MRO Strategic Sourcing & Category Management 

The MRO spend category encompasses a multitude of products, services, and suppliers that are crucial to your day-to-day operations. 

With a large, decentralized user base and millions of items and transactions, the MRO spend category has a high opportunity for cost savings – through Corcentric’s MRO strategic sourcing expertise and process. 

Maintenance, Repair and Operations (MRO) is often a loosely defined indirect spend category – containing everything from off the shelf nuts and bolts to specialized engineering services. Organizations tend to use the MRO category as a dumping ground for numerous subcategories, often categorized by a fragmented supply base and high amount of tail spend. Buyers argue that they are forced to make “spot buys” daily and many MRO-type purchases are done on an “as needed” basis.  The result? MRO is treated as a tactical spend category despite its critical importance. This problem is compounded by the sheer number of MRO buyers, the lack of communication between MRO buyers and facilities, and poor MRO spend data management due to the utilization of different systems across facilities. 

Corcentric’s MRO Category Management experts can help your Procurement and Sourcing teams overcome these factors.  Where Procurement teams responsible for MRO struggle to gain control over fluctuating costs, product non-standardization, and site-level compliance, Corcentric can help.  Our MRO category management services provide your organization with the strategic sourcing resources and expertise needed to help reduce costs through increased spend visibility, market intelligence, compliance tracking, and supplier optimization. 

Besides driving competitive MRO pricing, Corcentric’s category managers work with you to: 

• Provide expert MRO spend data cleansing and normalization to help you easily manage millions of SKUs and itemize current price points across all facilities 

• Gain control over your demand planning and inventory management through industry best practices like vendor managed inventory (VMI), inventory consignment, industrial vending, and order point optimization 

• Take advantage of economies of scale through MRO supplier consolidation and the establishment of a preferred MRO supplier base 

• Set up national account managers and local facility representation with MRO suppliers in order to obtain increased service levels and support 

• Streamline centralized billing processes to cut down on administrative costs 

• Drive compliance through proper end-user education within your organization 

• Ensure compliance and pricing through continuous monthly auditing services, post-implementation 

Through a comprehensive data collection and normalization process, Corcentric’s MRO procurement service team helps you gain a thorough understanding of your current MRO requirements from both a qualitative and quantitative standpoint. Not only does this provide more visibility into your MRO spend, but it provides a cleansed, line item-level detail data set for you to quickly understand and evaluate savings opportunities present within the spend. By leveraging our extensive internal database, MRO category expertise, and knowledge of the MRO market, Corcentric’s strategic sourcing resources can quickly benchmark your current costs and help develop move-forward plans to optimize your MRO supply chain. 

Corcentric’s MRO strategic sourcing team works with you to evaluate and optimize your current MRO supply chain, providing clear strategies that will efficiently drive cost reductions, increase service levels, and drive compliance. Contact our MRO Category Experts today.