Purchasing

SupplyPulse

Supplier quotes checked against the market price behind each item.

Open the demo Runs in the browser with sample data. Nothing to install or sign up for.
SupplyPulse in use with sample data
SupplyPulse in use with the sample data.

The problem

Buyers get new quotes every month and have little to check them against. A supplier asks for 12% more, but did copper go up 12%? Is the current supplier still the cheapest, and which quotes are too old to use?

Who it is for

  • Purchasing teams buying metal parts, raw material, packaging or food ingredients
  • Small and mid-size manufacturers without a spend analysis tool
  • Cost engineers getting ready for a price review with a supplier

How it works

  1. Add your items and suppliers, or import your quote log from Excel or CSV. Column names are matched for you, in English or Portuguese, and you can fix the match before importing.
  2. Pick what each item is compared with: the metals inside it (World Bank prices converted to BRL), an index from Banco Central such as IPCA, a price API you already pay for, or the price on each supplier's product page.
  3. Read the flags: a current supplier above the best valid quote and what that costs per year, suppliers raising prices faster than their costs, and quotes older than three months.

Bring your own sources

Any item works, from copper tube to a 25 kg bag of wheat flour. For each supplier you choose where the price comes from:

  1. The link to the product page. Paste the address of the product on each supplier's site. A small price reader takes the price from the data the store already publishes for search engines (schema.org Product and Offer, in JSON-LD or microdata, or price meta tags), reads robots.txt first and waits between requests. A web page cannot read other sites, for your security and theirs, so the reader runs outside the browser: on your computer, or every Monday on GitHub Actions. It writes one file, page-prices.json, and the page shows it.
  2. A marketplace API, where its terms allow it. Mercado Livre's developer terms forbid robots on the site and allow the API only for uses that improve the marketplace itself, with written permission needed for price statistics, so it is left off. Amazon's conditions of use rule out robots too.
  3. Typing the price in or importing a spreadsheet, for pages with no readable price or that may not be read. The reader lists those, each with a link to type the price.

Screens

Each supplier's price in force month by month, against the cost of the metal in one unit.
Each supplier's price in force month by month, against the cost of the metal in one unit.
A quote sheet in Portuguese, with a title line and payment terms like 30/60/90, read as is.
A quote sheet in Portuguese, with a title line and payment terms like 30/60/90, read as is.
What needs attention, ordered by how much it costs.
What needs attention, ordered by how much it costs.
Supplier product pages: how the price reader runs, and a sample run with what could and could not be read.
Supplier product pages: how the price reader runs, and a sample run with what could and could not be read.

About the demo

The demo opens with five sample items. Suppliers, quotes and volumes are invented; metal prices, the dollar rate and IGP-M are real data from the World Bank and Banco Central do Brasil. The wheat flour item shows prices read from supplier product pages, using test copies of the pages. Anything you add is saved in your browser only.

What a full version would add

The demo covers the daily work. Set up for a company, it would also have:

Open the demo