One click, every supplier: sourcing spare parts from price lists

Most traders know which three suppliers they will ask before they open the order. That habit is how a cheaper source, or the only one with the part on the shelf, gets missed. It is not laziness: opening five price lists of a hundred thousand rows each, for every RFQ, is simply not something a person does before lunch.

Load the whole list

Manufacturers' price lists are big and untidy: a logo in the first rows, the header on row nine, merged cells, three currencies. The desk takes an Excel list of up to 40 MB as it comes, finds the header row automatically and streams it in. It has been tested at 160,000 rows of a Liebherr list.

Rank who can quote

For every order, suppliers are ranked by how many of its lines their lists cover, and equivalents count: if a supplier lists the part under another brand's number, it still counts, marked as an equivalent. For each line you also see the four cheapest offers across every list, so you know the market before the first answer comes in.

Price the order before you ask

One click prices every line of the order from the lists. For many orders that is the quotation, and the supplier requests only confirm stock and lead time.

Ask them all

Tick the suppliers and one request goes to each, with the Excel sheet attached, in the supplier's currency and in a request e-mail you can edit. Each is numbered from the order, so every answer finds its way back to its request by the number in the subject, or by the address it was sent to.

Compare in one currency

Rates are fed daily from an exchange. A supplier's cost converts at the rate of the request it came from, so a quotation made on Tuesday does not move because the dirham did on Thursday. Landed cost adds freight by weight, duty and VAT per line.

The supplier you did not ask is the one with it on the shelf.

A sourcing checklist

1. Keep every supplier's latest full list loaded, not only the ones you use most.
2. Count equivalents when you rank suppliers.
3. Ask more suppliers than you think you need: it costs one click.
4. Convert at the request's rate, not today's.
5. Keep the answers on the request, so the next order starts from them.

When the answers come back

Supplier replies arrive in every format: a screenshot of their system, a PDF offer, a sheet with our lines and their prices, or three lines typed into the reply. Each is captured on its request line by line, with each price shown beside the one it would replace and the reason for the match. The offered brand and quality are kept, lots are kept as lots, and "in stock" is recorded as in stock. The request you choose then fills the order's cost, and the next order for the same parts starts from what you already know.

The systems: TERRA-307 PRICELIST, TERRA-302 SRQ, TERRA-308 CROSS and TERRA-309 RATES.

Questions