Strategic Sourcing Consulting

Strategic Sourcing Scoping, Planning and Implementation

There are six significant challenges within every sourcing project: organizational barriers, buyer behavior, available resources, demand specifications, negotiation expertise, and the conception of innovative strategies.

DFA Management brings the expertise to mitigate these challenges, and capture the opportunities within each. As the trusted third party, we are able to work from an unbiased view of organizational practices; we have the role to thoughtfully challenge leaders and stakeholders alike.

Our objective view affords us the opportunity to explore existing buyer-supplier relationships and to facilitate buyers and users in optimizing their buying decisions. We leverage the client’s category specialist with our own business experts, strengthening the client’s position in the marketplace.

Using our current knowledge of supplier and industry cost structures, DFA Management experts are able to intelligently challenge existing demand specifications toward an improved outcome. Our ability to apply strong cross-industry experience, and business know-how to every category, sets the stage for our advanced negotiation skills.

DFA Management brings sophisticated negotiation experts to each client team. We are known for creative, practical deals that have built-in performance and cost management elements. The contracts we develop for our client are aimed at mitigating market vagaries, and lightening the future monitoring load on the client category manager.

Incumbent Renegotiation

Many companies find themselves on cruise control with incumbent suppliers. Price escalations have stopped being negotiated, and are reduced to an announcement from the supplier.

Common concerns that we hear from company category managers are:

• the product is rare--can I risk alienating the supplier?


• maybe the deal is really ok, and how do I know?


• the product is an important but common commodity, but their service is poor. Do I risk supply disruption if I take up corrective action with them?

Incumbent renegotiation—a fine balance. We find that our business maturity is invaluable in finding that fine balance.

The DFA Incumbent Strategy aims its foreground focus on the science--objective measures: facts surrounding the market competitiveness of the supplier, and the t’s and c’s of the contract. Always in our background is the art of assessing the qualitative aspects—supplier quality, its loyalty to the client, possibility of enriched value to the client.

We have had significant success in re-working inappropriate deals to the favor of our client. At the same time, we have been effective in preserving and improving important relationships.