In the first post in this series examining Beroe’s approach to delivering category and market intelligence offerings to procurement organizations, I provided a high-level summary of the firm and its approaches. In today’s continuation, I’ll take the topic down a few levels by getting into the type of insight and actionable intelligence that third-party knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) providers like Beroe can offer and the difference it can make from a sourcing and supplier management standpoint.
One of Beroe’s guiding principals is to support procurement organizations at every phase of the sourcing, contracting and supplier management lifecycle. This involves providing intelligence that “feeds all stages” of activity. Depending on client needs, this may start with a structural analysis of a commodity or supply market — and how it may evolve in the quarters and years to come. Or it may take the form of ongoing updates on a particular commodity or supply market environment after a contract is in place.
Regardless of the structure a deliverable takes (e.g., category management dashboard, PowerPoint, Excel cost breakdown model), Beroe believes that it must offer market intelligence that provides a level of understanding that is actionable and crosses over enough categories while providing sufficient depth to support even commodity experts inside client organizations. Beroe typically engages with a client based around a set number of project deliverables throughout the course of an agreement (e.g., 150 or 750 discrete work products).
The deliverables typically support three different types of initiatives:
- Category analysis for sourcing programs — these often take the form of longer documents including commodity, supply market, supplier and other detailed analyses to support specific sourcing efforts
- Support for team members managing categories not being sourced — these deliverables often support procurement team members that do not have the bandwidth to actively source and manage all categories but still need intelligence around which opportunities to pursue and monitor
- Supply chain risk — Beroe provides a combination of quantitative information (e.g., financial analyses/ratios), qualitative analysis, market dynamic analysis (e.g., capacity utilization) and financial simulation to assist procurement organizations in evaluating the relative risk in their supply bases
Not all of Beroe’s clients leverage their offerings to support all three types of initiatives. Moreover, the audience for different types of information can vary between users as well, based on the granularity of the view provided. In general, category managers leverage Beroe for deeper commodity and category intelligence while procurement directors and executives are more interested in portfolio views into overall category and sector trends…
