Never Discount the Buy(er)
The Procurement Office is here to help. With the right strategy, mindset, and action, sourcing professionals can be a valuable asset to you, the engineering department. By involving the sourcing team early in your product design, you can save time and money, improve your product, and even learn something new.
Advanced purchasing organizations are divided by commodity in order for the buying agents to become deeply entrenched in the full market segment they are working with. Traveling the country or globe, they meet with the biggest and most relevant players in their buying scope. The level of market understanding will benefit you if you get the buyers involved early in product and project design.
Purchasing departments have two main goals. The first is to get the right product or service to the right place at the right time to support the organization. The second is to achieve the lowest total cost of these products and services. In order to achieve these goals, the buyers must understand the industry they are buying from. This level of understanding provides them with knowledge aimed to help solve a solve product quality issues or give leverage during a negotiation.
While educating themselves about their particular commodity, the buyers meet engineers and executives at many competing organizations. This extensive contact gives them the resources to provide a well-informed, objective opinion or option regarding whatever project you are pursuing. Working with Mar-Bal, Inc. allows you to immediately harness every available resource spanning from project concept to finished goods. Part of that value chain involves our own Procurement Department, when appropriate, to provide additional benefit to you, our customer.
Procurement can facilitate a conversation between you and another industry expert to result in deciding on an alternative grade of steel, improved fastener, or even a whole new product concept. Buyers might not be able to provide the expert opinion that makes a winning product, but they can certainly help you get in touch with many experts who can. Partnering with purchasing can lead to a higher profit margin or a more competitive price to your customer which would result in a winning proposal.
