Postal Service supplying professionals will strive to meet the Postal Service’s financial goals by adopting proven SM tools and techniques. The Postal Service has adopted continuous improvement as a strategic business imperative, and is committed to continually analyzing and improving its Supplying Practices to enhance its competitiveness, efficiency and effectiveness. Postal Service supplying professionals will use a variety of means, including benchmarking and other market research, participation in professional organizations, etc., to ensure that the best business practices are being used in the Postal Service’s supplying operations.
Early, detailed, cross-functional strategic planning is an essential component in meeting supply chain goals. Obtaining cross-functional involvement ensures a more holistic view of the purchase and enables SM to better meet Postal Service and client goals. Strategic sourcing is an important element in increasing the potential for achieving best value and reducing transactional costs. Therefore, each Category Management Center (CMC) and Purchasing Service Center (PSC) team is required to develop and maintain a written supply strategy (including advice from applicable clients) for each major spend category for which they are responsible. The strategy will focus on planned objectives, as well as the tactics and resources necessary to achieve client satisfaction and business success in the supply category in the coming year. At a minimum, category strategies will be reviewed annually by appropriate management levels within SM.
The Postal Service relies on market research as a best practice supplying tool in order to enhance strategic thinking, research, analysis, and decision-making and to sharpen its competitive advantages. All SM portfolios must perform and regularly update their market research in a cross-functional and collaborative manner. Research will focus on areas including, but not limited to, current and projected availability of products or services; the extent of competition in the market; the range of product or service performance characteristics; future industry, technology, and macro-economic trends; price trends and current market prices; supply base assessment; and types of available distribution and management systems.
Early forecasting is a key component of SCM; it can be a valuable mechanism for bringing the supply and demand for goods into convergence, and for reducing inventory levels and associated costs.
Effective communication throughout the supply chain is essential to successful forecasting. Therefore, SM and clients will work together to forecast future demand to the best of the organizations’ ability and to communicate this information throughout the supply chain to optimize performance. Forecasts for core goods and services, those critical to the Postal Service’s business success, will receive priority focus. Similarly, forecasts and changes to forecasts should be shared with suppliers, who are also encouraged to share Postal Service demand forecasts with their suppliers. Sharing relevant business information ensures that the Postal Service and its suppliers can work together more effectively and efficiently.
The Postal Service recognizes the power of leveraging spend across the enterprise through centralized procurement in facilitation of the achievement of best value. Therefore; unless there are compelling business reasons to do otherwise, all spend categories are centralized in order to maximize financial benefits by reducing total cost, including transaction costs, and improving quality and performance.
CMCs must continually work with their clients to reduce both the types and quantities of goods and services that they purchase in order to reduce costs on existing and future contracts. The Postal Service recognizes that product standardization is a powerful means to achieve best value when dealing with suppliers. By driving product standardization, the Postal Service will be able to negotiate better pricing, reduce overhead costs, and focus on developing relationships with strategic suppliers. Each CMC is responsible for identifying candidates for product standardization within its commodity category.
