Key Hotel Procurement Strategies for 2024
What Are the Sourcing Techniques the Pros Use?
Purchasing supplies, equipment, and services for your resort, hotel or leisure operation is an important part of managing your business correctly. There are several ways you can optimize this process to both save money and improve efficiency. Read three key hotel procurement strategies from Foodbuy Hospitality below.
1. Strengthen Your Supplier Connections
Putting time into vendor management and category management are two important hotel procurement strategies.
Vendor management is all about strengthening your
relationships with distributors and manufacturers and creating long-term partnerships. Maintaining connections with supplier partners can help you secure optimal products and prices, and even help you stay in-the-know about industry updates.
Category management, on the other hand, is the process of creating strategies based on specific product and service areas. Category management helps you determine the best possible choices based on your company’s spend volume for a product, your specifications, as well as current market conditions and knowledge of vendors. That way, you’re making purchasing decisions based on existing knowledge.
2. Protect Your Business From Risks
When developing hotel procurement strategies for your business, you’ll also want to think about potential risks. Many operators dedicate time and resources to supply chain risk management.
Supply chain risk management involves both risk assessment and contingency planning. You’ll want to make sure that you’re spending time every quarter on risk assessment. That means identifying potential supply chain disruptions due to factors like:
Geopolitical changes
Supplier shortages
Weather events
Once you’ve identified the risk factors that are most relevant to your supply chain, you’ll want to start contingency planning. That can mean identifying backup SKUs or allocating funds in case prices go up.
3. Review Your Existing Orders
Many hospitality operators fall into the trap of relying on standing orders and existing ordering processes. While this can work in the short term, the long term, you may be wasting money on products you don’t need.
Scheduling routine reviews of your orders is the best way to make sure you’re ordering the right SKUs in the proper amounts. You’ll want to look at how much of each product you buy, then compare with the products you either throw away or keep in storage between each order. This can help you identify products you can cut down on, as well as products you might need to order more of.
Team Up With a Group Purchasing Operation
Integrating the above hotel procurement strategies into your purchasing plan can seem daunting at first. However, working with a group purchasing organization (GPO) can make the process easier. Foodbuy Hospitality is a trusted, industry-specific GPO.
Because we’re backed by the buying power of Compass Group North America, we’re able to secure competitive supplier contracts with all the bells and whistles you need. Plus, we have a variety of teams dedicated to relevant procurement topics.
Our Category Business Managers are experts in a variety of food, supplies, equipment, and services. Our Culinary Solutions Team provides expertise in both the culinary arts and procurement. Finally, our Account Management Team is the ideal liaison between your business and our wide range of programs and solutions.
Become a Member with Foodbuy Hospitality today to get started.