Procure IQ

If you’ve ever bought an enterprise system, you know that the sticker price is usually only a small fraction of the total cost of ownership and that the implementation and integration costs can dwarf the sticker price by an order of magnitude. As a result, integration costs often present supply management with an opportunity to save six or seven figures. But how? Especially when 70% of enterprise projects fail to deliver on their initial promise? In a word, planning. According to several experts in the field, the most common problems that arise when companies …

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Procurement leaders recently summarized a new study by A.T. Kearny that found that CPOs [are] slow to focus on indirect categories such as IT, Marketing, Professional Services, Facilities Management, and MRO. This is worrying when you consider that not only do some of these categories represent an organization’s biggest savings opportunity, but that indirect spending accounts for up to 50% of spend in many manufacturing organizations, 60% of third-party spend in non-manufacturing companies, and 90% of spend (or more) in the financial services industry. This is doubly worrying when you consider that: …

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You can follow the advice in the HBR article that outlines some things you can do when you’ve got to cut costs, but only if you do it very carefully. In short, the practical guide to reducing overhead offers up six tips that will reduce your costs, but only if implemented properly as a couple of them will actually increase costs if implemented incorrectly. This post will discuss the six cost savings ideas offered up by the article and the right way to go about them. Consolidate Incidentals …

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As I mentioned in my recent post on how marketing is a huge savings opportunity, last year, the Marketing Supply Chain Institute released Define Where to Streamline: Making Marketing Supply Chains More Efficient, Agile, and Enviro-Friendly (registration required) that noted that, with good visibility, an average marketing organization can easily find 20% to 25% savings with Procurement’s help. About ten pages in, the report lists the top five areas where the marketing supply chains could realize sustainability gains (which are the ultimate key to long term savings). These are: print, …

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Today’s guest post is from Paul Martyn, Vice President of Marketing of Bravo Solution. Paul can be reached at p <dot> martyn <at> bravosolution.com or 312 279 6793. Most organizations have a diverse spend portfolio that includes many simple, several …

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A recent article over on CFO, which states the obvious, says that big lesson from the downturn is to cut inventory, not people. The timing of this is so poor it’s shocking! Why couldn’t they have run this *before* organizations cut so many people that joblessness came close to reaching an all time high: 10.1 in October of 2009 compared to the all time high of 10.8 in November of 1982! (Source: The Misery Index) As noted in the article, there is a huge savings potential in inventory reduction, which ties up working capital, eats up storage …

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… so long as it is black. This is one piece of advice from the early 20th century that we should not have forgotten in the early 21st. Maybe if a few more companies remembered this, they would not be in such dire straits. Consider the case of PolyOne Corporation that we discussed in a recent post on coming back from the brink to cash in the bank and how the complexity of too many manufacturing locations producing too many product variants was running them deep into the red. Now consider the case of Apple — one …

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A recent article in the McKinsey Quarterly noted that it is often difficult to make cost cuts stick, especially when the economy is improving, and that only 10% of cost reduction programs show sustained results three years later. To try and improve the situation, they offered us five ways CFOs can make cost cuts stick, which, briefly, were: Assign accountability at the right level Make sure the people actually spending the money are accountable for how it is spent, and that their compensation is related …

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The SCMR is back, Quinn is still in charge, and it looks like he’s striving to maintain the quality that the SCMR was known for. I was quite impressed with one of the first articles on driving a turnaround in tumultouos times, which presented a case study on PolyOne and how it came back from the brink of bankruptcy. In March of 2009, it’s share price reached an abysmal low of $1.32. On May 27, it was $10.19. That’s an eightfold improvement in a little over a year and the reason analysts are now recommending it …

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In a recent post we explained how sustainability is the current megatrend, but we did not give you any tips on how to deal with this information. In this post we’ll overview some of the advice provided in a recent Harvard Business Review article on the sustainability imperative and address how the sustainability imperative may impact your supply chain. The first piece of advice given in the article is to learn from past megatrends. For example, in both the IT and quality business megatrends, the market leaders evolved through four principal stages of value creation: …

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