Direct Procurement as a Strategic Advantage
By assessing suppliers worldwide, leveraging the right platform and network and optimizing costs, you can move from a traditional approach to a more strategic approach to direct procurement and gain a competitive edge.
Capturing Growth Opportunities and Managing Risk
Direct procurement departments have more oversight than ever in their efforts to purchase materials for finished goods. A strategic approach with a single platform connected to a global network provides agility for seizing opportunities and resiliency for managing risk.
Traditional Approach: Tactical, Manual, Inefficient
Traditionally, direct procurement has been viewed as tactical. All companies must acquire materials to manufacture finished goods, but this activity typically provides no real differentiation or competitive value. The usual process relies on siloed internal technology, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, to manage the data and primarily manual steps to move the process forward.
However, manufacturing has grown exponentially more complex, lead times are now tighter and competitive pressure is much greater. These dynamics present an opportunity to use direct procurement strategically. Yet outdated technology and manual processes can’t handle the scope and scale of what companies need to realize direct procurement’s full value.
A New Strategy and New Technology
The level of agility required to capture growth opportunities—plus resiliency to manage today’s risks—requires a new way of thinking about direct procurement and its potential. Direct procurement teams should be able to orchestrate everything from onboarding thousands of suppliers in multiple tiers to collaborating with trading partners across all ecosystems. This includes ensuring that all parties can stay in sync on purchase order details, match purchase orders to shipments, receipts and invoices and manage inventory risk at any stage.
Leveraging these capabilities, you can empower your teams to see and manage beyond the enterprise and drive maximal value from direct procurement. New technology is required to support this strategy by equipping them with access to a large trading partner network to get the data they need along with integrated, purpose-built software applications for start-to-finish process orchestration.
Essentials of Strategic Direct Procurement
Transforming your company’s direct procurement processes from tactical to strategic requires an evaluation of where your department is today and where you want to be in the future. e2open provides essentials to help guide you on your journey.
Visibility
Gain end-to-end visibility through the entire supply network, including long-tail partners. This includes visibility into finished-goods inventory, components and materials held by suppliers at every tier so you can proactively manage shortages and excesses.
Alignment
Proactively align supply with demand through early collaboration with multiple tiers of suppliers. Close collaboration also helps you optimize the use of supplier and contractor rebates so you can reduce the cost of goods.
Efficiency
Establish more effective processes by streamlining labor-intensive workflows to increase productivity and drive new efficiencies. For instance, you can easily set up an audit-ready, paperless workflow complete with validated, electronically signed and archived electronic invoices with compliance in over 50 countries. Another example is enabling trading partners to create carton-level shipment details on purchase orders, print their own labels and conduct four-way matching with ease.
Cost Optimization
Achieve economies of scale and enhance profitability through the centralized purchasing of raw materials and products on the behalf of partners. You can reduce shipping time and costs by drop-shipping directly to customers, warehouses, plants, contract manufacturers and co-packers with orchestrated workflows among all parties. By easily viewing changes to bills of materials, related costs and cost forecasts, you can look for opportunities to enhance margins.
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Power of the Network for Direct Procurement
Discover how you can use direct procurement strategically to enable the agility and resiliency that empower you to achieve growth and manage risk.
Infographic
Challenges of Direct Procurement
Overcome the challenges of direct procurement by effectively collaborating with partners, optimizing and automating for agility, and negotiating to maximize your buying power.
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Customers Testimonials
"The complexity of our business and operating our supply chain is increasing as we see significant growth and diversity of our business across the globe. We’re excited to partner with e2open to ensure we stay abreast of the ever-changing regulations, leverage global trade and compliance best practices and further the digital transformation of our supply chain. The new platform provides best-in class, time-critical compliance to improve our operations, allowing us to better serve our global customers."
Air France® Industries
Head of Customs and Trade Compliance
Air France® Industries KLM Engineering & Maintenance
We know what stock we have in the channel, is it healthy, what our average days of stock are, do we ship in more or do we reduce what we are shipping? We are really in control of channel data.
Mailin Boeker
Acer
With the e2open system, processes that used to take a whole calendar year now happen in a matter of days.
Vinny Moscatello
Avon
Working with e2open enables us to better fulfill short supplier lead times, reduce inventory levels, and dramatically improve inventory turns—all while lowering the total cost of ownership to our customers.
Celestica
E2open compliance capabilities are very important for the Geodis Supply Chain Optimization compliance risk management program. The digital information is key to providing timely and accurate visibility, streamlining our compliance check processes, improving their efficiency and reliability. We’re now very well-positioned for the next wave of growth and ready to offer our customers more value than ever before.
Laurent Rosa
GEODIS
The e2open capabilities through supplier collaboration have enabled Jabil to standardize and digitalize our forecast communication process for all suppliers, providing increased optionality for more efficient collaboration. This is undoubtedly providing us with a competitive advantage, ensuring we have near real time visibility into forecast status with our suppliers and helping us make more reliable commitments to our customers.
Alan Brown
Vice President of Supply Chain, Technology and Transformation
Jabil
By implementing an integrated international purchasing system, we have ensured that Leggett & Platt is maximizing its efforts to conduct its international procurement activities in a compliant manner.
John Wainwright
Leggett & Platt, Inc.
The vision for us is that the core activities of transportation should be running independently and smoothly without any interaction from ourselves so that we can really focus on the additional services that we offer to our customers.
Sebastian Poehl
Head of Global Business Solutions
Leschaco
Having visibility to the supply chain gives us and our suppliers the opportunity to plan. We talk about planning its capacity, its resources, its material—and it helps with the cost as well by having all those elements tied together.
L'Oreal
We want to achieve world-class logistics, with teams able to leverage the best tools to overcome todays and future challenges. The benefits we are anticipating by using e2open’s TMS tool for intercontinental logistics are threefold: standardization, reduction of logistics costs, and end-to-end visibility. This should give us a competitive advantage in the market.
Dan Jianu
Logistics Operations Manager
Michelin
"E2open has become our core supply chain platform, giving us all our critical information in one place and enabling true collaboration. Within weeks of implementing Long Tail, we reduced overdue POs from over a hundred to just two—freeing our buyers from transactional work so they can focus on improving lead times, supplier engagement, and delivering more reliable dates to our customers."
Nishith Mohnot
Senior Manager of Business Systems
QSC
We consider e2open global trade software as a game changer. It has enabled us to gain in efficiency, follow the evolution of trade rules timely and accurately, and exploit the necessary free trade agreements. It enhanced our overall competitiveness.
Jean-Paul Verschoor
Origin Responsible Manager
Renault Group
Centralizing and automating our export control processes, and particularly our trade compliance, not only reduces risk for Sandvik, but opens new opportunities to do more business worldwide.
Sandvik
"We now have full visibility and control—from classification and RPS screening to qualifying for free trade agreements. We can even see in advance where we avoid import duties, giving us a direct financial benefit that we can reinvest in other areas."
Edwin Tolsma
Trade Compliance, Global Domains and IT Lead
Signify
With e2open’s Global Trade Management, we’ve transformed a chaotic, manual review process into an automated workflow that approves cases in under a minute, filters out low‑risk transactions, and gives us confidence that every shipment and download complies with global export and sanctions laws. The time saved now lets our team focus on auditing, partnering with supply chain, and ensuring our products are correctly classified worldwide—while still processing around 1,000 orders a week within eight hours.
Sophos
We rebranded e2open Concierge Services as Help Desk Plus and it has become a real extension of our company. The Help Desk Plus has enabled us to meet our partners where we need them and where they need us and make it as seamless and as easy as possible for our partners to go to market for their customers.
Sarah Masessa
Global Partner Platform and Communications Manager
VMware by Broadcom
Go from tactical to strategic direct procurement