LIVING LOGISTICS BLOG

Jean-Jacques Laffont, a French economist, defined Procurement as "the process of finding and agreeing to terms, and acquiring goods, services, or works from an external source, often via a tendering or competitive bidding process."

Even though the core concept remains the same over decades, the reality is that in practice, procurement must evolve and adapt over time especially as technology advances around it.

Procurement is focused on making buying decisions that involve cost-benefit or cost-utility analyses but many debates still persist in acquiring Logistics services such as “do I enable my internal logistics department to make these decisions” or “do I centralize the process through an enterprise-wide procurement organization”.

These terms are mostly related to end-to-end visibility and a supply chain's performance, although a robust Center of Excellence is a much more complex concept.

The Center of Excellence consolidates all operations and supply chain process expertise into a single location. This location would not only include logistics experts but also Procurement, Global Trade Compliance, Finance and Planning, Order to Cash, Engineering, Network Optimization, Business Intelligence and IT.  All of these unique functions, working in harmony, will make it easier for our clients to do business with us while providing additional value to our Customer’s Supply Chain.

Initial tariffs were put in place last year for steel, aluminum, washing machines, solar panels and other goods at 25% in two phases. Starting September 1^st new tariffs on remaining imports begin at 10% for apparel, some electronics, toys, etc. and on December 15^th this will include all products from China.