Recent headlines about Toyota have no doubt been music to the ears of its major rivals — especially Ford and GM. From a giant recall for gas pedals that stick (making the Audi 5000’s sudden-acceleration PR woes look tame by comparison) to botched hy…
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The Sourcing Innovation Resource Site, always immediately accessible from the link under the “Free Resources” section of the sidebar, continues to add new content on a weekly, and often daily, basis — and it will continue to do so. The following is a short selection of upcoming webinars and events that you might want to check out in the coming weeks: Date & Time Webcast 2010-Feb-9 …
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I’m thrilled to announce this morning that Zycus has become a Lead Sponsor of Spend Matters. Previously an Associate Sponsor, Zycus has now assumed a Lead Sponsor role. If you’re not familiar with Zycus — or think all that they do is spend classific…
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Last week we featured an intro to low-cost automated phone surveys using InstantLoop. This week, we’ll examine how to quickly look at some consumer-spending trends.
– Ryder Daniels, Capsaicin, LLC
Bundle is a new service that uses a node-based t…
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The Harvard Business Review recently ran a great article on Breakthrough Ideas for 2010. While many of the ideas aren’t new (as a few can easily be traced backed decades), for many, their application would be. But more importantly, their application could fix a lot of problems in the world today.What really struck me was how they all had good supply chain equivalents that could help you revolutionize your supply chain. So, over the next three posts, I’m going to explain how their supply chain equivalents are ideas you should strongly be considering if you haven’t …
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My first two predictions in the Spend Matters 2010 forecasting series were
certainly more controversial than this one. Still, one could argue
that my third prediction, that an increasing number of
procurement organizations will budget for su…
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Stop relying on spreadsheets!I thoroughly enjoyed this recent article over on SupplyChainBrain on how Intel Takes The Top Spot in the Supply Chain Innovation Awards. The article pointed out that Intel enhanced product availability by scrapping its reliance on spreadsheets and embracing technology that creates a real time, available-to-promise (ATP) environment. As a business management tool, Spreadsheets Suck, straight and simple. Considering that up to 90% of spreadsheets contain non-trivial errors and that they are barely adequate at the task they were designed for (which was day-to-day ledger-keeping, and nothing more), it should be pretty obvious that they …
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If you’re still using spreadsheets to run any aspect of your sourcing, procurement, or supply management operations, then you’re working at the edge of a steep cliff over a deep ocean waiting for the earthquake to come. I bring this up yet again because I recently stumbled upon an article over on the Harvard Business Review blogs on why good spreadsheets make bad strategies, which, by the way, they do.It was a great blog post. We live in a world obsessed with science, preoccupied with predictability and control, and enraptured with quantitative analysis. Economic forecasters crank out precision …
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The past decade has been rough on many companies, but technology companies appear to have bore the brunt of it. Check out Fortune’s biggest losers over the past decade over on CNNMoney.com. Eight are technology companies, and all make Ariba’s Market Cap Loss of 46 B [as chronicled in James Kwak's The Myth of Ariba and discussed in my post on Will Private Equity Players Offer You Better Value Than Public Equity Players] look like pocket change! (Ariba Peak: 47 B, Recent: 1 B, approx.) …
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They make great editors!Every Blogger Needs to Have a CatTo the tune of Everybody Wants to be a Cat from Disney’s The Aristocats.Every blogger needs to have a cat,because a cat’s the only catwho knows where it’s at!Everybody’s pickin’ up on that feline beat,’cause everything else is obsolete.Now a square on the keys,can make your eyelids squeeze,ever’time he writes;and with a square in the act,he can set writing backto the caveman days.I’ve heard some corny birds who tried to write,but a cat’s the only catwho can get it right.Who wants to be fleecedby a long-winded pieceor stuff like that?When Every …
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