Purchasing

Abstract

The focus for this book is on operative procurement and not on strategic procurement. Strategic procurement selects the suppliers and negotiates the conditions and quantities. As a result a contract or a scheduling agreement might arise, and often there are costs of scale to be calculated. Operative procurement on the other hand is usually carried out by the planner and allows to choose between alternative suppliers.

Since sometimes components do have a long lead time, their procurement has to be triggered quite early. Another question is triggering procurement based on a feasible plan to save storage costs or to have the components early enough in place, if the production must take place in advance.