Strategic sourcing is among the most valuable disciplines of supply management, yielding savings between 5 percent and 50 percent over tactical buying. Historically sourcing organizations have been forced to conduct sourcing via manual processes or niche products for reverse auctions, which yielded inferior results.

"Driving improvements in supply cost and performance in today's tightening supply markets will require adoption of new intelligent sourcing methods and systems," said Tim Minahan, senior vice president, Supply Chain Research, Aberdeen Group. "Intelligent sourcing involves the use of collaborative and flexible negotiation methods and advanced analytics to achieve best total value supply solutions and to drive continuous improvement."

The new capabilities of Oracle Sourcing include:

* Complex bid management: enables organizations to drive additional savings by allowing buying professionals to tackle more involved strategic sourcing programs. New document inheritance capabilities, transformational bidding, and the ability to structure large bids based on lots, lines and groups, will significantly expand the commodities for which sourcing can be leveraged.

* Bid award optimization: helps organizations choose the suppliers that provide the best value for money with the best combination of cost, quality, risk, and innovation. Optimization also saves time by helping buying professionals to quickly choose the best supplier.

* Integration and workflow advances: enables organizations to realize additional savings by integrating strategic sourcing with other procurement applications. For example, users can create sourcing events from requisitions and expired purchase agreements and create contracts from sourcing events.

"Oracle's customers shared valuable perspective on what is really needed to exploit the most important sourcing opportunities," said Meg Lloyd, senior director, Oracle Advanced Procurement. "By listening to these progressive organizations and addressing their key objectives and challenges, Oracle is delivering solutions that will immediately impact Purchasing's ability to deliver savings to the bottom line."

In February, Oracle Sourcing became the first integrated application to receive eSender certification. To learn more about Oracle Sourcing, please visit: http://www.oracle.com/applications/procurement/Sourcing.html.

Oracle Advanced Procurement
Oracle Advanced Procurement is an integrated suite of applications that dramatically cut all supply management costs. With Oracle Advanced Procurement, organizations can reduce spend on goods and services, streamline procurement processes, and enforce policy compliance.

About Oracle
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