The electronic world can only get so far on automation, as I was reminded yesterday at the Seattle Spend Management Day. Brian Jones, Purchasing Operations guru at Nestle, discussed the opportunities, process and results from their efforts to categorize spend in order to identify low hanging procurement fruit and drive ongoing spend management initiatives across […]
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Despite the economic turmoil, people still need to eat. And when times are tough, they’re naturally going to eat out less, cook more meals at home and even brown bag some lunches. So, you would assume that provides opportunity for supermarkets, but that might not always be the case.
Last week Safeway announced they had increased […]
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In a blog post last Friday, Jason Busch brought up an interesting twist on the credit crisis…namely the ability of businesses to pass along increased supply chain costs to the end customer in an environment of tightening belts and lowered spending. He cites a story out of the UK where Marks & Spencer and […]
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I recently read an article on Purchasing.com about HP’s Purchasing Organization titled HP’s purchasing organization looks beyond price. At $104B in annual revenue, HP is quite a large organization with $16.5B in Indirect and Services Spend. The article talks about about how HP’s Procurement Organization initially focused their efforts on cost reductions but have […]
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On a swing through Europe last week, I had the good fortune to attend a discussion with British Airways CEO Willie Walsh during the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply (CIPS) forum at the new Sofitel in the airline’s new Terminal 5 at London Heathrow.
In between pot shots at rival Virgin Airlines CEO Sir Richard […]
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Talk about getting squeezed! Businesses of all sizes are feeling the pinch of rising commodity costs - from fuel and energy to flour and eggs. Leading retail, CPG, and restaurant companies are employing a variety of different approaches to cope in today’s market, including focusing on supply chain and productivity initiatives, offering drastic […]
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It seems a week can’t go by without yet another product supply safety scare traced to international supply chains. This week’s episode provides some of the scariest headlines yet: Tainted baby formula.
It also points to another aspect of international supply chains that requires increasingly sophisticated oversight by spend management organizations. We typically think […]
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A recent article in the McKinsey Quarterly discusses how how poor metrics undermine digital marketing, something The Brain and I have been trying to tell you for a while now. (Hint: clicks and page-rank don’t matter!) The article notes that, at least as far as measurements are concerned, the digital world has developed faster […]
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While it may not have the news-cycle cachet of a $700 Billion bailout, or the immediate voyeuristic drawing power of the battle of the banking titans (i.e. Wells/Citi/Wachovia), the struggles that suppliers are facing finding cash flow and short-term credit can have immediate and long-term impact on supply chains if those suppliers fail or are […]
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According to a CFO.com survey released on Wednesday, “”[as a result of the credit crisis] 61 percent of finance chiefs are concerned about their companies’ access to day-to-day financing.” This concern is especially acute for small to mid-sized suppliers for whom short-term credit is the primary operational bridge allowing them to make it from […]
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