Procurement Analytics

2022 · Python, Snowflake, Google Sheets

Problem

Picnic initially bought all products via a joint supplier agreement through a buying cooperative. When they left and started negotiating directly with suppliers, they had no baseline — no visibility into what margins looked like under the old contract, and no system to track how prices and margins evolved over time as the direct relationships matured.

The need: margin insights on historical contract prices, and ongoing tracking of competitor selling prices to benchmark negotiations.

Solution

Three components:

  1. Templated price offer tracking — structured Excel templates for capturing incoming supplier price offers in a consistent format
  2. Competitor price tracking — web-scraped competitor prices loaded into Snowflake, covering different price lines across multiple competitors
  3. Margin analysis — compare margins over time, per supplier, per product, per category, against competitor price benchmarks

Architecture

Impact & Scale

Margins improved by approximately 5% from where things started under the direct purchase agreement. It's hard to isolate this tool's contribution — selling prices also increased significantly during this period — but the analytics gave the team a grounded view of where they stood in every negotiation.