With skyrocketing costs and stagnant growth, performance is becoming ever more important to your supply chain. But how do you insure you get it? You start with measurements - against good metrics. Today we’re going to tackle supplier metrics.Back in the fall of 2005, CPO Agenda ran an article titled Supplier Metrics [...]
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News of the credit crunch has been unavoidable in recent months. Hopefully your business (and home mortgage) have been spared and you’re in a position to weather the storm. But what about your suppliers? If they’re having any credit/cash flow problems, that’s a huge risk to your supply chain. And buyers’ companies may be unwittingly [...]
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While the economy has become the top issue for business and supply management executives alike, there remains some debate on how best to address it. Recent research of over 160 global procurement, finance, and supply chain executives offers some answers.
As its title suggests, the third-annual Spend Management Priorities and Challenges study reveals strategies and approaches [...]
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With the outcome of what some are calling “the most important U.S. Presidential race ever” still uncertain, many business executives are fretting over the economic, tax, and trade policies of the eventual President No. 44.
Yet, savvy procurement and supply management professionals aren’t waiting for the election outcome. They know that, regardless of who wins the [...]
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Last week, Industry Week highlighted the fact that 2/3rds of North American organizations have limited knowledge of the operational impacts of REACH (Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of CHemicals). REACH is European Union legislation that aims to put more responsibility on industry to manage the health and environmental risks of industrial chemicals.
I can’t comment on my [...]
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The Supply Chain Management Review recently ran an interesting article on Embracing Supplier Performance Management for More Profit, Less Risk. The article noted that if each business unit is measuring suppliers with a different set of criteria, and not sharing data at the corporate level, how do you know which suppliers are achieving the [...]
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A recent article in Information Week on The Road to Making BI Available to Everyone noted that, on average, only 25% of workers use BI. Considering that we’re in the information age, this is rather pathetic. Why is this?According to the article, there are five major reasons for this: The tools themselves [...]
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I’m a consultant and I’m in the same business as a CPO.
Leafing through the archives of CPO Agenda, I came across an executive coaching Q&A, where a CPO asked how to tackle the problem of procurement not being involved with other functions and company decision making. Sound familiar?
Dick Russill’s eloquent and measured response was: sell. [...]
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As evidenced by my recent Talent Week series, and many posts on Talent here on this blog, a major war for talent is building, and you stand to lose your business if you don’t start preparing now. However, as clarified in a recent McKinsey Quarterly article, before you can win on the global talent [...]
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Three years after its inaugural look at Chief Procurement Officers’ key transformation strategies and the challenges to implementing them, Aberdeen Group’s latest CPO Agenda study finds more of the same. Cost-cutting continues to rank among top goals, due in large part to the ailing economy. And procurement execs say their groups struggle most with misaligned [...]
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