Sleeves Category Procurement Intelligence Report

Business practices within Sleeves market are heavily influenced by changing trends across the category as well as within the broader Warehousing and Storage market. 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.

Service providers have begun to use advanced technologies and tools such as loT, predictive analysis and big data for optimal asset utilization, geofencing, warehouse management, and smart inventory management. The efficiencies gained by using new technology and improvement in customer service capabilities are significant. More and more suppliers are moving towards adopting these technologies to realize significant efficiency gains in the longer run, however, it may also increase their OPEX in the short run.

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.

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

Sometimes, procurement functions are unable to timely alter their practices while responding to market conditions. Industry experts acknowledge that periodically reviewing procurement best practices and adopting learnings from across procurement categories can help procurement teams respond to market needs in a more agile way. This report combines our experience of other categories with Sleeves procurement insights and hand picks best practices that can work for category managers delving in this market.

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.

It is important that buyers assess the operating model of service providers to determine the best-fit case for their organizations. Buyers need to determine if services offered by the providers are comprehensive and involve adequate resource support and a well-defined customizable execution plan.

Buyers should negotiate to get the best add-on services from their suppliers, such as real-time tracking, route optimization, big data analytics to plan and forecast future requirements and Six Sigma practices to ensure the procurement of quality services.

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