Brand Name verses Specification base Sourcing

Buyers would have noticed that sourcing a branded product by part number is always expensive compared to specification based sourcing, once you give a specific brand or part number suppliers believe that you are looking for only a specific product and quote based on the given part number.

If you offer detail specification in eRFQ and also mention that you are open for specific brands or equivalent brand who can match your specification, buyers will have quote from multiple suppliers, but only thing is you have to spend time to evaluate in details before selecting the right supplier, because suppliers trend to quote even slight variation specifications, it is ideal to involve your Engineering and Technical team to help you in this process.

Specification based sourcing works ideally in parts or products which you trend to buy on regular basis or have volume usage, at the end of the day you have to calculate time spent in evaluating individual supplier offers verses the cost or annual spend on that product category, to make this process viable.

One of our Engineering manufacturing client sourcing team received an requisition from the user group to order several Field Test Meters a specific brand name and part number was given, just because they were using this since years and had it handy to refer, the sourcing team investigated the specifications and found that there were many brands that would perform as well and be equally acceptable to the user teams, subsequent bids from multiple competitors generated saving of $30,000 on annual spend of $150,000 thus saving around 20% with minimum effort, the year on year volume is going up as the company is expanding and deploying more field maintenance engineers globally.