It was the fall of 2001, in Ft Wayne, Indiana as the executive team of Wabash Technologies gathered for dinner after a day long board meeting. The chairman and owner Mr. Dyson, was discussing his portfolio of over 30 companies in the US. The discussion focused on “strategic” purchasing and collaborative supplier relationships.
From that discussion, we launched our internal Buying Consortium, pooling the spend on common commodity groups like Transportation, Office Supplies, and IT Equipment.
The executive team at Wabash created the idea of starting a purchasing consortium also known as IPC within the trailer manufacturing industry, which was led by Sourcing Insights Co-Founder Steve Miller. This need was created due to the current state of the economy in 2008, and a majority of the trailer manufactures were struggling with the downturn.
The top trailer manufacturers in the U.S then decided to partner. This created the ability to buy together as a group and focus on their raw materials such as tires, lights, aluminum, and steel.
The missing piece to the puzzle was data. By aggregating the spend of all the organizations, it captured the ability to understand each organization and the similarities between the spend and begin identifying strategic sourcing opportunities.
Initially, everyone agreed not to build products that were competitive with one another. This was thought at as a stand-alone model. Surprisingly, this was wildly successful. What the team at Wabash learned is that in some instances smaller companies were buying better than the large companies and vice versa. By being able to learn and leverage these skills created an advantage in the industry.
Having the data and visibility into each organization’s spend was such a powerful tool. Before, this information was guarded. With the opportunity to aggregate data, it created the ability to showcase where the opportunity exists.
This is one of the main reasons why Wabash survived during the economic collapse in 2008 and allowed them to become a leader in the industry. This was all made possible with Karl Anderson, Sourcing Insights Co-Founder, and his ability to create a proprietary platform and algorithm that could capture spend aggregation and visibility.
Check back next Thursday as we continue our story on how Sourcing Insights came to be! Do you have any questions for our founders? Leave them below and we will be sure to answer them next week on our LinkedIn page!
