Sourcing product lies at the heart of a retail business. It involves coordinating product specifications, managing supplier information, RFQs, order management and many other documents such as certificates, customs documents or compliance information.

Suppliers might be down the road or across the other side of the world and so it is easy to see how mistakes or misunderstandings occur when you measure the sheer amount of information and documents involved and the processes and status changes these go through. Supplier management and document collaboration can be made increasingly more difficult by the sheer amount of emails received during the process.

4Sourcing helps you to manage documents and allows the users to focus on the value added activities around product selection and price negotiations. The system includes alerts and workflow to ensure consistency and to allow users to manage by exception.

4Sourcing helps retailers manage their critical path and as a result get improved control of their sourcing processes. This can in turn mean that a retailer can accelerate its design to delivery cycles and reduce its administrative costs as well as the cost of errors.