A request for proposal (RFP) is a document that solicits a proposal, often made through a bidding process, by an agency or company interested in procurement of a commodity, service, or valuable asset, to potential suppliers to submit business proposals.
Disintermediation is the removal of intermediaries in economics from a supply chain, or "cutting out the middlemen" in connection with a transaction or a series of transactions. Instead of going through traditional distribution channels, which had some type of intermediary, companies may now deal with customers directly, for example via the Internet.
In the United States, a group purchasing organization (GPO) is an entity that is created to leverage the purchasing power of a group of businesses to obtain discounts from vendors based on the collective buying power of the GPO members.
QAD Inc. is a software company that provides enterprise resource planning (ERP) software and related enterprise software to manufacturing companies. The company has customers in over 100 countries around the world.
Strategic sourcing is the process of developing channels of supply at the lowest total cost, not just the lowest purchase price. It expands upon traditional organisational purchasing activities to embrace all activities within the procurement cycle, from specification to receipt, payment for goods and services to sourcing production lines where the labor market would increase firms' ROI. Strategic sourcing processes aim for continuous improvement and re-evaluation of the purchasing activities of an organisation.
A contract manufacturer (CM) is a manufacturer that contracts with a firm for components or products. It is a form of outsourcing. A contract manufacturer performing packaging operations is called copacker or a contract packager. Brand name companies focus on product innovation, design and sales, while the manufacturing takes place in independent factories.
Etsy, Inc. is an American e-commerce company focused on handmade or vintage items and craft supplies. These items fall under a wide range of categories, including jewelry, bags, clothing, home décor and furniture, toys, art, as well as craft supplies and tools. Items described as vintage must be at least 20 years old. The site follows in the tradition of open craft fairs, giving sellers personal storefronts where they list their goods for a fee of US$0.20 per item. Beginning in 2013, Etsy allowed sellers to sell mass-manufactured items.
Job production, sometimes called jobbing or one-off production, involves producing custom work, such as a one-off product for a specific customer or a small batch of work in quantities usually less than those of mass-market products. Job production consists of an operator or group of operators to work on a single job and complete it before proceeding to the next similar or different job. Together with batch production and mass production it is one of the three main production methods.
Integrated Micro-electronics, Inc. provides electronics manufacturing services (EMS) and power semiconductor assembly and test services (SATS) with manufacturing facilities in Asia, Europe, and North America. Its headquarters is located in Biñan, Laguna.
An online marketplace is a type of e-commerce website where product or service information is provided by multiple third parties. Online marketplaces are the primary type of multichannel ecommerce and can be a way to streamline the production process.
Molten Corporation is a sports equipment and automotive parts company based in Hiroshima, Japan.
A vendor management system (VMS) is an Internet-enabled, often Web-based application that acts as a mechanism for business to manage and procure staffing services – temporary, and, in some cases, permanent placement services – as well as outside contract or contingent labor. Typical features of a VMS application include order distribution, consolidated billing and significant enhancements in reporting capability that outperforms manual systems and processes.
In a supply chain, a vendor, supplier, provider or a seller, is an enterprise that contributes goods or services. Generally, a supply chain vendor manufactures inventory/stock items and sells them to the next link in the chain. Today, these terms refer to a supplier of any goods or service.
Global Sources is a Hong Kong-based business-to-business (B2B) multichannel media company that serves buyers and suppliers online and offline since 1971. Its core business facilitates trade between suppliers and buyers, through trade shows, online marketplaces, the management magazine Chief Executive China, apps and other virtual products.
A contract manufacturing organization (CMO), more recently referred to as a contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) to avoid the acronym confusion of Chief Medical Officer or Clinical Monitoring Organization in the pharma industry, is a company that serves other companies in the pharmaceutical industry on a contract basis to provide comprehensive services from drug development through drug manufacturing. This allows major pharmaceutical companies to outsource those aspects of the business, which can help with scalability or can allow the major company to focus on drug discovery and drug marketing instead.
PrestaShop is a freemium, open source e-commerce platform. The software is published under the Open Software License (OSL). It is written in the PHP programming language with support for the MySQL database management system. It has a software dependency on the Symfony PHP framework.
FedBid, Inc. is now known as Unison Marketplace Inc. Unison Marketplace is a privately held company based in Vienna, Virginia, that operates a full-service online marketplace designed to optimize how federal, state and local governments, and educational institutions purchase simple goods and services such as IT products, office supplies and lab equipment, through a reverse auction-based platform.
A reverse auction is a type of auction in which the traditional roles of buyer and seller are reversed. Thus, there is one buyer and many potential sellers. In an ordinary auction also known as a forward auction, buyers compete to obtain goods or services by offering increasingly higher prices. In contrast, in a reverse auction, the sellers compete to obtain business from the buyer and prices will typically decrease as the sellers underbid each other.
Cleveland CycleWerks is a privately held motorcycle manufacturer that designs and assembles small displacement retro style café racers and bobbers at its headquarters in Cleveland, Ohio, relying on offshore manufacturing in China by CPI Motor Company of Taiwan for most components, including frames and the Honda-derived engine used on all models.
A 3D printing marketplace is a website where users buy, sell and freely share digital 3D printable files for use on 3D printers. They sometimes also offer the ability to print the models and ship them to customers.
