Bringing together buyers and suppliers from all over Brazil, this year’s Forum de Compras and Sourcing focussed on supply chain strategies including building transparent supply chains, best practices and exciting innovations.
Over the course of the event representatives from diverse industries were all highlighting the same procurement opportunities and challenges they faced. Here are three of the hot topics that were discussed.
The growing importance of platforms
Digitalisation is having several effects on the way that supply chains are managed across the world. Companies are leveraging digital tools to make their operations faster and more flexible, and Brazil is no different.
Procurement platforms look set to be an area of high growth among Brazilian buyers in the coming years. Companies increasingly want to have a centralised place to view all their supply chain data, access important applications and facilitate communication with their suppliers. There was a lot of interest from companies about the benefits that procurement platforms can bring, especially regarding integrating with other functions like supplier pre-qualification.
The emergence of strategic sourcing
Another main benefit of platforms and digitisation, in general, is that by putting the data in a central place, buyers can massively increase the transparency of their supply chains. Many buyers are looking to get a clear picture of how their supply chains operate below tier 1. Often it can be difficult to know exactly where all the components and products they use come from. This lack of visibility can make accurate risk assessment and management a much harder task.
For procurement teams, the ability to easily locate, manage and communicate data means that they can focus much more on strategy. This move towards strategic sourcing was a major theme of this year’s Forum de Compras and Sourcing with talks from representatives from Coty, Logicalis, Procurement Garage, and Nortel, and was a regular occurrence in a lot of our conversations.
One attendee, Cargill, defines strategic sourcing as “a structured and collaborative approach with our businesses, functions and joint ventures” that helps the company “analyse, understand, plan, develop, communicate and implement provisioning strategies that go beyond the prices of the products and services.”
The key to being able to operate in this way is to have reliable, high quality and easily manageable data at your fingertips.
Making reputational management simpler
A lot of the companies had come to the event looking for ways to improve their supplier risk assessment practices. Particularly high on the list was preventing reputational damage.
In the wake of the ongoing Odebrecht scandal, which has so far seen over 200 people convicted, actively managing supplier risk was a key concern of this year’s event. A lot of the conversations were about the importance of rigorous and reliable supplier pre-qualification, but many were also looking to see what improvements they could make to their due diligence.
Perhaps the most important objective of established regional events like Forum de Compras and Sourcing is to showcase the number of local suppliers and expertise that Brazil has to offer. Trends like digitalization, increased due diligence and more strategic decision making offers these local suppliers a great opportunity and we’re proud to support them now and in the future.
The procurement sector is changing fast both in Brazil and globally. Talk to a member of our team about meeting your procurement challenges today.
