The Supply Management Forum in San Jose last week was a venerable Who’s Who in high technology, with supply management executives from the world’s leading software, hardware, and media companies swapping stories and tips on global supply strategies. And that was just the audience.
Our featured panelists included Roll International Corporation Director of Strategic Sourcing Alvin [...]
Read the rest » Supply Excellence
May 31st, 2007 | Posted in Best Practices, Supply Management, Supply Management 2.0 Forum, supply risk
Given my temperament to tout the talent gap that is now increasing daily, I was happy to see the recent article from the European Leaders Network that stated People Do Matter Most, Really. The article, which referenced a recently completed research study, revealed, again to my content, that the best performing CPOs are concentrating [...]
Read the rest » Sourcing Innovation
May 31st, 2007 | Posted in Best Practices, Talent
Supply & Demand Executive recently ran an article that an organization can use to determine whether it needs a more strategic approach to manage external supply networks. The article presented ten questions and indicated that if an organization answered yes to at least half, then it should consider investing resources to better understand and [...]
Read the rest » E-Sourcing Forum
May 31st, 2007 | Posted in General, Supply Management Best Practices
Last week’s rant — “Putting an End to Patent Madness” — put the spotlight on a critical issue for enterprises considering supply management software investments. It also sparked some great debate among Supply Excellence readers looking to balance intellectual property (IP) protection with the insatiable need for continuous innovation and improvement.
I tip my hat [...]
Read the rest » Supply Excellence
May 30th, 2007 | Posted in Best Practices, Events, Supply Management, supply risk
BrainNet recently released a mini white-paper on Best Cost Country Sourcing The Evolution of Low Cost Country Sourcing that had an interesting take on Low Cost Country Sourcing. According to the author, cheap labor is better suited to cheap products and cheap services and not necessarily an advantage for the premium products that industrial [...]
Read the rest » Sourcing Innovation
May 30th, 2007 | Posted in Miscellaneous, Outsourcing
Accenture recently released a thirty-two page white-paper (brochure) entitled High performance through procurement: Accenture research and insights into procurement performance mastery which defined six characteristics of procurement mastery that are quite interesting since five of them are really sourcing characteristics. The six characteristics defined by the report are:
Strategy
[...]
Read the rest » E-Sourcing Forum
May 30th, 2007 | Posted in Analysts/Research, General, Supply Management Best Practices
David Bush over at the E-Sourcing Forum turned me on to the article Does Your ERP System Need a Service? by Sam Graham. Most of his points were fine, if general, but he also claimed that “Most ERP systems are updated at least yearly.â€Â
That’s definitely not what I have seen. When I was at [...]
Read the rest » Procureville
May 29th, 2007 | Posted in Uncategorized
Last week’s post on CPO views of supply management metrics ignited a heated debate among Supply Excellence readers. The post cited comments from the CPOs of National City Corporation and AllianceBerstein stating that cost reduction was the chief metric for supply management performance.
Since then, I have been flamed by angry readers defending the finer points of [...]
Read the rest » Supply Excellence
May 29th, 2007 | Posted in Best Practices, Supply Management, Supply Management 2.0 Forum
In the April issue of Business Finance Magazine, Beth Enslow of Aberdeen Group penned a great article on How to Create a More Competitive End-to-End Supply Chain using Supply Chain Finance.
According to the article, by merging physical supply-chain information with financial supply-chain data and flexible funding methods, companies are able to not only [...]
Read the rest » Sourcing Innovation
May 29th, 2007 | Posted in Finance, Supply Chain
The topic of LCCS is fairly prevalent within supply chain circles with camps on both sides of the issue, so I was curious to read a recent cautionary article on the subject in Industry Week, which covered a new study by Boston Consulting Group. This also tied nicely to the comprehensive post written by [...]
Read the rest » E-Sourcing Forum
May 29th, 2007 | Posted in General, Global Supply Issues/Risk