Bridging Gaps and Delivering Solutions Beyond Excellent Ingredients

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In the world of corporate dynamics, ensuring personalized attention and efficient services can be a daunting task, especially when your business practices diverge from your suppliers. Sometimes, your corporate needs simply don’t align with the conventional practices of certain ingredient manufacturers.

Direct procurement can present insurmountable hurdles, even among the most distinguished and successful organizations. You crave swift solutions, but accessing their experts requires precious time you can’t spare. You require products on-site tomorrow, yet their nearest warehouse is in another state. These challenges are shared pains for both ingredient manufacturers and the food processors they serve.

Skidmore Sales customer, encountered unexpected obstacles when dealing directly with ingredient manufacturers. Turning to us for assistance, they sought relief from the mounting friction. While they procured many ingredients from us, some critical high-use ingredients were obtained directly from a leading ingredient manufacturer. These ingredients formed the backbone of our customer’s product line.

Despite their long history of direct purchases, our customer’s procurement team had expanded rapidly, leaving many team members without established relationships within the growing manufacturer’s organization. Connecting with representatives who could effectively address their inquiries and concerns proved to be a formidable challenge. Additional issues arose around the fact that supplier’s warehouses were not within a one-day transit of the customer’s facilities.

The supplier was unable to react quickly to demand changes. The challenges were beginning to cause damage to the relationship. Nevertheless, the quality of the ingredients remained unparalleled, and our customer was unwilling to compromise on that front.

Skidmore boasted a well-established, long-standing relationship with the ingredient manufacturer. Years of collaboration in our industry had cultivated the rapport needed to bridge the communication gap. Additionally, our considerable buying power enabled us to address several other pain points experienced by both our customer and the ingredient manufacturer,

The Skidmore customer care team embarked on an in-depth analysis to identify areas where we could simplify processes for both parties. Our team devised an initial plan to supply a select few ingredients that had been causing the most friction. To foster a more collaborative relationship between the two entities, Skidmore initiated regular meetings focused on timelines and logistics. With warehouses conveniently situated near the customer’s facilities, the customer could use us as a “buffer tank,” to hold floor stock of the customer’s ingredients until they need them. From there, we formulated logistics plans that streamlined orders, adhered to schedules, and ensured the uninterrupted flow of our customer’s operations.

The plan yielded resounding success. Our customer began receiving high-quality ingredients promptly via a single point of contact, along with the essential information to plan for their future. Simultaneously, our supplier maintained its sterling reputation and continued supplying ingredients to our customer.

As the months rolled by, our customer and supplier not only realized the benefits of entrusting Skidmore with procurement and warehousing of these ingredients, but they also mutually agreed that extending this arrangement to the remaining products on the ingredient list made sense. Collaborating with Skidmore Sales enabled each company to navigate the complexities of the supply chain with greater efficiency, fostering the productive collaboration they both desired. This allowed them to refocus on their core objectives: growing their businesses.