Purchasing and Supply Management

Purchasing and supply management holds a position of the mortar to hold the bricks together in the business world. Within purchasing and supply management, there are a few steps while creating a project supply, service, and material budget from detailed requirements. Those steps show how to select the most qualified suppliers and strategies for negotiating prices. Along with this, there are also benefits and costs of outsourcing. This includes the growth of outsourcing. Various organizations will be evaluated on their benchmarks in purchasing and supply management, along with their best practices in this. There are specific companies out there that who show market leadership in purchasing and supply management.

In some cases the term, “purchasing,” is often limited to the actual definition listed in text and dictionaries. It is limited to just buying and this refers to the location and selection of suppliers, learning of the need for whatever is needed, price negotiation and any terms of agreement, the payment and finally the delivery. In this particular case the term purchasing is referring to the process of and not the act of. “Purchasing, supply management, and procurement are used interchangeably to refer to the integration of related functions to provide effective and efficient materials and services to the organization. Thus, purchasing or supply management is not only concerned with the standard steps in the procurement process: (1) the recognition of need, (2) the translation of that need into a commercially equivalent description, (3) the search for potential suppliers, (4) the selection of a suitable source, (5) the agreement on order or contract details, (6) the delivery of the products or services, and (7) ...

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...me benefits that the workers in the United States receive. There are benefits to this but, there are also costs. The benefits have previously been stated and are rather obvious. The cost however, can come into play when business suffers due to poor quality in the customer service. In a lot of cases it seems that the quality of the product actually declines. The actual product quality itself may not suffer but it does in the sense of customer service for the company. This can be due to customers not always being able to clearly understand thicker, heavier accents that foreign telephone operators may have. This is just an example of a scenario but, it still holds a lot of room for improvements.

References:

Johnson, P. F., Leenders, M. R., & Flynn, A. E. (2010). Purchasing and Supply Management (14th ed.). Boston: McGraw-Hill Irwin. ISBN: 9780073377896