Challenges In Collecting Supply Market Intelligence

Supply Market Intelligence can provide some useful information about the overall operations of the

company.

Chief Procurement Officers, Procurement Specialists and Category managers often agree that

collecting high quality and valuable supply market information is a huge challenge for them. They

regard it as a challenge mainly because it requires them to subscribe to costly industry journals. It

sometimes also pushes the category managers to spend a huge amount of time so that they can gather

knowledge from various sources. In a nutshell, the procurement personnel need to spend much time in

it as well as money in order to gather supply market related knowledge.

In this modern era, any type of information is readily available on the internet. Nevertheless it is never

easy to find valuable and reliable information. Supply market intelligence program requires an in-depth

understanding of the complete end-to-end procurement processes including the internal process and

requirements, cost modeling and spend analysis, supply chain scenario in the industry, characteristics

of the supply constraints etc. Nevertheless all these informations need to be followed by a wide and

deep secondary research. Furthermore, organizations also require constant data and information

updates so that they can keep up-to-date with the sourcing and supply markets situation.

Making big investments in DMS or the document management services are often the common way which

is used by the companies to gain market knowledge. Their task also includes getting expensive industry

journals subscriptions. Procurement personnel also sometimes end up spending much of their valuable

time and money to gather the knowledge. It was never easy for the companies to gather information

and derive relevant supply market intelligence.

Some of the major challenges of the organizations in this particular area are:

The companies have to look into the huge volumes of data that are available for them to mine

intelligence from different sources. This has put them in increased pressure as they have time and cost

limitation which they need to consider for themselves.

Online literature is another source of information for the companies and it is one of those

largest sources that the companies look into. However, the main challenge regarding the online

material is the authenticity and validity of all the sources. None of them can be fully guaranteed.

Sometimes IP issues get raised as a result of online sources scraping.

Generic information is easily obtainable from the public domain. However, the same thing

cannot be said for specific and validated information because this type of information often requires

specialist market intelligence provider. This may be achievable but not affordable for every company

that wants to get this service.

The professionals, who will eventually be doing the research and analysis for acquiring Supply

Market Intelligence system for the company, may not be easy to hire, train or even retain them.

Supply market intelligence program is not something that the company can expect to get in a short

time with the highest accuracy. It needs careful planning as well as the right human resources who are

properly trained for this job. The company will be able to reap benefits out of this if it can follow the

correct procedure.

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