At Corporate Express, we operate in a very dynamic and progressive marketplace. Changes in the service offering and capabilities of suppliers occur at a hectic pace. For this reason, it makes good buying sense to keep pace with what the market offers as new developments may save your organisation time and money.

Examine your supplier’s ‘value proposition’ which is not only based on price but service and capabilities.

The best way to do this is to narrow potential suppliers down to three and go have a look at their operations. You’ll learn a lot more about a supplier and whether they can actually do what they say they can do by walking the floor. This will help you make an educated decision based on their capabilities to service your company.

At the end of the day, pricing is the easiest thing to fix because it’s flexible and based on a constant: the supplier’s cost price. On the other hand, service capability is far harder to fix as the problem could be related to staffing, inadequate systems, third party distribution and so on.