09: How Buyers Can Develop Smart Relationships with Their Suppliers - with Sarah Scudder

a BROADcast for Manufacturers

Meet Sarah:

Sarah Scudder is the chief marketing officer over at SourceDay and is the host of a monthly voice of supply chain show that features people in supply chains who are doing extraordinary things. Along with this, she hosts several other shows, is a regular on marketing and supply chain podcasts, and hosts a couple monthly LinkedIn live shows.

Kris: Can you just tell us briefly before we get started on other things is, you know, what is source day? What do you guys do over there?

Sarah: Yeah, so I joined source day about seven months ago, and I run marketing. We are a supply chain technology company that automates purchase order changes. So both of our founders, Tom and Clint worked in manufacturing at separate companies. And they both realize that their buyers were spending a lot of time managing emails and spreadsheets that were coming in from their suppliers with changes to the purchase orders. So they decided there was enough of a need in the market, that they were going to go build a platform to automate the back and forth between buyers and suppliers, and send those changes directly back into the ERP. So very, very niche, very specialized. We are 100% Direct spend focused, so we don't play in the indirect space at all. And our big verticals are manufacturing, which Chris and I have in common, distribution, retail and E commerce.

Kris: So tell me, you know, what do you mean when you talk about the first mile in the supply chain?

Sarah: Yeah, so this is something that I'm pretty vocal about and very passionate about. And it's the fact that I have noticed in the last couple years, buyers ignoring the first mile of their supply chain completely, and focusing all their time and energy on the last mile. So what the first mile is in your supply chain, it's buying the parts, materials or items that you need to get your end product ready to go to ship and distribute to your end customer. So if I'm a manufacturer, I'm probably buying lots of parts and materials. So I need to be able to go find those suppliers. I need to be able to negotiate my pricing and terms, I need to be able to place the orders. And then I need to get those materials into my warehouse so I can then produce our products so they're ready to sell. If I'm a distributor or an E commerce brand or a retailer, it's buying the items from the third parties that you need that you're going to package and then resell to your end customer.

Lori: I'm curious, when it comes to building these relationships with your suppliers, what are some of the different terms that companies can have?

Sarah: So what are some of the terms that are really important? The most important is figure out how to collaborate with your suppliers and become a customer of choice. So that means that when your supplier doesn't have enough product to ship to fulfill their orders, you want to get a partial, or you want to be that customer that they prioritize, and they're going to send the products to other companies. So whatever you need to do internally to figure out with your team, how to collaborate and partner with your suppliers. And I would argue a lot of that means freeing up your buyers time, so they can focus on being more strategic, and establishing relationships, versus spending their time doing automated manual work, like working in spreadsheets, like working in emails. So really think about how you can leverage technology to automate manual tasks to free up your buyers time.

And so much more…

Connect with Sarah

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Connect with Erin on LinkedIn and visit http://www.earthlinginteractive.com for web-based solutions to your complex business problems!

Connect with Lori on LinkedIn and visit www.keystoneclick.com for your strategic digital marketing needs!

Connect with Kris on LinkedIn and visit www.genalpha.com for OEM and aftermarket digital solutions!