From defining needs to signing contracts
Strategic sourcing
Strategic sourcing is essential for companies looking:
- to optimize their understanding of their supplier markets
- to mitigate risks in their supplier base
It involves a comprehensive approach to map the supplier markets and their capabilities, conducting thorough sourcing exercises, and selecting the best vendors for tendering based on tailored criteria.
Strategic sourcing does not only focus on prices and cost-cutting, but also helps you mitigating risks, capturing innovation, assessing capabilities and enhancing supplier relationships.
Your needs
(Re)discover the supplier markets
Manage risks
You may have longstanding contracts with specific suppliers without revisiting or challenging terms over the years. By rediscovering your supplier market, you can reassess these partnerships, gain valuable business intelligence, and understand how to best secure value for your organization. For new products or markets, strategic sourcing helps identify and engage the right suppliers, derisk supplies and fostering innovation and expansion.
Diversifying your suppliers ensures a derisked supply, essential to ensure business continuity. Business disruptions can also be mitigated by evaluating suppliers for geopolitical risks, financial stability, compliance, and sustainability. Continuous monitoring detects potential risks early, ensuring a resilient, stable supply chain and fostering stronger supplier relationships.
Optimize value
Outsource tendering expertise
By analyzing expenditures and supplier performances, we help you uncover inefficiencies, duplicate costs, and areas for potential savings. This enables your company to gain comprehensive insights into various cost drivers and associated risks, allowing you to develop strategies that effectively leverage available levers to mitigate costs and risks, ultimately optimizing value for your company.
You may lack a dedicated Procurement department or sufficient resources to manage a tender (RFX) process. Outsourcing these activities to Altesia ensures a structured and efficient RFP process, thanks to a proven methodology.
How we help you
Definition of your business needs
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A successful sourcing exercise begins with clearly defining your business needs and requirements, challenging them when needed. This involves:
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Aligning internal stakeholders:
Collaborate with key stakeholders identified based on the project's scope and strategic importance to the company. -
Preventing miscommunication:
Ensure clear communication and approved governance to enhance effectiveness and swift decision making. -
Identifying potential challenges early:
Address issues proactively to avoid future obstacles.
Market Analysis
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We help you understand the supplier market through:
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Deep business intelligence:
We gather and analyze critical data to understand market trends and supplier capabilities. We perform extensive research within your industry to identify key players and emerging opportunities. -
Risk assessment and mitigation:
We analyze risks within the industry and their associated market conditions.
Supplier evaluation and shortlisting
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After an extensive supplier assessment, we create a shortlist of vendors based on their capabilities, expertise and experience. This step includes:
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Detailed competency assessment
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Identification of suitable candidates for a tender exercise
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Focused selection for further consideration
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We always make sure to assess both "hard" skills and "soft" skills, with particular emphasis on the supplier's customer-centric approach and service capabilities. We leverage our human-centric approach to provide pragmatic, operationally ready advices and support.
Structured tendering process
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We manage the entire tendering process, including the creation of detailed specifications based on three main criteria:
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Technical:
Ensuring technical requirements are clearly included in the tendering documentation -
Legal:
Negotiating and structuring contracts, including GTCs, GDPR compliance, and other legal documents -
Commercial:
Assessing costs, commercial terms, and delivery schedules
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The process also includes:
- quality audits,
- technical and financial competency checks,
- developing an evaluation matrix with internal clients to score vendors accurately.
Vendor selection
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As the ultimate objective of the exercise, this process helps you select the best vendor based on:
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Assurance of supply,
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Quality
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Service
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Cost
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Innovation
In addition, our negotiation expertise ensures clients achieve the best possible terms, leveraging external support to handle complex negotiations effectively.
The result
Concrete deliverables include:
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Tendering documentation:
Capturing and defining needs accurately to avoid gray areas. -
Comprehensive specifications:
Coordinating with internal teams to draft detailed, precise requirements documents. -
Audit results and recommendations:
Slide decks and analysis of cost structures with actionable recommendations for strategic improvements.
Besides, you can expect the following outcomes:
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Cost and risk reduction: Achieving tangible savings or risk mitigation in supplier expenditures.
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Operational enhancements: Improving technical or operational performance to resolve internal conflicts and unlock efficiencies.
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Business continuity: Ensuring ongoing operations and compliance to avoid potential penalties.
What we don't do
At Altesia, we focus on delivering meaningful and sustainable improvements only. This is why we adhere to the following principles:
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No unnecessary supplier changes:
We don’t change your supplier panel just for the sake of it. Every change must have a clear, strategic benefit. -
No superficial market studies:
We don’t conduct market studies without thoroughly verifying sources and ensuring the accuracy of the information. -
No insignificant savings:
We won’t recommend changing suppliers for minor cost savings, as switching suppliers can sometimes cost more than it saves. -
Not replacing your own technical expertise:
We don’t write the technical part of the specifications for you because you know your requirements best and need to maintain ownership. Once this is done, we assist by translating those technical specifications into an RFP, for example.
