Barrels & Drums Category Procurement Intelligence Report

Business practices within Barrels & Drums market are heavily influenced by changing trends across the category as well as within the broader Warehousing and Storage market. Businesses are focused on maintaining a lean inventory of raw materials, parts, components and finished goods. While it is a novel concept to keep the inventory costs in check, it also highly challenging to implement in a global sourcing context and requires a clock work like optimization of logistics and warehousing processes. Companies are moving to a completely digital supply chain footprint to reduce errors and risks associated with such strategies.

Cyber security has emerged as a top priority within logistics and supply chain ecosystems. New accountability standards are emerging for the way suppliers and buyers collaborate and protect sensitive information and assets.

Suppliers are increasingly adopting a demand-driven planning of their assets and resources to reduce costs and optimize operational efficiency. Part of the cost savings are passed on to buyers, but this also creates supply chain risks for them that need to be managed jointly with the supplier.

As a result, category managers need to closely monitor the Barrels & Drums procurement trends and identify changes required in their procurement environment for the category.

It has become imperative for category managers to remain as agile as possible in terms of their procurement practices. However, it is not always easy to quickly spot and implement alternative practices in a category like Barrels & Drums. To help quick decision making, this report advises on several procurement best practices that have worked well for category managers.

For example, Buyers should assess service providers' capability of predicting the weather, traffic, and other real-time information, which might affect shipments that are in transit or in its delivery times.

Buyers should negotiate for administrative control over all technological systems that contain critical data. This will ensure 100% transparency and visibility over logistics operations. In addition, buyers should demand visibility across the entire supply chain using real-time metrics such as mobile and telematics systems.

It is important for category managers to track and measure supplier performance against a defined set of KPIs that are agreed upon by both parties during contract negotiation, including inventory accuracy, dock-to-stock, and on-time shipment. This is critical to ensure the optimal level of service. Suppliers' performance can also be linked to a part of their fee, which can be paid depending on the level of services rendered.

Barrels & Drums procurement managers also need to proactively identify and mitigate potential risks that can arise in the supply chain or contracts for Barrels & Drums procurement. Some examples include: