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CombineNet ASAP^®: Improving Collaborative Sourcing with Spend Stakeholders

The industry-leading sourcing analysis capabilities of our best-in-class e-sourcing tool CombineNet ASAP^® help sourcing professionals overcome one of the biggest challenges inherent in centralized sourcing or center-led sourcing events: ensuring that the preferences and constraints of different internal parties are accurately considered when making award decisions. This is often referred to as Collaborative Sourcing (but can also include external stakeholders as well).

CombineNet's customers have found a better way to achieve Sourcing Collaboration alignment with spend category stakeholders. With CombineNet ASAP, sourcing teams and their business stakeholders can collaborate closely during the bid analysis phase to test out a number of award strategies, allowing them to work together to find the optimal balance of cost, value, and viability.

Internal collaborative sourcing facilitated with CombineNet ASAP leads to several significant business benefits:

• Greatly improves visibility and understanding into the true cost of sourcing decisions and awards
• Mitigating the risk of savings leakage later (often the due to off-contract purchases when stakeholders don't trust or buy in to the decision process)
• Mitigates other potential risks by enabling a shared visibility into various sourcing scenario impacts
• Provides the e-sourcing team deeper insights into the spend manager’s needs and preferences for future planning

With the CombineNet ASAP Scenario Builder^SM feature, event managers working with their spend stakeholders are able to create any number of “what if?” sourcing scenarios using an unlimited combination of business rules and scenario scopes to identify the lowest-cost option that best meets the needs of the organization. Scenarios in ASAP can be compared and combined to identify the impact of each stakeholder’s preferences on the sourcing decision as a whole, enabling negotiations to be based on total cost of ownership with least business risk.

Learn more on how to get started with CombineNet ASAP.