Horticultural Services Market Procurement Intelligence Report

Several macro changes in the dynamics of overall Environmental Goods as well as Horticultural Services procurement trends are poised to change the business practices and procurement thumb rules. Regulatory changes are taking place more frequently and the changes impact multiple functions within an organization. Alignment of procurement practices and decisions with all the new regulations has now become highly challenging, especially when category managers are responsible to centrally procure for multiple regions with different regulations.

The global industry has seen a gradual increase in labor cost due to several factors, such as shortage of a trained workforce, increase in minimum wages, regulations around employee benefits and declining appeal for what have been traditionally called unskilled jobs. As the employee expenses increase, suppliers are compelled to pass some of this increase to their buyers by charging higher prices.

Many suppliers are trying to enhance the efficiencies and productivity within their operations through investment in new technologies and an overhaul of processes. Some of these initiatives are likely to influence their cost structure adversely till the time they recover their investments. However, a successful implementation of these programs can benefit them with a better cost proposition in the longer run.

Category managers need to take note of the potential of these developments and reassess the changes required in their procurement practices.

Horticultural Services procurement best practices are moving towards a level of sophistication which is typically seen in traditional procurement categories. Category managers now have an attractive opportunity to adapt the best practices seen within this category as well as those being leveraged in other non-related categories. This report summarizes the best practices picked from across multiple categories that could work well for category managers involved with Horticultural Services procurement strategy.

For example, Buyers need to evaluate the in-depth expertise of suppliers in the Horticultural Services industry. This can be assessed by considering factors such as the years of experience, number of resources that have multi-year experience of working in the same industry and at least 3 to 5 credentials for the supplier.

Investing in benchmarking studies helps category managers in enhancing their knowledge on market pricing of products and costing of maintenance and support services). This arms them with better ammunitions for negotiation.

While competitive bidding as a cost optimization tool is extremely potent but should be carefully deployed only when there is no significant differentiation among Horticultural Services suppliers.

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