E-sourcing specialist, Trade Interchange, today launches its Strategic Sourcing Management (SSM) product. SSM has been developed in conjunction with the UK’s largest health charity, Nuffield Health, and is a completely new module on the Trade Interchange eSourcing platform.
SSM is a collaborative workflow tool that enables procurement teams to effectively manage sourcing projects by ensuring all buyers follow best practice, as defined by their organisation.
Over the past eight months, Trade Interchange and Nuffield’s central procurement department have worked closely to refine the Nuffield procurement process and develop the SSM module. This co-operation involved the rationalisation and then the mapping of the Nuffield sourcing process on the Trade Interchange SSM system.
Like many companies, Nuffield Health previously employed a strategic sourcing process, based on spreadsheets. However, offline formats of this type can prove cumbersome to use, and do not provide management with visibility of progress, resulting in some employees lacking inspiration or encouragement to follow the spreadsheet based process.
Commenting on its new SSM module, Shobhana Singh, Orthopaedics Buyer, Nuffield Health said, “We expect to see considerable time savings through the streamlined sourcing process that we now have. In addition we have greatly improved management information and will be able to better manage a larger number of projects which will in turn improve the savings we achieve through procurement.”
Companies using Trade Interchange’s SSM will benefit from a more streamlined, consistent and transparent procurement process. For example, they will have genuine visibility of all projects through the easy-to-use SSM dashboard. Managers will be able to take a more proactive approach to monitoring progress on all projects by tracking the status of tasks through this dashboard, while new or junior team members will need considerably less training as they are able to simply follow standard company procurement procedures. Email reminders of key milestones, tasks, dates, events and terms simplify the sourcing process, and version control on all documentation, as well as robust review and approval reminders, create an audit trail.
Simon Brake, CEO of Trade Interchange said: “To date only really big companies have had access to process management tools. Now companies of all sizes are looking at eSourcing platforms in a comprehensive way and are realising that strategic sourcing management isn’t actually out of their reach and that it integrates well with other modules like eRFX and Supplier Information Management. It’s all about achieving a 360°view of buyer and supplier activity. Trade Interchange provides this via our flexible cloud based architecture and our comprehensive and informative dashboards, which identify bottlenecks and delays.”
Nuffield Health has been Trade Interchange’s development client on the SSM module, helping to create a leading edge SSM product to fit the needs of the healthcare provider. SSM is a highly configurable and flexible software module and Trade Interchange will customise each SSM deployment to match an organisations’ sourcing process.
