Every business needs to send packages. It’s just the natural order of business. But with such a dizzying array of options: Fedex, UPS, Purolator, DHL, who do you choose?
Well, I do not know if they are better suited to your needs or not, but after this advertisement (I apologize for the low quality, but I [...]
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Before the Sourcing Innovation Series, where the mighty prophet of the spend management space Jason Busch offered up his thoughts on Sourcing Innovation: Securitizing Direct Materials and Sourcing Innovation: Next Generation On-Demand, he published a whitepaper entitled Spend Management: Changing Business, A Case for Reexamining Procurement’s Role In Organizations of All Sizes, that you should [...]
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It’s no secret that fashion goes in cycles. Witness the return of the circa-1970s denim jackets and three-quarter sleeve concert T-shirts at your local Gap. (I’m just waiting for my Members’ Only jacket and Risky Business-style Ray-Bans to come back in vogue.) Business trends and approaches often follow similar cycles. The recent energy crunch was reminiscent of [...]
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One of the major challenges in any supply management effort is to maintain support for the effort within an organization. Unfortunately, spend analysis (SA) has long been a weak link in the emotional support structure of spend management initiatives, for two reasons:
Vendor over-promises with respect to data cleansing accuracy lead to disillusionment when [...]
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This week was another good week. To start off, Charles Dominick of the Purchasing Certification Blog started us off with a post on Talent Management that offered some suggestions for a mid-sized company to retain talent. In summary:
hire the “right” person, not necessarily the “best” person,
have a career development plan from junior buyer to [...]
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What are the views of a Silicon Valley guy like me whose spent a decade in Oracle’s performance-driven culture? To steal a line from Fox News, I think you’ll find them “fair and balanced.” 
Let me explain the context. In talking with friends and colleagues (like Michael Lamoreaux), it’s come to my attention that the [...]
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Here’s a few quick Coupa updates:
1) we’ve updated our website. let me know what you think of the new font on the homepage flash – noah, my co-founder, h-a-t-e-s it! should it go? and if so, what font would you recommend instead?
2) we’ve added instant online demos of our Enterprise Edition to our hosting infrastructure. [...]
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If one buys the conventional wisdom that a Spend Analysis (SA) system is simply a data warehouse/data viewer combination, that doesn’t leave much room for product differentiation. Most data warehouses are essentially the same, and so are most data viewers. This is why SA vendors tend to compete on the quality of their [...]
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ERP – Enterprise Resource Planning – the be-all and end-all of business software – all of your transactional data in one place – everything you need to run your business – only seven figures! That was the promise.
The reality is much different. Seven figures for the software license. Multiples of that for the installation. [...]
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In June, Supply Excellence began examining environmentally and socially responsible supply chain strategies. Our motivation was due in large part to a passionate speech former President Clinton’s passionate delivered at AMR’s Executive Conference, which was aptly themed Supply Chain Saves the World. The ex-Commander-in-Chief used the event to stump the Clinton Global Initiative, a non-partisan [...]
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