Clarity Venture's President and CEO Chris Reddick meets with Ron Halversen, Vice-President of Sales and Marketing at Clarity, to discuss buying groups and the advanced inventory logistics they may need.  

Part 1 of a 3-part series.

RON HALVERSEN: Good morning, Chris. How are you doing today? 

CHRIS REDDICK: Hey Ron, doing great. Looking forward to diving into advance inventory logic for buying groups and group purchasing organizations today with you. 

RON: Yeah, I agree. This is a great topic that has people asking what is a buying group? Let's go ahead. And first off, let's just talk briefly about what advanced inventory logic is, because buying group inventory can be very different, right? Because of the just the sheer quantity of either the bulk purchases themselves or the vendors. So why don't you go ahead and dive in and talk a little bit about the logistics of advanced eCommerce inventory management and what that can mean across the organization? 

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CHRIS: Absolutely. Well, thanks. So this is a really interesting topic because most buying groups and group purchasing organizations tend toward doing some form of dropship or some form of, you know, multi-warehouse inventory model. Typically, it's going to be a dropship type of model, though, and you can think of it as a kind of distributed inventory and being able to represent that with the lead times, with the appropriate kind of buffer of the inventory in, you're dealing with a situation where in most cases where the buyer is looking for different products from different vendors essentially. 

So these different vendors may have different lead times, different shipping capabilities, maybe they have different kind of buffer of inventory. And if you're not careful as a buying group, you may end up representing items in stock that are not. And this can be extremely frustrating and even cause a fundamental problem with a buyer, a member of your group, purchasing organization, or buying group

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CHRIS: If they order something, they plan on it being there. It needs to show up on time with rare exceptions, if any exceptions. And so it's really important that this advanced concept be in place because we really have at the baseline or the foundational element of the buying group, this concept of integrity and credibility of the information within the system. 

So if anything, you know, what we want to do within our B2B eCommerce platform is enable you and your organization to seamlessly leverage this data in an intelligent way and do it in a way that works for the members, for the buyers, so they can see the information transparently, very easily. And in most cases, that's really the name of the game, is transparency with some amount of buffer. So we want to be able to represent inventory for each of the different vendors, possibly give the buyers options to purchase or source from different vendors for the same product. 

There could be different distributors, there could be different warehouse locations. And we want to as the buying group or the group purchasing organization, we want to enable our members. OK, so our job with the software is to make that easy for you and ultimately put the governance in place so that the the vendors who are selling have the ability to keep their information up to date and they have incentive to make sure that it's kept up to date or they are removed or lowered in the search results. 

Possibly there their items that they're selling are kind of marked as low reliability. Maybe we increase the lead time, reduce the amount of items that we show in inventory because their information is incredible, this kind of a thing. And so ultimately though, whenever a buyer is going into your platform and they are looking to purchase a thousand items or fifty items that need to be delivered urgently, this advanced inventory logic is what is going to give them that sense of security that, yeah, I might be getting a great price here, but it is absolutely going to be delivered on time. 

And then the other thing, too, on this is looking at the locations and the lead times. A lot of our buyers are members within buying groups have multiple locations that they need to do a split shipment to. In many cases, there will be a group purchase that will need to occur. So the group members, the members who are participating in the purchase, will need to do split shipping. 

And so again, this inventory logic is really important because the shipping costs and the lead times are dramatically different depending on where someone is physically. 

RON: Yeah. And I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to show a couple screenshots here real quick because the inventory can be done in a couple of different ways. One, the one I'm going to show on the screen right now, is when there are multiple vendors potentially sourcing the exact same product where you can kind of see them side by side in a grid view. 

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RON: And then if you wanted you could click and add them to a compare engine and compare them side by side to make sure everything's identical. This other view is something that we've added specifically for buying groups and specifically for large purchases like this, and it's called the table view. I think everybody's kind of familiar with the grid list view.

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RON: But we've added this custom table view, where I'm just going to do a quick search here on an Amazon Echo. And you can see here, when I do the search, there's five Echoes and you can see it in the grid. But when I flip to the list view, you can see this very easily in a single row. So if this was five different vendors sourcing the exact same thing I could see very quickly, and I'm just using the Amazon Echo's the example, there are five different sources to get it. There's potentially five different prices and potentially five different prices, stock counts.

And then like Chris just alluded to, is another thing we might want to add to this table for your implementation, is lead time. Because if the lead times are very different, as Chris just said, the fulfillment of that might cause a project to not be able to be done on time. If all sudden, hey, we got a cheaper price at this place, but the lead time was three weeks and we needed it in a week, it messed everything up on the project.

Continue to Part 2 to learn more about advanced inventory logistics.