Expressive Commerce: A New Approach to Sourcing

Advanced sourcing strategies require advanced technologies. CombineNet's optimization-driven Advanced Sourcing Application Platform (ASAP) enables a new, strategic approach to sourcing, Expressive Commerce™.

Expressive Commerce is an innovative, technology-enabled business practice which combines the interaction and expressiveness of traditional, face-to-face negotiations with an advanced online capability to collect and analyze expressive proposals alongside an organization's business goals and operational constraints.

The result: ASAP delivers the absolute best total cost of goods and services based on the purchasing organization's unique business needs; at the same time significantly increasing the speed and efficiency of the sourcing cycle. This is done not by squeezing the margins of suppliers or by simply automating the bid collection process, but by creating a richer, more expressive marketplace between buyers and suppliers.

Buyers express their requirements, constraints, and preferences.

Suppliers express their strengths and capabilities to best meet the buyer's needs.

That's Expressive Commerce.

With ASAP, sourcing organizations articulate their unique procurement needs, expressing their business preferences and operational constraints in significantly greater detail than with other sourcing tools.

In turn, suppliers are able to pick and choose which items to include in their bidding strategies. Suppliers provide proposals based on their unique strengths and capabilities, including Expressive Bids that can include conditional (if/then) offers, volume discounts, packages of items (bundles), and other creative offers that take advantage of their strengths. With Expressive Bidding^®, suppliers drive the inefficiencies out of their own business and share the savings with buyers, simultaneously strengthening strategic relationships for long-term supply chain efficiencies and competitive advantage.

Delivered on-demand via the Web, ASAP enables Expressive Commerce on a global scale. Powered by CombineNet's patented optimization technology, buyers can analyze tens, even hundreds of thousands of expressive proposals against their internal business rules in seconds. Virtually unlimited "What If?" scenarios can be run to determine the optimal mix of suppliers, proposals, and business rules in an award allocation scenario. Stakeholder alignment, absolute total cost of ownership, and cost modeling of award decisions is easy and fast with ASAP's Scenario Builder^SM.