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Centralisation
& Automation
& Automation
We automate your orders via our eProcurement and eCatalogues solution.
Join more than 400 companies that optimize their spot purchases
Definition
What does the term "Tail Spend" mean?
Also called wild purchases or spot purchases.
Non-strategic purchases Off-panel
Tail Spend purchases are all purchases outside of your usual and non-recurring suppliers who cannot fit into traditional order processes.
Time-consuming Management of Spot Purchases
They consume precious time for your procurement department because of the administrative management to be devoted to them: sourcing, purchasing requests, validation, supplier creation, ordering, etc.
Spot Buy Outsourcing
Tame your c-class purchases
Buy Made Easy offers a complete ecosystem for businesses in order to outsource Tail Spend.
Outsourcing
Outsource the administrative management of your purchases and supplies.
Purchase tracking
Benefit from 100% dematerialized monitoring tools for faster actions.
100% transparent
View a complete expense report on demand.
A dedicated team
Collaborate directly with our teams of buyers and managers.
Discover Tail Spend Procurement Outsourcing
Maximize your savings and free up your internal procurement resources.
Testimonies
What our customers think
We've helped companies like yours transform their purchasing processes and achieve significant optimizations. Our customer testimonials offer an insight into the benefits you can expect from outsourcing your purchasing to BME.
Buyer
LEM
"We are fully satisfied with the Source-to-Pay suite that BME provides. The solution has met our expectations and continues to evolve positively."
e-Procurement Director
EIMI
"Before BME, our contracts were managed manually in Excel, which was totally counterproductive for us. Now, everything is automated with BME."
Procurement Manager
Cenexi
"Simplified supplier contract management ordering processes have lowered costs and are driving investment in more strategic actions."
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Managing Your Spot Buy Made Easy
Our Tail Spend procurement outsourcing service takes care of all administrative management.
Complete Administrative Management: Our outsourcing service covers the entire procurement cycle: from supplier selection to dispute management, invoicing and payment.
Sourcing and Supplier Relationship: We take care of supplier sourcing and maintain relationships with suppliers to ensure a smooth and efficient supply chain.
Process Optimization: Our outsourcing service streamlines procedures related to purchases not covered by your regular suppliers, freeing up internal resources for strategic activities.
Procurement Automation
Optimise your Tail Spend
and your Accounting
We optimise your direct and indirect spend with our outsourcing solution
Cost
optimisation
optimisation
We reduce the number of suppliers and negotiate better prices.
Improving
Productivity
Productivity
We take the administrative and management work out of your hands.
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FAQ
questions frequently asked
What is the definition of C-class purchases?
Wild purchases, also called spot purchases, concern all the products and services that businesses need on an ad hoc and irregular basis to function on a daily basis. Buy Made Easy (BME) is positioned as your Master Vendor for all your purchases beyond your supplier panel.
Example: during a snowy episode this concerns the purchase of snow removal salt, or when you organize a seminar, the purchase of chairs, or even in preparation for an epidemic risk, PPE or personal protective equipment (stocks of gloves, masks, etc.).
These wild purchases are most of the time made outside of the purchasing policy in place. So this goes against a TCO approach.
What is a TCO approach?
TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) aims to analyze the real costs associated with the purchase of a product (beyond the simple purchase price) from a supplier. Thus, TCO includes all costs throughout the product life cycle, combining direct costs but also and especially indirect costs, also called “hidden” costs.
How to estimate the cost of a dematerialized transaction?
The digitization of the purchasing process concerns the stages of product selection, the sending of the order, the processing of invoices and finally the payment of these electronically:
— The purchase request and its validation are made directly in the digital solution (Punch-out for example). The step manual order creation by the buyer is thus eliminated.
— The order is sent directly after hierarchical approval from the digital solution.
— Invoices are collected online through the Supplier Portal or via interfaces (EDI).
— The payment of supplier invoices is triggered automatically when due if everything is in accordance (amount, quantity, receipt, quality).
In this case, we are talking about sending an order made electronically (EDI: electronic data exchange).
Thus, through this optimization of the purchasing process (without human interaction), the cost per transaction goes from an average estimate of €120 to €26.
What do you think of over-the-counter orders?
So-called over-the-counter purchases can be useful in some cases, especially in case of extreme urgency on a construction site.
When we talk about C-class purchases, emergency criteria should be put into perspective or even avoided, because they are most of the time due to a lack of foresight that can be solved by a respected purchasing strategy and an adapted digital solution. Counter shopping is once again going against a TCO approach because it generates a huge number of hidden costs.
However, BME offers an Emergency service allowing a Counter supplier to be paid remotely and in real time. Respecting the deadlines of a construction site and the safety of your customers are our priorities.
How do you break down a management cost of €1000 per supplier?
This assessment is broken down into four main costs:
• First of all, an initial cost of referencing the supplier: source the supplier, analyze the profile, retrieve the initial administrative information, even assess the financial risk.
• Then the cost of maintaining the supplier database. Indeed, Purchasing Departments annually assess the status of their suppliers (active, dormant, etc.). The cost of the ERP itself and external vigilance providers is often added.
• The administrative management cost imposed by regulations (legal documentation, solvency, CSR, subcontracting). There are specialized companies that can help purchasing departments gather this information, but this incurs an additional cost.
• Dispute management, concerns product returns and assets.
Is procurement outsourcing suitable for an SME?
Yes, this approach can effectively be applied to an SME as well as to a large company.
The cost may be revised downwards, depending on the size of the company, its structural and/or organizational costs, or even its sector of activity.
An SME specializing in the nuclear sector or another specific sector may have additional administrative costs simply by having to control the normative aspect of its obligations.
In all cases, the centralization of spot transactions on a single supplier leads to better fluidity and sustainable savings.
What are the different types of purchasing classification?
Purchasing departments most often use their own classifications (commodities/purchasing categories). If this is not the case, they can be based on the most used generic classifications such as the UNSPSC or eCl@ss.
For example, the UNSPSC or “United Nations Standard Products and Services Code” is a nomenclature of more than twenty thousand categories proposed by the United Nations, with a hierarchical structure at four levels: “Segment”, “Family”, “Family”, “Class” and “Product”. Hammers belong to the class of “forming tools” which belong to the family of “hand tools”, which themselves belong to the “tools and general machinery” segment.
How to dematerialize the management of supplier catalogs?
We recommend working with a digital solution such as Punchout in order to benefit from a product offer that is updated in real time (stock availability, access to product sheets, etc.) and which is much more intuitive for users when looking for products. In the case of class C purchases, this also makes it possible to avoid wild purchases by accessing hundreds of thousands of references more easily.
How do you calculate your own cost per transaction (TCO)?
The cost per transaction can be calculated by breaking down the order process in place in your business. Then determine for each stage which employees are concerned, how much time they spend on the transaction and what costs this generates for the company. The addition of all these costs gives an estimate of the cost per transaction.
I invite you to download our White Paper on this subject.
Doesn't the implementation of a punchout tend to increase the number of orders?
This observation can be made in certain cases, in particular when no minimum order amount is specified. The aim is to avoid processing orders that incur more processing costs than the actual value of the items ordered.
In addition, the Sourcing Force solution integrates validation circuits and budgetary controls to avoid any abuse of consumption.
Why is the cost per transaction usually estimated between €150 and €250?
Indeed, there are several evaluations of the traditional transaction cost in the literature ranging from €150 to €250. At Buy Made Easy we have decided to raise the average of our own consulting missions in French companies.
We believe that this cost per transaction is closer to the reality of companies in France, which have generally already optimized some of their purchasing procedures.
This is still an estimate, which may vary depending on the organization/structural costs of each company.
Are you able to reference any product at BME?
We have enriched our offer, leading us to now offer more than 5,000,000 references for companies of all sizes. Our B2B marketplace offer aims to cover all business needs such as tools, packaging and handling products, office supplies, office furniture, etc.
Depending on the type of products that are not referenced in our offer, we carry out a reference on demand. For example, having been requested by several customers, we recently referenced a new range of industrial products covering mechanical transmission elements (ball bearings, etc.).
We also take care of all types of non-catalog references such as services, seminars or even custom manufacturing.
What do you think of small purchases made by bank card on the internet?
Many purchasing departments have made corporate bank cards available to their employees, in an effort to control expenses. At first glance, this makes it possible to make life easier for employees and to control an overall budget.
However, this solution is not satisfactory in many respects. Indeed, if you really want to optimize your class C purchases, it is necessary to be able to analyze expenses by purchasing category (suppliers/products) and not globally.
The use of acquisition cards leads to an increase in the number of suppliers and goes against the rationalization of the supplier panel.
Users maintain the administrative burden of managing expense reports and keeping receipts. Accounting must reprocess transactions to assign them manually to cost centers.
Do you have predefined communication plans, tips for outsourcing C-class purchases?
Indeed, communication is crucial in the implementation of the procurement outsourcing action plan. The important thing is to coordinate joint communication between the Purchasing Departments, Buy Made Easy, the tier 2 supplier and the users.
Corporate purchasing departments have much more weight with respect to users than an external service provider.
Thus, the external service provider will support them in order to make users aware of bad practices, to eradicate inappropriate procedures (illegal purchases: counter, credit card, etc.) and then highlight the digital solution by highlighting the savings that can be made for the benefit of society.
The tip is to communicate through internal newsletters, or formats that are well established in the company. These communications must include the conditions of the offer (discount), the possibilities that end users benefit from, the type of products concerned, explanations on what this changes in relation to habits.
The crucial point is to anticipate the resistance of employees to supplier changes, by explaining well how this change occurs and how Buy Made Easy is the best response to provide.
Do you include the cost of installing an e-procurement solution in the estimation of digital transactions?
In the estimate of the cost per digital transaction of €26, the initial investment of the e-procurement solution is not included.
Sourcing Force offers advice and supports you in setting up the hosted punchout or catalog. Unless specific development is requested, the set-up costs are negligible compared to the cost of the transaction.
Does the substitution of several suppliers by a single supplier centralize the sourcing and ordering functions?
In practice, we actually speak of “out-sourcing” in English, or outsourced referencing in French. In the event that substitutable suppliers are the company's usual suppliers, BME Consulting will take the decision with its product managers to approach these suppliers and to reference them if they are not already suppliers.
The advantage of this solution is that BME Consulting allows you to benefit from better prices, as well as associated services.
Regarding the placing of orders, it remains centralized at BME in order to offer you a single supplier account for all your spot purchases.
