Can you honestly say you have full confidence in the data your procurement team uses to make decisions? Will your data help you stand strong against disruptions? Does it allow you to venture past relationships with just the big guys and source smaller, diverse suppliers as well?
If you can’t give a definitive “yes” to any of those questions, you need to start reconsidering how your procurement team has been gathering and managing data. Too often, organizations will get pieces of supplier data, add them to a spreadsheet, and assume they will stay viable for use in the future. However, our industry is constantly changing, as are the details of your supplier information.
In order to have supplier data that is reliable and serves future procurement decisions, processes need to be put in place to ensure the data is consistently harvested, refreshed, and analyzed for completeness and accuracy.
Manual Methods Don’t Work
Above, we mentioned how a large number of companies rely on manual methods that involve spreadsheets and web searches to discover new suppliers and keep track of data. In some cases, businesses will even use paper business cards or personal relationships as supplier records.
But all of these lead to a lack of innovation and inability to be agile, both in everyday business or in the event of disruptions.
Clean Up Processes are Timely and Arduous
In an effort to combat stale data, some procurement leaders will perform manual clean-ups of their data that involve health checks, identifying where to improve integration, cleaning the data itself, and developing processes for bringing in and cleansing new data. But this process takes a lot of time and effort, and our industry moves too fast for this to only occur once, making it necessary to expend that effort repeatedly.
So How Do Procurement Teams Access Clean Data?
The best way to ensure your organization has access to the most accurate, refreshed data is to invest in technology that does the job for you and establishes a supplier data foundation.
Establishing a supplier record that captures (and maintains) multiple levels of clean, self-updating information isn’t just transformational, it’s critical — especially one that can continuously grow and learn with your business over time.
In our whitepaper, The Case for Clean Data, we go over:
- The tell-tale signs that indicate a need for better supplier data
- The specific cases in which TealBook is a fit for you
- The ways TealBook’s 5-step proprietary data process provides your organization with the data foundation it needs to transform your procurement processes
