By Jim Utter
Director of Journalism
One of the biggest hurdles companies face in any industry is procuring quality supplies, equipment, and services needed at reasonable costs.
By having managers at each location making buying decisions they are losing efficiency, increasing risk to the company and fragmenting the spending.
The goal of SimplSourcing LLC is to save money but to do it through simplifying the buying process, establishing standards, ensuring suppliers meet quality standards, reducing the number of suppliers and making it easy for managers to use the program.
Concepts such as “one stop shopping” and buying in bulk can secure better deals, which is how the founding concept of SimplSourcing came about earlier this year.
The consulting firm was founded by Michael Koontz, an award-winning sourcing innovator with over 25 years of experience at Fortune 100 companies. The company is based in the Charlotte, N.C., area, specializes in strategic sourcing and procurement, and was launched in late April.
While still in a “startup phase” in some respects, SimplSourcing has found a receptive audience with several prominent car wash operators of varying sizes.
The firm has created a reliable vendor network which grants clients access to leading national contracts for supplies they use to run their businesses.
Many companies this size cannot justify the cost of a full-time sourcing organization or having a chief procurement officer, but SimplSourcing does this for them, providing benefits that only a few can obtain on their own.
“We want to allow our car wash owners to focus on their customer, allow us to represent them to ensure they are able to compete by keeping their location operating at a high standard, making sure they have all the products needed, their reclaim programs are operating at optimal levels and when something breaks, they have a way to get it addressed and back up quickly,” Koontz said.
“Cost is important but not when it impacts quality.”
SimplSourcing doesn’t purchase any products and resell them, but rather determines the car wash owner’s needs and uses the group of suppliers to get the best solution available.
“We use the scale of our group of customers together, leveraging them to drive better pricing and value to each individually,” Koontz said. “One customer’s 30 locations are great but if we go to suppliers with 1,000 locations and leverage that buying power together, then you get the best pricing in the industry.”
Todd Morgan, the company’s executive director of operations, said SimplSourcing differs from a company like N1 Buying Group, a car wash buying group based in Las Vegas.
“N1 focuses on providing some discount but the majority of benefit is in rebates owners and operators get at the end of the year,” he said. “We don’t really do rebates right now. We just pass savings on from the dealer from the very beginning.”
Right now, SimplSourcing focuses strictly on car wash operators – primarily in the eastern United States – but potentially could expand into adjacent industries.
It may seem an entity like SimplSourcing may primarily be of benefit to small or medium-sized operations, but its client base is varied and includes larger car wash operators as well. Koontz said the company has produced cost reductions of between 10 to 15% for clients in the first year.
“One thing we can do is build kits for owners who are building washes – a package that includes everything from not just equipment but chemicals, office supplies, everything they need to get off the ground,” Koontz said.
A pallet shows up 90 days before opening with equipment, 60 days for furniture and fixtures and all other supplies two weeks prior to opening day.
“This has been an amazing journey with our customers, learning every day and helping drive success to each in their own way,” Koontz said. “We want to streamline the buy process, get the products into the hands of operators quicker and at a lower cost.”
