Supply Chain Center of Excellence’s muscles in our nearshoring initiatives. In assisting our clients manufacturing moves to locations nearer to the U.S., we discovered that Mexican companies were unfamiliar and struggling with strategic sourcing – their business practices were centered around doing business with those they had personal relationships with, and advertising their products and services was not an established practice. Their negotiation tactics also differed greatly from those used in the United States. These differences made it difficult for U.S. companies to find the right suppliers in Mexico, and even if they did, the differences led to inflated prices, reducing the country’s competitive advantage. Source One developed a strategy to act as ambassadors for strategic sourcing in Mexico, helping regions within the country build foundations to work efficiently and effectively with its partners in the U.S. We were invited to CONAMA in 2011, a gathering of Mexican businesses, politicians, and scholars, to further define strategic sourcing and provide insight on the opportunities and challenges facing Mexico’s, and Latin America’s, nearshoring industry. Since then, we have continued the dialogue, and have spoken at various events for LaSalle University students in Mexico City, furthering their education on U.S. business practices.

To sum it up, Source One is leveraging our industry knowledge to stay ahead of the advances of the changing procurement industry by shifting away from cost reduction practices and moving towards proactive supply chain and risk management. As procurement moves from purely cutting costs to managing projects and offering market intelligence in the name of offering their company’s a competitive advantage, we are ready to help.

Check out our Center of Excellence page here.