Archive for January, 2009

Closing the Contract Automation Loop With Electronic Signatures

Interest in enterprise contract management automation continues to grow and for good reason. Improved compliance of procurement contracts drives additional savings hitting the bottom line while faster, more efficient sales contract negotiation results in increased revenues and lower costs. In a recent report, independent analyst Forrester opined that contract lifecycle management (CLM) could [...]

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The secret of good system design

Designing a new system? The single most important question to ask is what do I not need?
Apple asked how few controls do we really need to operate an mp3 player and the iPod was born. Asus asked what does a user really need to surf the net and the eee pc burst onto the market. [...]

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Even in Night, Procurement Shines Bright

The Winter Edition of CPO Agenda had a great article on how stand-out procurement functions are continuing to extend their reach and value despite volatile market conditions. In How the Stars Shine Brighter, the authors reviewed the 2008 Assessment of Excellence in Procurement from A.T. Kearney (AEP) that surveyed and benchmarked almost 500 respondents [...]

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Help! I’m Out of Content! What Do I Do Now? (Part II)

Last week, not being able to imagine what it would be like to be out of content, I culled a top 15 list of ideas of what to do from my fellow bloggers. Some were good. Some were not. But the one commonality they all had was that, for the most part, [...]

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Dead Company V: More Ways to Avoid the GraveYard

In our last post, we talked about twelve smart things a smart company could do to avoid the graveyard that many of its dumb company peers are heading too in this down economy. Today, we’re going to talk about ten more smart things a smart company can do, courtesy of Christopher Lockhead who guest-posted [...]

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Strategies for Renegotiating Contracts in a “Buyer’s Market”

Last week’s Top 5 Categories to Source Now webinar (view the replay here) had a HUGE attendance, which I’ll take to mean that buyers are hungry to capitalize on the opportunities the current market provides. But the intention to seek costs savings and actually executing on those good intentions are two different things, especially when [...]

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A Great Guide to Outsourcing Risk Management, Part III

In Part I we we discussed the starting point of your outsourcing project and how you go about selecting service providers to issue RFPs to and in Part II we discussed proposal evaluation. Today we will discuss the contract, and the dispute resolution process in particular, and remind you to check out the full [...]

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Best Practices of OfficeMax Top Customers Yield ROI & Efficiency

Last weeks’ Spend Management Day in Palo Alto featured an insightful presentation from OfficeMax’s Director of Electronic Commerce, Joni Anderson. In that role, Joni runs the group that facilitates procurement of office supplies at large companies via ecommerce channels.
According to their data, eProcurement of office supplies can save companies over 10% in the first year, [...]

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A Great Guide to Outsourcing Risk Management, Part II

Yesterday we discussed the starting point of your outsourcing project and how you go about selecting service providers to issue RFPs to. Today we will discuss proposal evaluation and remind you to check out the full series on outsourcing risk management by Alsbridge, as printed by SourcingMag.com, that this series is partially based on. [...]

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Can SaaS Make CIOs Strategic Again?

My visits with business executives and media mavens over the past few weeks involved heated discussions about the future role of the Chief Information Officer in this age of Software as a Service (SaaS). Public perception is that SaaS is in direct competition with the CIO, chipping away at the death grip this top IT [...]

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