Beacon, which helps businesses in the hospitality, leisure and healthcare sectors improve their profitability, has found that issues such as trying to find the right supplier and having a lack of time to review their suppliers are affecting more than 80% of businesses’ purchasing strategies, and bottom lines.
According to the new research, conducted by Beacon, 28% of business owners find that they have a lack of time for supplier reviews and price re-negotiations, leaving them unhappy with the cost of products and services, but with no easy way to improve the situation.
16% of those asked are frustrated by the poor quality of suppliers and 15% think they use too many suppliers, which has a knock on effect on the amount of time spent on administration and paperwork.
The research also revealed that 21% of business owners find that searching for and eventually finding the right supplier is a real issue within their business, an initial hurdle which is hard to overcome, taking up valuable time and resource.
“We conducted this research to find out more about how businesses outside of our customer-base purchase from suppliers, and specifically what issues they face day-to-day,” says Paul Connelly, director of operations at Beacon. “These results show that many businesses are facing issues when working directly with suppliers, and not primarily due to poor service, but mainly down to a lack of time to invest in managing and maintaining a successful procurement strategy.
“We work closely with more than 2000 businesses in the hospitality, leisure and healthcare sector to manage their purchasing strategies, taking the onus away from the business owner, and allowing us to utilise our expertise to ensure working relationships with suppliers are successful.
“We work with a large number of pre-qualified suppliers, which offers choice to our customers if problems should occur, whilst our rigorous application process ensures that customers are confident in the negotiated commercial terms and service agreements in place – something that business owners find time consuming and difficult.”
