This Monday, we welcome back Ryder Daniels as he continues his tech-ed series.
To begin our weekly series about tools and technology for March, we’re highlighting a service called BillShrink. Billshrink helps consumers and small businesses reduce …
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Editor’s note: We are pleased to welcome T&E strategic sourcing guru Scott Gillespie, author of the Gillespie’s Guide to Travel Procurement blog, for some guest posts this week.
Two observations really drove this point home for me last week. The first came from Marc Hochman, a partner at A.T. Kearney with deep expertise in the procurement [...]
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In the first of this two-part series on the new enterprise spend analysis product from Rosslyn Analytics, I tackled some of its spend visibility basics, such as how does the solution handle data, acquisition/management, enrichment, and basic spend qu…
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( For Part 1, click here.)
One of the questions asked by some of Spend Radar’s channel partners (and customers ) when first hearing of the tool is simple: does the
world really need another spend-classification and -analysis product?
Aren’t…
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While I plan, over the holiday break, to find as many ways as possible to ignore
numbers, charts, graphics, and useful and creative
quantitative displays of visual information in general, there was a time earlier in the month when, although ove…
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A few weeks back, over the best Korean fried chicken in Chicago, if not the world, I
had the chance to catch up with Brian Daniels and Rod True of Spend Radar. In full disclosure,
Spend Radar is not only a sponsor of Spend Matters, but Brian is…
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In a column from last Friday, I provided some background details on the current state of Spend Matters as well as intimating what might be around the corner. To summarize, for those who missed it and don’t want to read the first installment in this s…
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In the first column in this series highlighting Basware’s latest
connectivity offerings, I talked on a high level about how this
offering fits in the context of Basware’s overall P2P footprint. In
today’s analysis we’ll go deeper, examining how Ba…
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Innovation seems to be pouring out of the Tata Group at a very rapid clip. The Tata Nano, which relied heavily on the company’s suppliers for their cost savings and creativity, raised the proverbial innovation bar by dramatically lowering the cost of an automobile thus making them available to a larger portion of the Indian population (and perhaps the rest of the world in the future). Now the company is back in the headlines with a new, revolutionary, potentially life-saving product with huge demand. The Tata Swach is a low-cost water filter aimed at the HUGE number of people in India and worldwide who lack access to clean, safe drinking water.
I’ll let this CNBC video fill you in on the details of this low-margin, high volume (in terms of sales, not water volume) water purifier Tata want to have in 3 million Indian homes within the next 5 years.
The collaboration story thus far focuses on Tata Group companies. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the more in depth story on the life saving device (approximately 380,000 children die each year of diarrhea in India alone) actually tapped into their suppliers in order to keep costs down and innovation up. Given Tata’s success with that model in the past, it seems likely they’ve employed across much of the Tata Group, particularly when trying to achieve a game-changing design AND a low price point.
What’s the lesson here for other companies, that are striving for differentiated products at a lower cost than their competitors? Tata’s key to success seems to be … starting with a price point and product, then working backwards through the R&D process with a constant eye on the bottom line. And to get there, they rely heavily on their suppliers for innovation – in terms of specifications and process efficiencies.
Can you do the same? Are your suppliers ready, willing and able to help?
Justin Fogarty is Managing Editor of Supply Excellence. For any questions or feedback on the blog or its contributors, Justin can be reached at jfogarty[at]ariba.com.
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MetalMiner, Spend Matters’ sister publication focused on metals sourcing, turned two today. Three years younger than Spend Matters, the site is nonetheless following in the virtual steps of this digital rag, quickly catching up with and overtaking es…
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