Toolbox Market Procurement Intelligence Report

Business practices within Toolbox market are heavily influenced by changing trends across the category as well as within the broader Tools market. Volatility in the prices of key inputs is creating multiple issues that impact procurement within Toolbox category such as benchmarking and budgeting of the procurement costs.

Markets across the globe are reeling under shortage of professionals and workforce that have relevant skills and training. Minimum wages and stringent regulations are compelling suppliers to increase their employee expenses which are expected to have an inflationary impact on buyers' procurement cost.

Regulatory guidance on data protection and increasing concern over cybersecurity have increased the costs for suppliers as they incur additional spend on compliance and security. These additional costs have a potential to drive marginal increase in prices across the key geographies.

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

Toolbox 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 Toolbox procurement strategy.

For example, Buyers should invest in benchmarking studies that help category managers to improve their knowledge on market pricing or billing rates of service providers. This helps them to not only save costs but also increase their negotiation power.

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.

Competitive bidding as a cost optimization tool is extremely potent but should be carefully deployed only when there is no significant differentiation among Toolbox suppliers.

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