Newell Rubbermaid represents a significant collective market of goods and services. Each global business unit (GBU) has requirements that are specific to the portfolio of products it markets, but there are four major commodity segments that span our enterprise, including:
- Plastics and Resins
- Metals
- Indirect Goods and Services
- Packaging
These commodities are considered strategic in nature and have increased concentration and visibility across our collective business. To focus our attention, we have developed an organizational model around these commodities to guarantee that our GBUs have the necessary expertise to make technical materials decisions, execute tactical sourcing decisions, achieve required productivity and ensure continuity of supply. We call this focus a commodity "Center of Excellence," or COE.
Our COEs are designed to create synergy in these areas and drive commodity strategy while leading in identifying and syndicating emerging opportunities to the GBU purchasing organizations. The leaders of our COEs publish commodity strategy, drive volume leveraging, execute enterprise-wide contracts and report on key supplier relationships for these strategic spend areas.
One strategic COE area is sourced products. Many of our GBUs, due to the nature of their markets, design, purchase and then resell a number of sourced products. These are procured from quality and value-adding suppliers all over the world. Products for resale range from decorative home fashion products to cookware items to tools. The supply base supporting these products understands that it must be innovative, cost conscious and supply-chain savvy in order to meet our goals.
Additionally, Newell Rubbermaid runs a number of worldwide factories that require traditional Maintenance Repair and Operational (MRO) supplies to support their day-to-day operations. In the process of their production cycles, they consume various raw materials and use fabricated parts that must be purchased to support our production needs. World-class suppliers are necessary to sustain these operations and represent broad spending areas at GBU, regional and local levels.
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