NO MORE WASTING TIME WHEN LOOKING FOR WASTE RECYCLERS
The procurement manager at an ecommerce giant with a huge portfolio of electronic and electrical equipment needed to act quickly when new regulations demanded a new way of recycling, putting millions of euros of revenue at risk.
The procurement manager had one provider of extended producer responsibility (EPR) compliant recycling, but needed several more to cover the entire European market. The new EU directive demanded producers’ ownership along the entire product life cycle for electronic and electrical equipment and had already been implemented in Germany and France. It was only a matter of time until other EU member states followed.
Finding the first supplier had cost her a great deal of time (three weeks of on and off searching) - browsing through supplier repositories, googling, and asking her personal network for recommendations. She would now have to repeat that process for the other five key markets, and the internal expectation was that she only had another month to find relevant suppliers.
It had taken so long to find the first supplier that she didn’t really know where to start going about finding another five! Was it going to mean repeating the three-week long process for each of the five key European markets? This was time she simply didn’t have with the internal deadline of just one month looming.
Not being able to find EPR-compliant recycling providers would not only mean failing on internal expectations, it would also have severe consequences for the entire business. As the directive states, non-compliance with EPR would lead to hefty fines or even a complete ban on goods sold. This put a yearly revenue of hundreds of millions of euros on the line.
On the upside, finding relevant providers in the little time she had would make her a procurement hero. Simultaneously, it would create visibility across the entire company for the impact and importance of the work being done in the procurement department.
She decided to make use of Scoutbee Supplier Discovery for the first time. It had previously been purchased by her department and already put to use by some of her colleagues. The tool promised high quality results in a fraction of the time previously needed. Hoping to avoid having to go through countless Excel sheets, checking information on existing suppliers, searching on Google, and asking around her
entire department for clues as to where to find suppliers in five different markets, she was eager to start the case in Discovery.
The first step in the process - filling out the search form - helped her define exactly what she was looking for. Before using Scoutbee Discovery, she had struggled with translating the requirements set out in the regulation into relevant keywords, especially as there were many aspects to consider. For example, with the Scoutbee Discovery form to identify providers of services, she was able to exclude consultancies from the search and focus on service providers only - an issue she had encountered in her previous search attempts - as a lot of consultancies were showing up for the same keywords as actual recycling service providers.
Moreover, entering a set of keywords, desired locations, and required certificates in the form would make repeated searches and filtering of results redundant. After filling in the form, she was eager to see what the AI-powered tool would come back with. In the onboarding material she had read, the algorithm would aggregate all data available on the internet relevant to her search, single out the suppliers with the highest number of keyword matches, and enrich these suppliers with data on revenue, employees, and relevant certificates. It would also ignore SEO-optimized content by companies offering similar but not the exact services needed.
In contrast to traditional searches, this would ensure a comprehensive view of relevant suppliers. Her expectations were high and she wasn’t disappointed - after only two days she received a list of 25 suppliers located in the five key European markets. Being able to review their enriched profiles, she was quickly able to decide on who to invite for further onboarding. As she put it,
“Without Scoutbee Discovery, I would still be buried in Excel files.”
In summary, while it had previously taken her three weeks to find one supplier in one market, the entire process with Scoutbee Discovery was completed in just two days, and yielded 25 suppliers located in five different countries. In metrics, the process had been 85% faster, producing 25 suppliers to choose from instead of one. This allowed her to report back with a set of suppliers to invite for an RFI, having completed the task a month before the deadline. From a company perspective, achieving these results was pivotal to ensuring EPR compliance which, in turn, would secure a multi-million euro revenue stream.
If you’re looking for a way to innovate in your supplier sourcing, get in touch with us today to see how we can help.
