CombineNet, Inc., announced findings from its survey of 500 sourcing events recently conducted by customers of CombineNet ASAP, the company’s best-in-class sourcing product delivered as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution to easily integrate advanced sourcing and sourcing optimization capabilities into their existing environments.
Key findings include:
- Support for All Spend Categories: CombineNet customers are sourcing all major categories through the product (Indirect Spend, Transportation, Direct Materials, and Packaging). Of those, the largest growth in CombineNet ASAP is in Indirect Spend, which is up 15% in the past several months.
- Easy for Smaller Spends: Event sizes run the gamut, but majority are smaller in scale and more frequent: 48% of the sourcing events in CombineNet ASAP had fewer than 100 items per event put out for bids.
- Ideal for Complex Sourcing: CombineNet maintains its strength in supporting customers with large, complex sourcing needs: 20% of events conducted had more than 1,000 items per event; 20% had more than 100 participating suppliers; and 24% collected more than 10,000 bids per event (with 8% having more than 100,000 bids).
- Support for More Data Collection: CombineNet ASAP users take advantage of collecting more data for each bid item, since CombineNet provides the analysis power to evaluate both price and non-price data. Seventy-six percent (76%) of events collect more than 50 different bid attributes, 29% of those collect more than 100 bid attributes per event.
- Analysis of Suppliers’ Expressive Bids: Customers use CombineNet ASAP’s Expressive Bidding® to collect from suppliers a variety of price and non-price bid elements within proposals to factor into sourcing decisions. The most common expressive bid types found are: supplier capacity to deliver on the bid item (77%); conditional offers (34%), including bundles/packages; and alternate specifications (34%).
- Capacity Relevant to All Categories: Buyers from all major spend categories use CombineNet ASAP to collect and analyze supplier capacity data with Expressive Bidding. The suppliers’ capacity to deliver items being sourced was modeled in 86% of Packaging events; 85% of Transportation events; 81% of Indirect Spend; and 50% of Direct Materials.
“While CombineNet may have been seen historically as the go-to solution for a company’s largest and most complex sourcing events, our customers are increasingly using us for their more frequent, smaller-scale sourcing activities due to the speed and simplicity in launching an online event in CombineNet ASAP,” said CombineNet’s VP of Product Management, Alan Himler. “We are very pleased to see these adoption trends across our customer base and across different types of spend areas.”
