"We need to expand our product portfolio and our product margins and we're going to do it through global sourcing!"

How quickly can the CIO align current systems to do this? Currently, buyers are juggling, on average, eight systems to complete an order. Is there a solution available solution that users, IT and vendors can get behind?

The answer is TradeStone’s Merchandise Lifecycle Management suit. By layering TradeStone’s Merchandise Lifecycle Management suite over the existing IT investments, organizations can maintain the integrity of data repositories and existing integrations. The key, however, is the benefit to end users: now with one view of the entire transaction, users don't have to toggle between five or six systems, referring to a dozen spreadsheets, or manually re-entering data from one system to the other.

This layering capability also allows TradeStone to fill in any functional gaps. These gaps develop as businesses move the majority of their sourcing activities from domestic buys to international buys. An example of one functional gap is accurate costing. TradeStone has developed costing models to not only compare per-piece-price, but also take country of origin costs into account, as well as freight, agent commissions, broker commissions, handling fees, and customs duty. More advanced costing models will also compare repacking costs, marking, tagging, VAT, royalties, terminal handling charges and document handling charges. These features just didn't exist in procurement or sourcing packages before and created a bifurcated system - one workflow to handle domestic buys, and one cumbersome and clunky system to handle international buys.

With TradeStone, buyers and manufacturers quickly create Request for Quotes (RFQs) and put those quotes out for bid to numerous vendors worldwide. By normalizing disparate currencies, languages and lead times, and automatically calculating the estimated landed costs for goods, TradeStone enables product managers and buyers to easily and accurately compare offers from different suppliers, no matter their location. These robust Estimated Landed Cost calculations offer better comparison mechanisms for buyers and merchants concerned with product margin goals.