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The past decade has seen the extraordinary rise of SaaS or Software-as-a-Service. What is SaaS, and why has it become so popular?

Breaking news from Arkestro: You can now survey suppliers at the line item level for every request you run on Arkestro before you collect quotes. 

The typical person may not know offhand what CPGs are (consumer packaged goods), but you can bet they interact with them every day. The CPG industry produces everyday items. These are the products you find in grocery stores, big-box stores, hardware stores, and convenience stores. People increasingly buy them online.

Strategic sourcing has been growing in importance in the world of procurement. The traditional sourcing strategy of picking the supplier who offers the lowest cost worked for centuries but doesn’t cut it in a modern, globalized business climate. 

Let’s talk about stress at work. It’s rarely sought after, and work-related stress can be especially problematic. When you work eight hours a day at a job (and sometimes more), there’s no escaping it. Everyone feels pressure at work (and that in itself is not necessarily a bad thing), but when little pain points become constant more serious stress results. 

In the old days, food manufacturers didn’t sweat the issue of finding food suppliers. They looked local and went with the lowest prices. Often, they would build a processing factory right near the fields where they sourced their raw ingredients. Canning and bottling plants were built nearby, so the entire process was often run within a small geographical area.

The food and beverage industry is a massive one, especially in North America. According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), in 2019, U.S. consumers, businesses, and government agencies spent $1.77 trillion on food and beverages in grocery stores and other retailers. Generally speaking, food and beverage prices remain fairly stable, increasing just 2.3% per year over the past decade. Consumers are resistant to big hikes in food prices. At the same time, the food and beverage sector tends to operate on razor-thin margins. 

You’re a procurement professional. The company or organization you work for has tasked you to choose a strategic sourcing software that supports this new way of doing things.

Many companies are content with employing a reactive sourcing strategy. When material sourcing, their procurement team responds to requirements from the business side of the operation as they arise. That’s fine—sourcing professionals have the expertise to deal with this common scenario—but is it the best way to be doing things? That is debatable. 

It doesn’t matter what kind of business or organization you work for; if you’re part of the sourcing process, you’re working under pressure. Strategic sourcing stress is caused by day-to-day occurrences and manual process.