As Spend Matters readers know, I consider supply risk to be one of the most important topics that procurement and operations executives need to learn more about (not to mention vendors and consultants who need to better integrate mitigation and management capabilities into their offerings). Given this, you can imagine I was thrilled to learn [...]
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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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Over at Supply Excellence, Tim Minahan stumps for former President Clinton?s efforts to promote social responsibility, tying global initiatives back to procurement. As Tim notes, “Last week, Clinton was back to doing good, enticing world and business leaders to commit more than $7 billion to fund improvements in healthcare, social understanding, and sustainable growth around [...]
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I’ve heard from multiple sources that Verticalnet will announce some financial, non-product news next week. Possible re-cap. Possible sale. These are just rumblings at this point, but I’ve heard about them from enough sources that I’d wager that something is probably up. Regardless of what happens, I hope that the product and services suite survives [...]
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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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I wish that I could have been a fly on the wall — a multi-lingual fly to be exact — during the trade discussions last week between US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Chinese officials. For both countries have so much riding on the need to reach a compromise position on the appreciation of the [...]
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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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The Eye for Procurement Conference this week really made me think about the total cost factors of sourcing globally. And it also made me consider India’s potential to become a true export superpower if it can get out from under its own bureaucratic weight, hampering infrastructure build out. Despite labor costs that are often 1/25th [...]
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