Air Curtains Market Procurement Intelligence Report

The market for Office Furniture, Fixtures and Fittings and its sub-segments such as Air Curtains are at an interesting intersection. With advancement in technology, service providers are employing diverse tools in their operations to identify opportunities for optimization and greater collaboration with the customers.

The category has historically lagged in tech adoption due to inadequate skillsets of majority of workforce and the perennial requirement to reduce facilities related cost. Therefore, suppliers who have demonstrated technological prowess to achieve efficiencies are being preferred over traditional vendors.

A balanced approach to procurement of Air Curtains has emerged, where buyers with multiple locations first outsource at individual locations and gradually move to standardize and consolidate the services across facilities.

Trends like these and many others discussed in this report are necessitating a relook at the way Air Curtains 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 Air Curtains. To help quick decision making, this report advises on several procurement best practices that have worked well for category managers.

For example, Buyers should set a baseline against which the performance of suppliers can be benchmarked along with setting measurable/quantifiable KPIs. Defined KPIs provides suppliers with clarity on the scope. Besides setting standards for operations, pricing, and performance, KPIs must provide tangible goals in terms of the quality of solutions.

Category managers must explore opportunities to integrate planning and management activities of categories using analytics, to gain better control over category spend. This will also allow them to consolidate their supply base easily, as well as to segment suppliers based on requirements and spend on each supplier.

Investing in benchmarking studies that help category managers enhance their knowledge on pricing or billing rates of suppliers allows them to not only save costs, but also negotiate better with suppliers. For example, while negotiating for bundled services, they can save significantly on a single service by cross-verifying rates quoted by suppliers against industry benchmarks.

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