What is LightSource?

Our mission

At LightSource, our mission is to “illuminate the global supply chain”. To achieve this vision, we build software to help procurement professionals collaborate with their suppliers, and create win-win’s in the process.

Ok, but what does LightSource actually do?

Put simply, LightSource is an online platform for strategic sourcing. It’s designed for both buyers and suppliers, and includes sides of the app with tools for everybody in the supply chain ecosystem.

• For buyers: LightSource makes it easy to find incredible suppliers, send RFQs (requests for quotes), and make the best sourcing decisions while collaborating with your team.
• For suppliers: LightSource makes it easy to review an RFQ, responding with quotes quickly to win business, and find new sales and margin-improvement opportunities.

For more detail, check out our documentation, including both: (1) tutorials on how to use LightSource, and (2) an educational blog with content on supply chain practice and theory.

For tutorials, we’d recommend checking out Sourcing Projects, Sending an RFQ, and Getting Started as well as our blog posts on Strategic Sourcing and the difference between Direct vs. Indirect procurement.

What LightSource is not.

Well first off, LightSource is not excel + email. For a typical sourcing event, buyers and suppliers can exchange upwards of 100+ messages, so a lot of the details get confusing or generally “lost in the sauce.”

LightSource is also not a early-2000’s e-Procurement or e-Auction platform. It’s a collaboration tool to give procurement professionals super powers, not automate them.

It’s also not made to negotiate harder or squeeze margins. Again, LightSource is a collaboration tool to help buying and supplying team partners and communicate better.

Create Win-Win’s

Over this last year, it’s become more clear than ever that when teams collaborate, strategic relationships form, and win-win’s become possible. That’s our goal. To make collaboration easy, and then use the data coming through the workflow tool to make everyone better-off.

In fact, when we on-board new employees to the LightSource team, that’s the first of our 10 Core Values:

Make supply chain transparent and fair for everyone. Our goal is to make both buyers and suppliers better-off, not to tip the scales.

And we live by that when building our product.

It all comes down to “why”

Every piece of meaningful technology is built on a set of both tactical and philosophical insights.

The biggest problem is that Supply Chain is extremely difficult, but procurement professions never get credit where due.

When things “go wrong,” supply chain teams are blamed. But when things go right, we are invisible.

From our personal experience, there’s a lot of complexity involved in developing and supplying great products. And if it seems overwhelming to juggle a million things at once, it’s because nobody has taken the time to build great procurement software. We’re trying to change that.