Open-ended problem is something stopping the achievement of an objective or blocking progress. To solve this type of problems, procurement professional should find a way to unblock the block-age. In the above question, high logistics cost is an obstacle to cost cutting objective while suppli-er’s incompliance prevents the company to achieve its sustainable objective.
Reference:
LO 1, AC 1.1

In this question, you have to calculate price variance and quantity variance.
Last month, 1 tonne of steel costed $216. This month, the price decreases to $181.1. Price variance = (P1 – P2)*Q2 = ($216-$181.1)*11 = $383.9 Quantity variance = (Q1-Q2)*P1 = -$216 Price variance is greater than quantity variance, therefore, price variance is the main cost driver.
LO 1, AC 1.4

There are three major types of buying situations, which are new purchase, modified rebuy and straight rebuy. Three factors make the buying situations be different from the others, customers may face different problems in these situations.
A new purchase is a situation requiring the purchase of a product for the very first time.
A straight rebuy is when a company places a second order with a supplier that is identical to the first purchase it made.
A modified rebuy is when a company orders again from a supplier, but wants to change some as-pect of the order, such as the quantity, packaging, product features, or delivery times. The scenario above is an example of modified rebuy.
Reference:
– What is a straight rebuy example?
– CIPS study guide page 3-4

Value Analysis (VA) is concerned with existing products. It involves a current product being ana-lysed and evaluated by a team, to reduce costs, improve product function or both. Value Analysis exercises use a plan which step-by-step, methodically evaluates the product in a range of areas. These include costs, function, alternative components and design aspects such as ease of manufac-ture and assembly.
According to the Value Methodology standard, there are 6 phases to a Value Analysis:
– Information
– Function Analysis
– Creative
– Evaluation
– Development
– Presentation
1. Information
In this first phase, the team attempts to understand why the project exists and who or what it is to produce. They obtain project data, present the original design or product concepts, and understand the project scope. Schedule, costs, budget, risk, and other non-monetary issues are studied until the team is comfortable with the concept of the project, what it is to produce, and who its end users are.
This step also includes things like site visits and meetings with the project team, if required. Project documents like plans, drawings, specifications, and reports are obtained and the value engineering team becomes familiar with them.
2. Function Analysis
This step represents the meat and potatoes (core) of the value analysis. The team attempts to determine the functions the project serves. Functions come in two forms:
– Primary functions are those that represent the reason for the project’s existence, for example, a building project might have adequate plumbing as a primary function.
– Secondary functions are those that the project serves without being core to the project. For example, a building project might have as a secondary function maintaining the view of the neighboring building.
The functions are described in verb/noun pairs, such as “supply water to all suites,” or “Maintain view of adjacent park.” For a project like this, the team should come up with 10 – 15 functions. You might be surprised how many secondary functions exist for most projects. Subject matter experts would be a great resource, but in their absence an appropriate level of brainstorming and analysis are necessary.
The team should also identify value-mismatched functions to focus the improvements on. For ex-ample, maybe a large obstruction is preventing the view of the adjacent park from too many suites resulting in a potential mismatch of the cost vs. functional benefit. This is investigated in the next step.
3. Creative
This phase represents the generation of improvement ideas. The team develops alternative ways that the project can perform the functions that have been identified. At this step, the functions are looked at individually and each one gets a list of alternative ways to perform the function. There is no judging between the importance of the various functions.
4. Evaluation
At this stage, a priority is given to each project improvement idea. The ideas are discussed and potential costs are determined. Once the risk-reward profile of each idea is itemized, the team has determined which ideas are worth implementing into the project or feature.
A few years ago, there was a pedestrian bridge built near my home which was originally designed for emergency vehicles. Although this type of design is standard practice for the bridges of this type, the value engineering team identified that emergency vehicle passage was not needed (verb/noun pair = ‘maintain passage for emergency vehicles’). Also, a second major outcome of this value analysis was to change the design to an aesthetic, curved bridge because it was in a prominent location. The redesign of the bridge cost some money but this was more than made up by the cost of the bridge construction. Thus, the value analysis paid for itself about 10 times over in the reduced construction cost, and the bridge was significantly more aesthetic.
5. Development
Once the value improvement options have been whittled down to the ones that make sense, the value engineering team develop the options to the point of passing them back to the original project team. They must be clearly written and explained so that the project owner and stakeholders can understand how it benefits the project and act on it. Any potential negative factors are identified. Potential costs and cost savings are itemized.
6. Presentation
This last phase represents the presentation of the alternatives to the stakeholders. Often value engineering represents a change in the normal practices that people are used to, an “out of the box thinking.” Thus the best salesperson on the team is often the best one to do the presentation.
Some typical products of a value engineering analysis are a briefing document, risk analy-sis, present worth analysis, advantages vs. disadvantages, etc.
Reference:
LO 3, AC 3.4

Public annual reports can be a source of information that helps the procurement professional to analyse an industry’s cost and revenue using the line of best fit. Line of best fit is one of the most important outputs of regression analysis. Regression refers to a quantitative measure of the relationship between one or more independent variables and a resulting dependent variable. Regression is of use to professionals in a wide range of fields from science and public service to financial analysis.
In this case, by collecting and analysing 17 annual reports, the procurement manager can find the line of best fit which goes approximately through the middle of the data points with an equal num-ber of data points above and below it.
The slope of the line of best fit is the approximate variable costs the industry. The easiest way to calculate it is to take a point at the right-hand end of the line of best fit and note its cost and output levels. Divide the cost by the output and this gives and approximate figure for the cost per unit of output or variable cost. This gives an approximate value for the industry fixed and variable costs.
Reference:
LO 2, AC 2.3

Functional benchmarking is a comparison to similar or identical practices (e.g., the picking process for assembling customer orders, maintaining inventory controls of spare computer parts, logistics to move operational forces, etc.) within the same or similar functions outside the immediate industry. Functional benchmarking might identify practices that are superior in your functional areas in whatever industry they may exist. Functional benchmarking would be accomplished at the federal level by comparing the IRS collections process against those of American Express. Comparing copper mining techniques to coal mining techniques is an example in the private sector.
Benefits
– Provides industry trend information
– Quantitative comparisons
– Better improvement rate
Challenges
– Diverse corporate cultures
– Great need for specificity
– Not invented here. syndrome
– Common functions can be difficult to find
– Takes more time than internal or percent
– Must be able to visualize how to adapt the best practices
Source: USN Benchmarking Handbook
LO 1, AC 1.3

The purpose of this Question:
to actionable requirements before communicating with the suppliers. The scenario suggests that Synergy Ltd’s customer services team is using Excel spreadsheets, they lack a centralised customer database. This leads to problems in communications with customers.
A CRM system can solve the communication problem. But a Question: 100
will the previous data be imported? If the CRM system can support bulk import from Excel tables, it will save a lot of time.
Reference:
LO 1, AC 1.1

Primary activities consist of inbound logistics, operations, outbound logistics, sales & marketing, service.
Second activities consist of firm infrastructure, human resource management, technology development and procurement

Support activities (also known as secondary activities) include Firm infrastructure, Human resource management, Technology development and Procurement. Developing digital SRM technology to manage suppliers better is Technology development.
LO 1, AC 1.2

A conformance specification is a specification that defines the technical and physical characteristics and/or measurements of a product, such as physical aspects (e.g. dimensions, colour, and surface finish), design details, material properties, energy requirements, processes, maintenance requirements and operational requirements.
On the other hand, performance specification typically includes list of output or outcome or func-tional requirements. Brand name can be a part of performance specification because brand is a re-minder of quality that customers remember. For example, when talking about Roll Royce, people will think about an elegant car.
Reference:
LO 3, AC 3.1

The writing of a complex specification should be treated as a project because it requires the brain power from different stakeholders. Many tools and processes of project management can be applied to complex specification development. Before engaging with the stakeholders and implementing the project, the project initial document should developed.
A Project Initiation Document (PID) is one of the most important components of project manage-ment, which forms the foundation for a company project. It is a reference point during the entire project, for the client as well as for the project team.
A PID bundles documentation into a logical reference work that collects all important information needed to start and run a project from a good foundation. After that, Project Initiation Document must be transferred to all stakeholders, including business sponsors.
This forms the basis for the project management. The documentation from which the PID is com-posed include the business case in which the project’s justification can be found, the communica-tion plan and the project plan.
The PID is composed out of collected information and includes, among others, the following com-ponents:
– Project goal(s); what do you want to achieve with the project?
– Project size; how large is the project, how long does it take and how many people are involved?
– Project organisation; who are involved in the project, what are their tasks, responsibilities and authority?
– Limits and risks; what can cause a project to stagnate and are there risks related to the project?
– Stakeholders; who has a stake in the success of the project?
– Project checks and frame reporting; by carefully taking into account evaluation moments, it is clear to everyone what sample tests can be carried out during the process.
In addition, it is important that the Project Initiation Document also contains the following infor-mation:
– The background and occasion of the project, which together provide information about the con-text.
– The project organisational structure, which describes who has which management responsibility in the project.
– The project quality plan, describing who controls the quality of the products to be delivered and how it will take place.
– The total project planning, including the duration of all activities.
– The exception process, which describes how exceptions are dealt with and the steps of the escalation procedure.
– The risk log, including the measures that will be taken when there are unforeseen risks.
– The documentation structure of the project, in which the encoding and storage of all documents and products to be provided by the project has been recorded in advance.
Reference:
– CIPS study guide page 148
– Project Initiation Document (PID), a project management tool | ToolsHero LO 3, AC 3.3

To improve production process and reduce supply risk, Datong should collaborate with suppliers early in procurement cycle. Collaborating with suppliers in this way is often referred as Early Supplier Involvement (ESI)
‘Request for quotation from potential suppliers’: Quotations should only be requested if the buyer know exactly what they need. In this scenario, Datong is not yet sure about the specifications of product’s components, request for quotation is not a good idea.
‘Mapping out business plan’: A business plan, as defined by Entrepreneur, is a “written document describing the nature of the business, the sales and marketing strategy, and the financial back-ground, and containing a projected profit and loss statement.” A business plan is not appropriate with improving production process and reducing supply risk.
‘Budget controlling’: Budget controlling largely concerns with dealing with budget variances. Tighter budget alone cannot lead to improved processes and fewer risks.
LO 3, AC 3.1

Using Porter’s value chain helps procurement professionals know what are direct and indirect costs of supplier. Information on direct and indirect costs will have been collected as part of the market analysis. Information sources that may help include the following:
– Company annual reports
– Market data
– Technical data
– Request for information
– Plan visits
– Discount lists
Market data is the information that is collected and analysed by specialist organisations like Mintel, Gartner, Forrester,…
Reference:
LO 2, AC 2.3

Barriers to entry is an economics and business term describing factors that can prevent or impede newcomers into a market or industry sector, and so limit competition. The most obvious barriers to entry are high start-up costs and regulatory hurdles which include the need for new companies to obtain licenses or regulatory clearance before operation. Also, industries heavily regulated by the government are usually the most difficult to penetrate. Other forms of barrier to entry that prevent new competitors from easily entering a business sector include special tax benefits to existing firms, patent protections, strong brand identity, customer loyalty, and high customer switching costs.
In the scenario, the new factory for chipset manufacturing costs billions of dollars, which indicates high set-up costs. Also, the incumbent manufacturers have reached economies of scale, allowing them to produce the components at optimal price.
The above descriptions are compiled from recent reports on current chip shortage (2021).
Reference:
– Barriers to Entry Definition (investopedia.com)
– CIPS study guide page 96-97
LO 2, AC 2.2

The term product life cycle refers to the length of time a product is introduced to consumers into the market until it’s removed from the shelves. The life cycle of a product is broken into four stages-introduction, growth, maturity, and decline.

Source: https://blueoceanoutsource.co.ke/the-product-life-cycle-concept/ At maturity stage, price competition sets in as more and more supply capacity has been added by new entrants, then the competition will be the most intense.
Reference:
LO 2, AC 2.2

Main risks involved in an under-specified requirement
* The product or service is not fit for use since it does not match the actual needs
* Higher cost due to corrections or reworks (proposal evaluations, scope or work monitoring, change in insulation materials or systems, reduced productivity, etc.).
* Higher operating cost on many fronts: process control, energy consumption, maintenance, etc.
* Other problems like corrosion under insulation, mold development, safety-related concerns, etc.
LO 3, AC 3.3