Forget Captain Jack Sparrow and the End of the World. (The box office certainly has.) Instead, worry about pirates pillaging equipment, siding, and other metal-based materials from your plants and facilities.
New reports find that the black market is bullish for scrap metal. A 95% boost in prices over the past two years for copper, aluminum, lead, tin, [...]
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I once knew of a guy who was unrealistically terrified of the Year 2000. Certain that the Y2K computer glitch would bring commerce to a halt and turn the city into a post-apocolyptic Waterworld, he bought a safehouse in the mountains, stocked it with food, and converted most of his wealth into gold bullion bricks.
True [...]
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A Wall Street Journal cover story earlier this week warned of inflationary indicators around the globe, including near-capacity production operations in Europe and double-digit wage increases among both laborers and service providers in China and India. The article quotes former IMF Chief Economist summing the current supply market situation this way, “Markets have gotten used [...]
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A common refrain I hear from procurement execs is ”What are the right key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure supply management success?” In a recent report, Aberdeen Group proffered a list of the Top 10 Procurement KPIs. But Chief Procurement Officers (CPOs) tend to have a more direct answer: it’s all about cost savings. And cost avoidance doesn’t [...]
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Last week, I shared the latest projections from Thinking Cap Solutions which uncovered opportunities to negotiate double-digit discounts on your zinc, copper, and aluminum contracts. And that’s just the tip of the “ICEberg.”
Thinking Cap’s latest Industry Cost Escalation report — the ICE-Alert — identifies 183 industries “where average prices can decline without sending margins any [...]
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Believe it or not, there may be a silver lining to the cloud that’s been hanging over metals buyers. According to Thinking Cap Solutions, Inc.’s latest analysis of price, cost, and margin trends, now is the time to negotiate price discounts for lead, zinc, aluminum, and copper, among other metals.
In its latest ICE-Alert (www.ice-alert.com) — [...]
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In recent posts on the requirements for Supply Management 2.0 and value-based sourcing, I banged the drum loudly about how it is imperative for supply managers to move beyond their cost focus and find new ways to contribute value to the business. A recent Purchasing magazine feature on the key role supply management plays in product development [...]
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A Supply Excellence reader comment to yesterday’s post reaffirmed the sense I’ve been getting from recent conversations with supply management executives: Everyone talks about best total value supply. (You can’t puruse a software vendor’s web site — including my employer — without being accosted by value terminology.) But few truly understand what best-value supply is. [...]
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Congratulations. And thank you for responding to my request to share your favorite approaches for driving supply and contract management improvements.
Supply Excellence reader input — coupled with personal meetings with supply management teams around the globe — serve as the foundation of a new electronic book:
The 100 Greatest Supply Management Tips of All Time!
Practical [...]
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I’m excited to welcome an old cohort, Elizabeth Baatz to Supply Excellence. A true economist, Elizabeth was a regular contributor of pricing and supply indices and intelligence to Purchasing Magazine. Today, she and her husband, economic-whiz-kid Victor Malair, have created a proprietary forecasting model that uses multiple indicators to predict price and supply trends for [...]
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