Now that Dairy Queen is embracing e-sourcing, I’m hoping that the cost of my next Blizzard comes down in price. Seriously, given the amount of taste sensation for the buck in a Blizzard, I don’t think there’s a better deal in mass market food going. And getting it for a few cents less would make […]
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The Spend Fool, Eric Strovink, and other experts are evolved in a spend visibility and analytics smack-down debate in the comments section from a post earlier this week. The comments now outnumber the original words in the blog entry by over 10 to 1 (and are far better argued than this humble editor could ever […]
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Over at E-Sourcing Forum, David Bush breaks the news of a recent Hackett Group report that finds that “Companies wanting to expand their supplier diversity programs can do so without sacrificing savings”. Even though I won’t dive deep today into the economic arguments about whether or not the societal costs of supplier diversity programs outweigh […]
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The recent Supply Excellence exclusive with Norbert Ore, Chair of the Institute for Supply Management’s (ISM) Manufacturing Business Survey Committee, prompted some lively commentary questioning the accuracy and value of economic indicators. The most vocal commentator was Charles Dominick, president and founder of Next Level Purchasing and author of the Purchasing Certification Blog.
I have admired […]
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A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog about how to go through the process of determining a suitable reverse auction candidate. Jean-Philippe Massin of the blog, Strategic Sourcing | Europe, even added some very good comments. To add to that topic, I wanted to pass along a link from the UK Office […]
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Yesterday we listed ten characteristics of innovative companies. These were:
Innovative Business Model
Continuous Investment in Innovation
Skillful Blend of Design and Technology
Steady launch of “paradigm shifting” products
Lengthy track record of successful innovation
Institutionalized Capabilities
Ongoing and successful expansion into new areas
Speed
Products that allow “lock-in”
Staying Power
Now we are going […]
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Over on Supply Excellence, Tim Minahan just posted an entry that talks about how Nokia has made a successful transition to a (mostly) center-led procurement organizational structure. Tim talks about how Nokia set out on a path to move to a “centralized organization with a strong matrix across regions … which blends spend leverage, process […]
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While cruising about on the excellent blog Strategic Sourcing | Europe, I came across this elegantly simple downloadable template to use when thinking about category prioritization for strategic sourcing initiatives. In the words of the author, “Nothing fancy here, only pragmatic factors about markets, suppliers, products and ‘buying’, sorted in a .xls table to review […]
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What’s the worst supply chain risk known to man? Bird flu — nope, it has not figured out a permanent way to leapfrog to mammals, at least not yet. How about the Axis of Evil, you say? Given the individual and highly personal delusions of Kim Jong-il and Ahmadinejad, I’d say there’s more evil than […]
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I found a good article on the IACCM site the other day titled Multi-Tier Sourcing Practices for Commodities Supplier Relationship Management that indicates that effective procurement strategies for increasingly scarce resources are becoming more important than ever as global price volatility and supply risks increase due to the increased demand from emerging countries such […]
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