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SOURCING
The procurement cycle begins with strategic sourcing—the long term strategy of identifying, evaluating, and negotiating with the optimal group of suppliers and trading partners.
Sourcing is the most important, value-added activity that procurement professionals perform for their company. Doing it well requires a wide range of skills and subject matter expertise. Sourcing also requires an inordinate amount of time gathering and comparing offerings from multiple suppliers. Automating those tasks with Epicor Sourcing not only allows the purchasing professional to focus more time and energy on strategic activities, it also provides for online collaboration and fosters competition that enhances the value of their work.
The Epicor Sourcing solution is a highly configurable, web-based framework that provides companies the tools to quickly and easily integrate strategic sourcing, dynamic pricing, collaboration and negotiation, and complex auctioning capabilities into their e-commerce and purchasing platforms. Whether buying, selling, or sourcing direct and indirect materials, goods, services, or spot purchases, Epicor Sourcing enables your organization to maximize savings and compliance by automating the process of negotiating the optimal combination of suppliers, products, services, and prices.
Rapidly locate, source, and transact with qualified business partners and eliminate the inefficiencies in the procurement process for direct, indirect and spot purchasing. Epicor Sourcing can streamline manual processes and deliver suppliers that meet your criteria in record time. Sourcing is the single most important part of a successful procurement strategy representing a savings of 15-20+% of total spend, and a 25+% reduction in cycle times.
Epicor Sourcing's comprehensive sourcing capabilities include powerful search capabilities, alerts and notifications, proxy bidding, event monitoring, multi-line functionality, automatic event upload/download, and configurable event types. Epicor Sourcing will save time, automate control, provide consistency, and accelerate mass adoption.
Epicor Sourcing provides your business with:
- Epicor Sourcing automates requests for information, quotes, or proposals, accelerating the process and helping negotiate the best value. Buyers evaluate suppliers on price and non-price parameters with weighted attribute eRFx. Streamlining the manual RFx process allows buyers to evaluate and select suppliers based on value to the organization.
- Weighted attributes enable buyers to establish any number of attributes on which to gather and compare values from bidders. These fully configurable attributes allow for relative weighting of each attribute and associated response value. The complex algorithms required for quantitative scoring of responses are all handled by Sourcing.
- Side-by-side comparisons of responses from multiple bidders make it easy for buyers to evaluate them and select a winner. The event scoreboard enables the buyer to make "split" awards, and optimize the award based on lower total costs and not just the best bid. This time saving element promotes quicker, better-informed decisions.
- Epicor Sourcing also provides graphical bid analysis. Bids from all participants are graphed in a dynamic, real-time display, giving the buyer a visual picture of an event's progress and success.
- Organizations can define and maintain metrics of supplier performance. Supplier report cards help drive purchasing decisions and evaluate suppliers. Report cards are configurable based on user-defined parameters such as quality, responsiveness, delivery, and cost. Each parameter can then be weighted and scored.
- Epicor Sourcing enables true online collaboration and negotiation with suppliers. With the solution, you can facilitate event creation and automate true cross-enterprise workflow. Information is disseminated throughout the organization and allows online negotiation between buyers and suppliers. Participants in sourcing events can participate in the free-flow sharing of information, and create an audit trail of messages that includes text, images, and documents.
- Multiple event types-choose from over 20 types of pre-configured events and auctions, or customize your own based on the way you do business.
- Easy configuration and customization -designed to let business users easily create customized events and site parameters.
- Secure transaction environment-Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) technology keeps transactions secure
Alerts-reduces the risk of missed opportunities by notifying you of events (proactive event notification) that meet your criteria, changes, and out-bid situations.
- Wireless capabilities- receive, view, and bid on events using your wireless device.
- Search Filters – powerful search capabilities allow buyers and suppliers to find events, items, and partners that meet their objectives.
- Integration with Epicor eProcurement - allows buyers to push non-catalog requisitions directly from eProcurement to Sourcing, run an event, and pass the winning bid back to eProcurement. Epicor Sourcing is fully integrated with Epicor eProcurement.
Epicor Sourcing has benefits for buyers and suppliers. The numerous benefits to buyers include accessing new suppliers, reducing purchasing costs through competitive bidding, reducing purchasing cycle times, and streamlining and automating internal processes. Supplier benefits include increasing investment recovery, increasing sales channels, liquidating excess inventory easily, and reducing sales and marketing expenses.
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