by Josh Dials, Solutions Consultant
Robert A. Rudzki, contributor to the Spend Matters blog, brings up a great point in a recent post. “’Strategic’ is perhaps one of the most overused (and misused) terms in business today,” he says. “Simp…
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Tomorrow, I am moderating the monthly member call for the LinkedIn Strategic Sourcing & Procurement group. This month’s topic is KPIs. So please join us if you have KPI questions or insights, or if you’d just like to hear your peers engaged in a lively discussion of the subject.
The details:
Tuesday, August 31st
9am Pacific Daylight Time
No [...]
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The glory days of the Private Equity (PE) world are certainly not over but they are changing. Firms today are struggling to attract new investments and to manage the portfolio companies they own.
The days of the quick buy and sell are long gone. The PE firms today are faced with attempting to figure out how [...]
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Today’s guest post is from Sudy Bharadwaj, ex-analyst extraordinaire of the Aberdeen Group, former VP of MindFlow, former CMO of Informance, and, most recently, a star at Inovis. I don’t get it. I have been involved in numerous business process improvement projects over the past 20 years. I have been in numerous meetings about “business process management”. I’ve read white papers and looked at discussion groups. In way too many cases, very early in the conversation, a business process discussion gets down and dirty into integration processes, XML and other related technologies. At …
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A recent article in the Harvard Business Review outlined seven questions to ask to find out if you are ready for a rebound. What I found enticing about the article is that these seven questions have supply chain corollaries. If you can’t answer yes to these seven questions, chances are that your supply chain will not be ready for the decade ahead. Do You Take Advantage of Opportunities Others Miss? Many companies continue to miss market and technology shifts that their rivals exploit. If …
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For months now, economic prognosticators have been sending mixed signals on the potential global economic recovery. Recent stock market volatility has only added to this uncertainty. Yet, a new Saugatuck-BusinessWeek study of more than 400 global C-level executives shows clear signs that most businesses are optimistic about economic growth.
The study, Shifting C-Level Business Priorities as [...]
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Mostly Harmless, Part XIII Previous Post In the last post, reconciliation was defined as the process of comparing and matching figures from the accounting records of one system with the accounting records of another system. This meant that records in the system not only needed to match up, but match any associated records in the inventory system, the human resources system (if temp labor was procured), and the records in the supplier systems. This often requires a number of challenges to be overcome. This post will address some of the challenges of reconciliation, …
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Mostly Harmless, Part XII Previous Post Reconciliation is the process of comparing and matching figures from the accounting records of one system with the accounting records of another system. In e-Procurement, it generally refers to the reconciliation of the invoice and associated payments against goods receipts, purchase orders, contracts, and / or tax records. While reconciliation should be done at each step of the process — as the purchase order should be matched against the approval and a contract, the goods receipt against the purchase order(s), and the invoice against the goods receipt(s) and the purchase …
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You need to source some more cocoa for your chocolate factories to keep production moving (and the oompa loompas working). In years past, you’d just hold an auction and cut a contract with the lowest cost bidder, but you can’t do that now that you’re a socially responsible buyer. You can’t buy from some sellers on the Ivory Coast that you know are using child labor, you can’t buy from further away than necessary as long hauls greatly increase your carbon footprint, and you can’t buy inferior products for your luxury chocolate production lines. You …
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It’s good business. In fact, for most businesses, it’s good innovation. Innovation is difficult and costly for most businesses, and most innovators are unable to capitalize on their innovation to become the market leader. In contrast, most of the market leaders are companies that perfected innovative imitation, where they come up with cheaper and better versions of the innovative technologies developed by their competitors (which use new and improved technologies and processes that “invent around” whatever patents the competition might possess). Good examples are given in this Harvard Business Review article which explains why imitation is …
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