The supply chains that bind us:
Extended enterprise has long been sought after as a prized goal for nearly all B2B purchasers and suppliers, where the supply chain becomes one constant uninterrupted process extending from the buyers through the suppliers.
As is often the case in such scenarios the real is far removed from the ideal. Even minute logistical failures result in extended breaks and delays along the chain. These breakages deploy across both ends of the supply chain and both buyers and suppliers are forced to incur losses.
At least a third of the overall budget of most hospitality companies goes towards the purchase of goods and services. Consider the sheer amount of goods being exchanged on both ends of the supply chain.
At this scale every loss of shipment or delayed delivery makes a critical dent to the company bottom line. Yet current procurement practices are mired in antiquity, relying on individual personnel to canvas the marketplaces, in such an atmosphere it becomes convenient to focus only on the cheapest deals.
The bulk of Supply Chain Management (SCM) entails concocting solutions to the various roadblocks that fall in place due to these very conventional methodologies of procurement.
Today e-Procurement is hailed as a solution to these supply chain woes. A sizeable demand now exists for a fully customizable Purchase Suite that can handle visibility and control over the entire supply chain, from one end to the other. This is where Pursuite.com steps in.
The informed internet
The idea of a website handling all procurement for major hotels and restaurants may seem counter-intuitive to those steeped in the old ways for decades, but it is wasteful to ignore the reams of useful data we have available to us.
Today we live in the information age; our lives are imprinted upon the internet on a daily basis. We live in a world where GPS and location tracking have made it possible to gain real time updates on ongoing deliveries, where statistics and predictive algorithms can rank your suppliers based on your own custom metrics by taking into account the records of past sales, where digital contracts can be negotiated on encrypted chat channels and smart clauses inserted to ensure on time deliveries for critical items.
The average hospitality industry customer has already adapted to the internet, embracing the advantages it afford. Today’s customer makes more informed and more empowered choices in how they spend their money.
The hospitality industry in India must also, as a whole, embrace the information advantage provided by the internet and the concept of e-procurement.
Multiple international hospitality players have completed the switch to E-Procurement to meet their demands, any stragglers or slow movers at this stage now run the risk of getting left behind for good.
To Procurement 4.0 and beyond
With e-commerce’s widespread usage and application, the hospitality industry is now waking up to the concept of E-procurement, however if we take this a step further we arrive at Procurement 4.0.
Procurement 4.0 is an entirely new framework to build a company’s procurement policies on. It involves giving procurement an entirely new value proposition backed by digital category and service procurement, digital supply chain and supplier management and innovative procurement data utilization.
Hoteliers traditionally meet their procurement demands by running lengthy procurement cycles managed by dedicated departments and designated procurement officers.
Procurement 4.0 allows us to fully automate these cycles and track them in real time without investing in personnel and logistics.
This up-gradation of current procurement practices in turn opens the hospitality sector to a whole range of advantages it has so far been deprived of, such as enhanced seller-buyer compatibility, better transparency of information, improved document management, cloud analytics and custom finance solutions. In effect, granting end to end visibility and control over the entire supply chain.
As costs and roadblocks are better managed across the supply chain, the benefits are also deployed across both ends, aiding the buyer as well as the supplier. This application of E-Procurement and Procurement 4.0 powered by Pursuite.com will finally allow for the idealized concept of Extended Enterprise to become a reality.
Also Read: An Efficient Hotel PMS Software Goes Beyond Managing Just the Property
(Disclaimer: This is a guest post submitted on Techstory by the mentioned author. All the contents and images in the article have been provided to Techstory by the authors of the article. Techstory is not responsible or liable for any content in this article.)
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About The Author:
Amit Shukla is the founder and CEO of Pursuite, the online solution space for hospitality procurements committed to revolutionise the industry practices of purchase business management for delivering best value to all eco-system participants.
He has vast experiences with established companies as well as budding startups, at primary and secondary level people and team management. Has been a key mentor of several internet startups, helping them harvest technologies and define, streamline and scale operations to handle the highest traffic and page views across all internet domains.
