Generally, what you have is sourcing people at companies. They're charged at the beginning of the year with, say, a goal of saving the company 6 percent this year. They'll start looking through the company's spend in a systemized way, and try to figure out which areas they can attack to find ways to buy the things in that area more cheaply, and more effectively. What if I could do a deal with one supplier and aggregate all that spend, and buy all of our laptops from that one person. Let me go out and start negotiating for that contract.
Every company varies in the way they do it.
Let's say you've already established a vendor for laptops, and it's Dell. Choosing the vendor in the first place is sourcing. If you look at the way companies buy things, there's sort of three major purchasing processes that happen. One is e-procurement. The second piece for companies is collaborative design purchasing.