Introduction to Cable Gland and Functions of Cable Gland

A cable gland is a device intended to join and tie down the finish of an electrical cable to the electrical equipment. A cable gland is defined as a “mechanical cable entry device” which is used to link the wiring for electrical, instrumentation and control, automation structure including lightning, power, and telecoms.

A cable gland is utilized as a sealing and termination device to guarantee the characteristics of the enclosure in which the cable enters can be maintained properly. Cable glands are made up of different plastics, aluminum, brass, or steel.

Cable glands are generally known as “connectors”, which distinguishes them from quick-disconnect, conducting electrical connectors.

Functions of a Cable Gland: 

The very main function of a cable gland is to act as sealing and terminating to ensure protection to the electrical equipment and keep the electrical cable intact. Apart from this, other functions are as follows:
  

>> Environmental Protection: Cable glands give protection against water and dust through its seal on the outer covering of the cable, eliminates/block the moisture on the electrical equipment or enclosure.

>> Holding Capacity: Cable glands provide support to the electrical cable from getting pulled out.

>> Extra Sealing: It provides additional seal protection at the cable enclosure when a high level of protection is required. 

>> Good Earth Continuity: Earth continuity can be provided for armoured cables in case the cable gland has a metallic construction characteristic.

Cable glands must adjust as per the environment the cable is in. If the cable is in a hazardous environment, the cable gland must be powerful and rigid. In a nutshell, the more important an electrical cable is, the more protection a cable gland should provide.

How e-Commerce is changing material procurement for SME’s

Whether a business is large or small, all of them have their own set of challenges. But small medium-size enterprises (SME’s) have their own distinctive barriers that must be overcome. So as to remain aggressive, organizations persistently investigate more channels that will help to overcome the challenges and build a strategic advantage.  

The challenges faced by SME’s in the procurement process:

1. Access to limited vendors: SME’s generally have access to the limited vendors only. Here, SME’s have very limited access to innovative products as well as raw materials.
2. Quality issues: One of the key explanations behind the low quality of the finished products is the low quality of raw material. This is the reason why SME’s find it difficult to compete in international markets.
3. Challenge in economies of scale: Indian SME’s feel difficulty to achieve economies of scale as work with smaller vendors who can’t consistently supply a large amount of material.
4. Challenges in the payment system: SME’s often have working capital related difficulties. SMEs will confront difficulties working with local as well as unorganized vendors who are not prepared to move into the new digital transaction system.

The difference observed with eCommerce:

B2B eCommerce will help to overcome the challenges of SMES’s procurement process in the following ways:

>> With b2b e-commerce platforms, SME’s will have multiple options to procure materials from different vendors. This will open a wide range of possibilities for the SME organization.

>> By implementing just in time procurement strategies will help the SMEs to make most of their working capital. Ecommerce also helps in cutting down on raw materials hence reducing the warehouse costs.

>> By sourcing from the b2b platform, SME’s can procure better quality materials and that too with discounted rates.

>> B2B platforms like helioscart will help SME’s to float quotations to “n” number of vendors across any geography.

Building an Efficient Procurement Process for Real Estate

Real estate procurement is one of the key factors in delivering decent, tough, steady, sellable, and profitable real estate projects. The real estate industry’s procurement has come with unlimited alternatives, various customizations, and the changing trade & business laws have placed the experts in the field under huge worry to settle on the correct choices, brisk choices consistently.

Knowledge of the dynamic market: The real estate market is highly evolving. Everything from regularity to full-scale macro-economic conditions, all influence the real estate procurement decisions. Therefore, this requires a procurement proficient who knows about the entire real estate market and accordingly equipped with the forecasts and trends.
Business Networking: A decent list of business contacts is the way to fruitful business management. The database is not only of peer business contacts but also relates to the professional of the real estate industry i.e. architects, engineers, designers, etc. It's great to relook into your business network on occasion and have a go at being in contact with all who are essential to you all the time.
Effective Communication: Successful and effective communication results from knowing the individuals you meet or manage them well ahead of time. A decent comprehension of what they do, the materials they give or the tasks that they take a shot at, their estimating structure, level of customization and adaptability, their experience and aptitude and a lot of such data gathered in front of your communication with them helps you settle on informed decisions.
Innovation: Innovation provides a strong competitive advantage for real estate procurement as it is reinforced by the selectiveness of the items utilized for the delivery of procured materials. Innovation creates value for the project.
Exposure via business events: Business events will give the right exposure to working. These events are a great platform to showcase your best self and best about your organization to gather the interest of associates you are keen on.

5 Advantages of Digital Procurement Technology

Procurement is simply the management of purchasing the materials involved with the outside merchants. It searches for approaches to verify items at the least cost. It ensures procured items make it securely to the premises. It tallies the money.  

It is not so surprising that something has digital, whether it is for a B2C market or a B2B market. And digital procurement is no different as the advanced analytics and data-driven optimization is leading to better insights, allowing for increased value-chain between all the stakeholders. 

Without a committed department for procuring the materials, activities would slow down. The question here is: what makes digital procurement so different?  The e-procurement benefits are getting progressively obvious as the more extensive comprehension of its numerous utilizations becomes evident.

• Cost Reduction: Expenses can be decreased by utilizing volume, having organized provider connections and by utilizing framework upgrades to diminish outside spend while improving quality and supplier performance. E-procurement takes out desk work, revise and blunders.
• Productivity: The internal employees can get the materials they need through an online purchase requisition and order arrangement. Even the procurement staff can be discharged from preparing requests and dealing with low worth exchanges to focus on key sourcing and improving provider connections.
• Visibility on Spends: Streamlined tracking of transactions ensures the full track of purchase requisitions reports, purchase orders, and the payments that are made.
• Better decision making: The visibility highlights give real-time actionable insight into the procurement process. This helps in taking better decisions and design potential ways to take the possible gains.
• Removing Tedious tasks: Procurement frameworks can mechanize a significant number of the tiresome procedures workers need to trudge through consistently.

E-procurement preferences must be completely acknowledged when the frameworks and procedures to oversee it are well set up. Software tools are needed to create procurement documentation of electronic requests for information (e-RFI), requests for proposal (e-RFP) and requests for quotation (e-RFQ).  

5 Components of Procurement-as-a-Service

Procurement has become a large part of all the total revenues. But, the selection of technological drivers in the procurement procedures has not driven the expected efficiencies which it has in other areas. The procurement technology and any corresponding procurement procedure have become very complex due to the imbalance of innovations in technology and speed. 

The simplest and most straightforward strategy is to adapt to the scenario of “..as a service”. This helps to embrace and treat the procurement function as a platform that integrates the procurement process through a mix of cloud-based technologies, procedures, and services. 

The procurement-as-a-service approach could tackle the procurement procedure problem by decreasing complexities and receiving basic and reliable processes.

Components of Procurement-as-a-Service:

>> Vendor Management & E-sourcing: Vendor Management in procurement-as-a-service helps to understand the current supplier base. Managing the vendor information and keeping the record up-to-date prompts smart sourcing, helps to decrease purchase-to-pay transactions inaccuracy. It also brings growth in productivity using e-sourcing tools.

>> Contract Lifecycle Management: With a state-of-the-art contract lifecycle management application, you can utilize digital practice for different types of contracts to make standards, while additionally streamlining the negotiation procedure.

>> Spend Analytics: Spend analytics is achieved by gathering information from various sources, and after performing a thorough data quality checks, these data pieces helps to drive decision making.

>> Cost and Performance Review: Data science technology helps to perform a cost, risk, and performance review on your spend. Vendor risks are categorized on the basis of the nature of risk, vendors in unstable geographical areas, etc. Authorizing the data of vendors selectively while creating a purchase order helps in handling data for decision-making.
 

>> Reporting dashboards: The cloud-based PaaS approach gives the staff an opportunity to identify any further procurement innovation via reporting dashboards and visualization tools.

PaaS approach tackles the inefficiencies by merging with the cloud-based technology to manage the vendors, costs, risks, performance, enable e-sourcing, deal with the contract lifecycle management, and review with spend analytics

The 9 Steps in an Effective Procurement Process

The 9 steps in an effective procurement process will assist the organization in a precise way. In this way, the chances of error are eliminated and the visibility and coordination are maintained between all the partners in the procurement process. An organization may utilize these focuses as comprehensive rules while characterizing their procurement processes.

• Identification of procurement needs: The primary phase in the procurement process is to identify the procurement needs. The procurement needs can be easily identified by the end-users as and when required. A purchase requisition form is required to raise the procurement needs. It is also known as purchase intent. The purchase indent should have all the details of the materials to be procured.
• Review of purchase requisition: Before initiating the procurement of materials, the purchase requisition must be should be approved by all the concerned departments, head, budget approving authority, etc.
• Selecting the right vendor: The selection of appropriate sourcing of a vendor is a vital factor in the procurement process. Having proper data of the qualified vendors, their business information, etc. will ensure that the right vendor is contacted for procuring the materials.
• Requesting for Quotation: The procurement team sends a request or inquiry to submit the item quotation. This document includes details about the material, its description, quantity, unit, requirement date, etc.
• Evaluation of quotation: From the “n” number of vendors to whom quotation has been sent, the best price is chosen from the number of alternatives. Evaluation of vendors is done on various parameters like- transportation charges, freight costs, delivery terms, etc.
• Purchase Order: The purchase order is the formal documentation that is used by the organization for confirming the vendor. A typical purchase order contains the required materials, pricing, quantity, terms, and conditions.
  
• Receipt of Materials: After getting the items, the buying organization must seek a receipt of materials that contains all details of the items, pricing, and quantity. The inspection shall be carried out of the inventory. If any defect is seen, immediately it should be notified to the supplier company.
  
• Invoices and Payments: The invoice is processed by a three-way matching process. In this, the invoice is checked against the purchase order for the rates, terms, and conditions.
• Maintaining Records: For an organization, keeping and maintaining procurement records is very important. The procurement record involves many transactions such as purchase requisition, RFQ’s, quotations, comparative statements, and its approval, purchase order, goods receipt notes, payments, and invoices.

The procurement procedure includes a series of activities that take place to make sure the necessary materials are accessible at the right time, right place, and in the right amount. Procurement is a key business function which impacts the tasks, store network, quality, cost and benefits of most business association. Consequently, it is significant to have a successful and powerful procurement process. 

8 Steps to Successful e-Procurement Process

Electronic procurement or simply e-procurement refers to the acquisition of products or services on the web. e-Procurement helps in saving the time, efforts and various procurement cost as it turns the manual procurement to the automated procurement process. 

Here are the 8 steps for implementing a successful e-Procurement process: 

e-Procurement

• Define the business objective: Any organization that is operating its business must identify its objectives that they want to achieve from an e-procurement solution. A clear and well-defined business objective ensures the successful planning of strategy.
• Analyze the current procurement process: By reviewing the current procurement process of the organization, one can easily identify the major gaps in the procurement process and can specify the areas of improvement.
• Preparing a revised procurement strategy: At the point when the organization composes the updated procurement methodology, they should keep in mind that the acquisition procedure merely includes a joint effort of people within and outside the business. Hence, an organization should consider internal and external factors, technology, etc. while developing a realistic strategy for e-procurement.
• Do ensure support from management: If the management supports the implementation of e-procurement, it will get the essential attention, active participation of all the stakeholders, and the required number of resources.
• Measure success by KPIs: Against each objective of e-procurement implementation, a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) should be developed. A good KPI provides real-time status of each objective.
• Review the optimal e-procurement solution: After all the processes, the next step is to evaluate and review the e-procurement solution vendors and select the best alternative that meets the requirement of your organization.
• Execution of e-Procurement solution: After selection of best e-procurement solution vendor, it is time to set a well-thought project plan that is done along with the vendor to ensure the success of the implementation of an e-procurement solution.
• Measurement of e-procurement success: Post-implementation, the last step is to measure the success and check how the objectives are met.

To ensure e-Procurement achievement, you ought to have clear business objectives, defined processes, adequate assets, and reasonable desires. You should choose the correct e-procurement method, appropriate usage plan, execution of preparing system and post-execution exercises.

6 Reasons to have a B2B eCommerce Portal for Businesses

Finding the right eCommerce platform that works for your business can be difficult and a challenging task. If found, a dedicated B2B eCommerce portal can be the best fit for your organization and easy to go with. The six reasons to have a b2b eCommerce portal for any business is: 

>> Customization of product: An online b2b portal is a platform that gives your b2b buyers a personalized and customized view on your product inventory, purchase requests, and other marketing information.

>> Convenient Payments: Through b2b portals, one can easily make new orders, keep track of the current purchases, and make the payments as per their convenience.

>> Managing Client Relationship: It enables you to manage your relationships with various clients, merchants, and accomplices from a single most platform. It can also offer help for complex items set up and provide a full list of products as well as services.

>> Manage orders as per convenience: It is a gateway that empowers your clients to deal with their own records and spot orders, set purchase limits and spending plans.

>> Explore and connect with new businesses: With b2b portals, you can easily manage the product catalogs, explore new business opportunities, make quick and easy order processing decisions that include bulk orders, order renewals, and omnichannel fulfillment. It also allows manufacturers and vendors to connect with the best industrial buyers.

>> Reduce errors in orders: Web-based ordering improves your activity by taking out human order errors. Order errors, often, cost organizations endless long hours of work and stress. With the b2b eCommerce portal, buyers can simply make their orders, anywhere, anytime. Rather than simply taking requests, your business sales team can concentrate on upselling and advancing new items.

Maintaining a business isn't simple. A B2B marketplace will spare your time by giving an extra channel to your clients other than email and telephone calls. Besides, your customers can track requests and shipment statuses themselves, which sales team and your deals and customer care group from long stretches of work reacting to messages and telephone calls.