Ladders and Castors Market Procurement Intelligence Report

The market for Tools and its sub-segments such as Ladders and Castors are at an interesting intersection. Customers are expecting service and experience levels which are at par with what ecommerce and consumer sectors of today offer. Moreover, competition keeps intensifying and demand and supply dynamics keep shifting.

Suppliers are continuously taking efforts to improve efficiencies and productivity and deploying processes and technologies. Some of these investments are likely to increase their costs in the shorter term, but learnings from other sectors keep the suppliers optimistic about a lean cost structure in the longer run.

Volatility in the prices of key inputs is creating multiple issues that impact procurement within Ladders and Castors category such as benchmarking and budgeting of the procurement costs.

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

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 Ladders and Castors procurement insights and hand picks best practices that can work for category managers delving in this market.

For example, Buyers need to evaluate the in-depth expertise of suppliers in the Ladders and Castors 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.

Buyers should engage with suppliers that repurchase used products at fair market value. This assists buyers to dispose of used products in a convenient manner. Also, during such repurchases, suppliers provide credits to buyers for future purchases. This reduces overall procurement costs for buyers.

Buyers should assess the level of adoption of the latest technologies by suppliers to assess cost-saving opportunities and quality that can be provided by the latter. For instance, the adoption of technologies such as cloud computing will enable suppliers to reduce their internal computing hardware requirements for operations such as CAD and CAM. This can, in turn, enable them to reduce their operating costs, thereby suppliers can offer products at lower rates to buyers.

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