SAS^® Sourcing Strategy

Every procurement organization strives to continually meet its sourcing strategy objectives. Whether those objectives involve reducing supplier spend, managing risk or complying with industry regulations, procurement executives must make decisions about which suppliers to do business with – and how much business.

In the Spotlight From Purchasing to Profits SAS uses its own SAS Supplier Relationship Management to drive strategic sourcing

Such decisions first rely on complete, accurate spend data and on the ability to analyze that data for trends and outliers in procurement activities. But even with comprehensive visibility into procurement, determining optimal supplier spend depends on the ability to balance hundreds or thousands of variables for the best result. Procurement organizations need a reliable way to model their procurement spend – a method that factors in all the nuances of complex supplier relationships and allows for easy "what-if" calculations.

Take the next step in strategic sourcing
Currently available as an add-on to SAS Spend Analysis, SAS Sourcing Strategy presents the next step in sophistication for strategic sourcing. While the method for supplier ranking in SAS Spend Analysis creates an ordered list of suppliers according to your most important criteria, SAS Sourcing Strategy employs user-defined business rules to narrow that list and recommend the best way to achieve your procurement goals.

Specifically, SAS Sourcing Strategy includes a wizard-driven application that guides business users through the process of selecting a commodity group, identifying a measurable objective (e.g., reducing spend or optimizing risk exposure) and defining business rules to constrain the calculation. SAS then calculates not only which suppliers you should retain, but how much money you should spend with each one to best meet your stated objective.

This analysis provides guidance for answering such strategic questions as:

• From whom should we buy?
• Should we spend more or less with a given supplier?
• What should we buy from a given supplier?
• How should we alter our buying practices?

SAS Sourcing Strategy is a component of the SAS Supplier Relationship Management suite, a comprehensive, integrated set of data management and analytic applications that help procurement departments gain a better understanding of their purchases, suppliers and performance in order to make better strategic sourcing decisions.