Supply Chain

The Smart Cube provides customized procurement and supply chain research to global corporations and specialist procurement service providers. Our research capabilities cover all critical supply markets and extend across the globe - from developed western countries to low cost emerging markets, including China, India, Latin America, Eastern Europe and Africa. In line with our emphasis on providing insight and not simply data, we integrate in-depth primary and secondary research to help our clients' sourcing and supply chain analysis needs.

Supply Market Analysis

We help our clients understand the fundamental structure of supply markets to inform their category sourcing activities. We comprehensively analyse the nature of category markets, demand and supply levers, buyer vs. supplier negotiating power balance, markets trends, etc.

Our services include:
  • Category specific issue-based research support
  • Global, regional or country specific category supply market analysis
  • Low cost country (LCC) sourcing research and supply analysis
  • Category maintenance - ongoing category intelligence tracking and updating, customised key drivers tracking, supplier assessment and monitoring, etc.
  • Vendor analytics

Supplier RFX

We provide category specific support to execute supplier RFIs and pre-qualification to customised criteria. We also support the RFQ/ RFP process right through to final negotiations with the short-listed suppliers. Our services include:
  • Global, regional or country specific supplier identification to specified criteria
  • LCC sourcing - supplier identification and pre-qualification
  • Supplier intelligence and profiling
  • RFP/ RFQ process management

Spend Analysis

We work closely with our clients to 'crunch' accounts payable data, analyzing trends and patterns to generate key buying insights, spend consolidation opportunities and inform the strategic sourcing process. Our services include:
  • Spend cube/ category tree development
  • Strategic sourcing opportunity assessment
  • Deep dives on specific spend areas; for instance, long tail of wrongly/ uncategorised spend data
  • Compliance monitoring - mapping contract vs. usage data
  • Data cleansing and categorising

Supply Chain Analysis

  • Sector-specific supply chain trends
  • Logistics analysis - inbound/outbound freight trends, pricing analyses, 3PL/4PL analyses
  • Distribution models
  • Customized, topical support e.g. greening of the supply chain
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