Safety Apparel Category Procurement Intelligence Report

Business practices within Safety Apparel market are heavily influenced by changing trends across the category as well as within the broader Clothing and Textiles market. 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.

Buyers are moving towards longer contract durations with suppliers of Safety Apparel to benefit from value-based discounts, integrated products and services, lower renewal cost and lesser expenses on contracting activities.

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

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

For example, Buyers should proactively manage relations with Safety Apparel suppliers and have pre-determined intervention criteria for onboarding or replacing a supplier, changing specifications or terms and conditions.

Large organizational buyers can leverage their scale of operations to initiate competitive bidding between suppliers. Competitive bidding would enable buyers to have a better visibility of the market prices and may help identify suppliers that offer the most competitive price offering viz-a-viz other players.

Buyers need to evaluate the in-depth expertise of suppliers in the Safety Apparel 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.

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