1. What Are Staged Deliveries?
The method of intelligently planning for a sequence of in-time supply deliveries, meeting supply consumption needs while taking advantage of market conditions and timing to reduce the total supply cost. It typically involves breaking a single delivery shipment into multiple smaller shipments that arrive in different times to the destination.
2. How Staged PPE Deliveries Saved Procurement Cost for a Business
Recently, GreenPPE implemented a staged PPE delivery schedule for a business service provider in the US. Among the consumables, their staff uses 1,000 boxes of vinyl gloves each month. The provider needed a 12-month supply of 12,000 boxes.
At the time the provider engaged with PPE, they had two weeks’ glove supply. GreenPPE was able to source from a reputable supplier partner who was capable of fulfilling the provider’s demand with a short production lead time. GreenPPE negotiated down the price for the provider and could have arranged to have the entire shipment of 12,000 boxes to be shipped to their warehouse within 2 weeks.
2.1. Buyer’s Constraints
This procurement comes to GreenPPE with these hard constraints:
- Must receive a minimum of 1,000 boxes before the end of 2nd week
- Must supply at least 1,000 boxes in each week after
2.2. Single-Shipment Delivery
A straightforward single-shipment schedule could look like this:
Figure 1. Single-Shipment PPE Delivery Plan (click to view in full size)
While meeting all hard demand constraints, this single-shipment delivery plain is quite costly in that
- There are lower-priced offers from more suppliers if they can come later.
- Express shipping is always expensive than regular shipping.
- It creates an “overstock” situation in the provider’s warehouse when this shipment arrives
In addition, GreenPPE’s big-data demand-supply matching engine also predicts that the glove price is likely to go lower in the near future.
2.3. Staged Multi-Shipment Delivery
By collecting and analyzing all the product, shipping, market intelligence, the GreenPPE system came up with STAGED PPE DELIVERY PLAN as follows:
Figure 2. Staged Multi-Shipment PPE Delivery Plan (click to view in full size)
When compared with the single-shipment delivery plan in Figure 1, our new staged deliver plan breaks the delivery of the total 12,000 boxes into three separate shipments (therefore STAGED):
- S1: The same express shipment as shown in Figure 1, except we only need to deliver 2,000 boxes. They will arrive within 2 weeks and supply enough gloves for the next 2 months.
- S2: At the same time of scheduling the express shipment S1, our system also co-schedule a regular shipment for 5,000 boxes that will arrive during the 3rd month before the supply from the first shipment S1 runs out.
- S3: GreenPPE also secured a third shipment for the rest of 5,000 boxes with the lowest pricing by ordering this batch at a later date with a lower-cost shipping method.
2.4. Supply Procurement Cost Reduction
As can be seen in Figure 2, our staged multi-shipping delivery plan meets all hard supply constraints while lowering the supply producer cost by 25% for the buyer.
It has to be noted that GreenPPE pricing is door-to-door all-inclusive, from supplier to the buyer. On behalf of the buyer, we take care of product sourcing, quality examination, pricing negotiation, shipping & logistics, and final delivery.
All supplies delivered by GreenPPE comes with unconditional quality assurance and guarantee, backed with a full refund.
A side benefit for utilizing a staged in-time on-demand delivery plan: we also reduced the buyer’s warehouse storage cost.
About GreenPPE
GreenPPE https://greenppe.com is a global PPE demand-supply matching platform and marketplace, where we pool buyers’ demands together and match them to the production and shipping schedules of our vetted suppliers. Our team qualifies our suppliers by all regulatory and production standards in each market we are in. We utilize the product, shipping, market intelligence to generate sustained purchase and shipping plans for our buyers, with lowered total procurement cost. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we have helped health institutions, businesses large and small, government agencies at federal, state and local levels, as well as colleges and schools, to acquire quality PPE supplies at the lowest possible cost with on-time deliveries.
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