OPRE 6371- Prep/Reflection Assignment- Greenville Design Inc. Nikitha Samineni- NXS190034 1. Why is office supply a typical candidate for sourcing improvement efforts? First and foremost, office supplies are not a one-time investment. This is a recurring expense. From Figure 1, it is evident that office supplies are the third highest expense to this company. Strategically sourcing these commodities will help keep the costs at minimum. It is stated that the company is spending an average of $250-$280. When we're looking at it on a individual basis, it might not seem as high. Considering a company the size of 15000 employees, reducing even 5% cost bring about a significant decrease in the total costs. These are commodities easily available from a variety of suppliers. Making the best choice can prove beneficial to the company. Negotiating and sourcing from the best and economical becomes easy with a wide choice. 2. List some potential cost saving strategies for GDI. Centralizing orders is the primary step to a cost efficient purchasing strategy. The case study mentions that similar products serving the same purpose having multiple SKU's. Selecting and making available limited products with economic value can also help. Online ordering practices proved to be very efficient in terms of time and money. Hence enforcing online ordering can be beneficial. Perhaps choosing to purchase in bulk with catalogue suppliers and storing common items in inventory can also be useful. The main goal is to reduce administrative costs, product pricing variations and this will in turn reduce the overall costs. Most of negotiating with suppliers on better pricing contracts by leveraging the availability of multiple suppliers. 3. What are some potential implementation barriers for your proposed strategies? Centralization of orders will need new technology infrastructure which can be a high expense. Resistance from employees to change from manual orders to online ordering. Limiting the product variety can be tough to implement due to difference in nature of work done at different locations. This study source was downloaded by 100000841231784 from CourseHero.com on 02-18-2022 11:56:15 GMT -06:00 https://www.coursehero.com/file/73226170/Greenville-Prep-OPRE-6371pdf/ Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)