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Chris Reddick (President and CEO of Clarity) and Ron Halversen (Vice-President of Sales and Marketing at Clarity) continue their discussion about custom lists and specialized pricing for groups.

Part 2 of a 4-part series (Click to return to Part 1)

RON: So let's go ahead, I want to dive into some of the lists, right, Chris? So why don't you take over and especially cover when you get to the bottom of this one? I really want to cover the tracking on a group buying platform, especially when it comes to these international ones that we've done. Where we're tracking the containers, we've got three or four of those types of projects going right now. And what I'll do is, I'll try to bring a couple of screenshots when Chris gets to this part.

CHRIS: Absolutely. Just going back to the pricing for a moment and then diving into lists, one thing that is really powerful is the pricing in the inventory data. And we talk about this a lot. So a lot of folks that are listening, you may already be aware of this and thinking about this, but one of the biggest challenges is the logistics of bringing the data in and integrating that seamlessly. 

That's something that we absolutely want to encourage you to be thinking about. It's not just a matter of what is the capability of your buying group platform and your group purchasing software, but it's also a matter of how are you going to integrate the data. And not just bring it over once, but in real time as needed, continually have that data flowing back and forth between the various systems of the manufacturing group purchasing organizations.

And that can be a huge logistical challenge. So we encourage you to work with a partner like Clarity who has a lot of experience with leveraging an integration platform, being able to help you and guide you and your team along the process of what makes sense, what doesn't make sense. And maybe even based on the phase that you're at with the business, what makes sense at this phase and what should you be planning for? And I think this is great going into a very high level on the pricing list and then diving right on into some of the wish lists and some of that functionality as well.

At a very high level here is, first of all, whenever somebody is working within the application and they are typically busy, there may be a purchaser, they may be some form of manager or leader within the organization that's making the purchase. Maybe it's someone who's opening up multiple new franchise locations, for example. They're going to typically be pretty busy. And one of the biggest challenges for any of these organizations is consistency across all of the different locations or across all of the different people within their organization. And most buying groups end up working with members who are going to span the spectrum. 

what is hipaa

CHRIS: Frankly, the more that we can consistently give them access to best practices, so actually creating lists that are suggestions or templates for them that say we are the buying group. Yeah, almost like a checklist. We're the buying group and we see and we're aggregating this data and removing any private or sensitive data, but we are basically going to give you suggestions based on what's happening in your space and possibly based on the location. 

There may be different kits or templates for making purchases for a [swimming pool repair] buying group, and depending on the location, it might be a lot hotter in one location and a lot more temperate in another, or even maybe it rains more, so we might have different regions that you guys make templates for. 

Maybe it's different industries and specializations. Maybe you make different templates for making group purchases that are like, "hey, if you purchased from this wish list or from this shopping list, it has built-in quantity discounts at your membership level that allow you to capitalize on these recommended discount levels." And so these are just some interesting ideas for how you can take advantage of the knowledge that you have. 

This is something that's really big within the buying groups and group purchasing spaces. A lot of buying groups and group purchasing organizations don't necessarily take advantage of, and really help, deliver the value that they can with their knowledge and with their exposure to this aggregated information within the space. So you want to be thinking about these shared lists as an opportunity to really serve and not just provide a utility but also provide a set of guidance and a mentoring of these purchasers who are members; this can really help them out a lot.

Now, in addition to that, they can also create their own lists, they can create their own sets of items that they need to purchase based on their own internal practices. And then this can even be granularly controlled so that they can share these lists internally, but maybe they restrict what roles have access to them. Maybe within your organization, the buying group platform, you're going to restrict what memberships have access to, so maybe you provide an automatically discounted set of items with the auto-apply discounts. And that's just part of being a member. That's a "silver member" or "gold member."

what is hipaa

CHRIS: Or it could be based on rewards. You know, if you purchase this amount of items every year, this dollar amount or this percentage of your goal, etc., then you get these other resources. So some really cool things that you can do. It's also possible to have third parties build these lists. So a pretty interesting idea would be to work with some of the vendors from the manufacturers, distributors and say, "hey, what are you seeing in this industry?" and provide this as a service to your members. "What are you seeing within this industry that's really happening and changing? And it's going to be a paradigm shift over time here and how can we get this in front of our members to help them become aware of it in advance." And so maybe they put together their own lists and maybe it includes training and resources so that the buying group customers and vendors can get up to speed anyway. You get the point.

The main idea here is that we want to be looking for ways to add a lot of value while still having that utility. So we're still within these lists. We're going to be sharing all of the detail about the pricing the quantity discounts, presenting the inventory like you were talking about, Ron, being able to really get into the weeds. 

Well, one of the other big pieces that a lot of folks don't necessarily think about, is dealing with the logistics and making sure that we're able to consistently present the data that the buyers—the members—need. And this is another facet of these lists. One of the concepts in general that, if you've listened to our webinars before you've heard us talk about this, but it's basically having an alert system set up in the buying group platform, or essentially a capability to set a search criteria within the application and set a notification model. It could be text, email, the inbox within the application. It could be all three, it could be some other form of notification.

Then this will at the frequency desired and as quickly is as the user specifies—immediately within an hour, every week, whatever—it can notify them when something hits their search criteria if inventory becomes available. Well, within buying groups, a lot of what you see is there are different group purchases that are occurring and members need to participate in order to meet the quantity discount break.

what is hipaa

This is really challenging from a logistics perspective for some organizations, because they may have to fill a container in order to get the bulk discount that they're getting as a purchasing group. And the different members need to be able to do the split-payment and the split-shipment on that container that gets filled up in. It's represented to the manufacturer or the distributor as a complete order, a single, complete order. 

But for every one of the members, it's getting distributed individually. So we're going to have intermodal shipments potentially. We're going to have all the associated tracking, being able to see what the shipping costs are, customs and duties, taxes, etc. All of this is capability logistically and integration wise within the different ERPs and the different line of business applications that we specialize in. And this is the nuts and bolts of making all of this self-service work.

Ron, I would be curious to hear your thoughts on this as well. To me, those are some of the really key aspects whenever we're looking at taking advantage of these bulk purchases. There are a lot of logistics and being able to present that consistently to the user on the group purchasing platform that's really a necessity to make this work oh yeah. 

RON: Yeah, we've got quite a few different clients we've worked with, and I'll try to throw out some generic options here. So we've got one client that, one of their biggest customers is Home Depot. And so when Home Depot orders, you might have the West Coast Purchasing Manager buying all the nuts and bolts from our client whose factory is in Taiwan, and they know it costs $1500 per container to ship a container across from Taiwan. 

So they need to be able to go onto the buying group platform and order literally millions of nuts and bolts and combinations of that in a single sitting and they need to be able to do it rapidly and quickly and almost monthly. So the ability to recreate these lists and have things that they can commonly go in very quickly and just go, "I just need to reorder. All I need to do this is my complete list. It's already built out. I just need to change a couple of quantities. Add to cart I'm done. But as I'm adding to the cart because the quantities are changing every month, I need a tracker, I've got two or three different clients."

what is hipaa

We're literally building out right now as we speak that up above at the top here, you can see in the header where it's got the container, it's got the load, and it's literally tracking in real time as the purchasing agent is adding things to the cart. It's telling them how full that cart is. 

So what Chris was talking about was the buying group purchasing, and we've done—I won't name their name, but there's a big county out in eastern U.S.—and they've got a lot of townships. And we designed and built their marketplace for them. And this is a marketplace where one town might have been able to afford a snowplow, none of the other towns around can. So not only do they use the snowplow when it snows, but they want to be able to put it up on the marketplace and allow other townships to come in and bid a price and potentially rent and schedule their snowplow with salting capabilities.

The township that owns the snowplow knows that if they buy salt 1,000 pounds at a time, that they can get a discount, they might come in and go, "for all of those of you planning on potentially renting our truck this year, we're going to go out and buy salt next month in preparation. In order to get a discount, we need to do up to 1,000 pounds, everybody put in and tally your orders in."

And so each township could go onto the group purchasing platform and go, "Hey, I'm in for 200 pounds, and they can go in—and this is the one Chris was just talking about where, for Chris Town—Chris could go in and put 200 pounds, put his credit card in or his account number, and it adds it to the order and tallies it at 200 pounds, and then it still holds the order. And then I might come in for Ron Town and I go ahead and put in—my is a little smaller—so I put in 100 pounds, and so as soon as it hits 1,000 pounds then it notifies the town that owns the truck and they can go and actually place the order and get the discount.

So there's the buying power of group purchasing, which is what Chris was talking about, and then mine is when you're doing bulk purchasing and you're going to order a 1000 units, but if I knew if I ordered just another 500 units I'd get free shipping, or I could order up to another 500 and fitted on that container—which isn't going to cost me shipping next month and I have warehouse room to store those 500—that would be nice to know because I might go ahead and buy those extra 500 now that I filled the container, it's a flat rate of $100 to ship that container across. So I got free shipping on 500 units all the way from Taiwan. That's a big deal, right?

So that's part of what some of these screenshots I've shown here are is, as they're filling these containers and they're shipping—especially intermodal and internationally, and shipping costs can get very high—they need to be able to track and figure out exactly where they are as they're adding orders to their containers and their crates and things like that.

 

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Continue to Part 3 to learn about intergration opportunities.

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