Conveyor Belts Category Procurement Intelligence Report

The market for Warehousing and Storage and its sub-segments such as Conveyor Belts are at an interesting intersection. 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.

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.

Rise in minimum labor wages across countries such as the US and China will result in increased employee expenses for Conveyor Belts suppliers who will be forced to pass on a part of this increase to their buyers.

Trends like these and many others discussed in this report are necessitating a relook at the way Conveyor Belts is procured and the procurement cost saving opportunities that exist.

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 Conveyor Belts. To help quick decision making, this report advises on several procurement best practices that have worked well for category managers.

For example, Buyers prefer to engage with service providers that offer robust technological systems and leverage Internet-based systems to reduce cost and simplify visibility across the supply chain. Buyers should also assess the integration capabilities of software platforms offered by service providers to ensure that there are no additional costs incurred for software implementation.

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 need to assess the level of automation provided and time required to obtain process efficiency, apart from checking if suppliers have the correct documentation for as-is processes and to-be processes to avoid any conflicts in implementation.

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