Procure IQ

Editor’s Note: Today’s post is from Dick Locke, Sourcing Innovation’s resident expert on International Sourcing and Procurement. (His previous guest posts are still archived.) China’s exports in February were up 45% from last February. (LA Times) My opinion: the rapid decline and unsustainable increase in Chinese exports were from the bullwhip effect of a long supply chain. A small change in final demand can cause huge swings in upstream supply. This mainly applies to those using ships to …

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Editor’s Note: Today’s post is from Dick Locke, Sourcing Innovation’s resident expert on International Sourcing and Procurement. (His previous guest posts are still archived.) Back in August I posted a blog suggesting that contract language should be tested for readability. I pointed out that it’s especially important for international contracts, because the chances for confusion are higher than when both parties are in the same country. (The original post Blogging on International Contracting, is in the archives). I suggested using your word processor’s grammar checker with “show readability statistics” turned on. The Microsoft Word grammar checker gives two figures: …

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Editor’s Note: Today’s post is from Dick Locke, Sourcing Innovation’s resident expert on International Sourcing and Procurement. (His previous guest posts are still archived.) The US Census Bureau recently announced that one out of six people in the US workforce is foreign born. In four states it’s more than one in four and in one state it’s more than one in three.Here’s an excerpt from the NYTimes article Census Finds Rise in Foreign Workers:Nearly one in six American workers is foreign-born, the highest proportion since the 1920s, according to a census analysis released Monday. Because of government barriers to …

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Editor’s Note: Today’s post is from Dick Locke, Sourcing Innovation’s resident expert on International Sourcing and Procurement. (His previous guest posts are still archived.) The October 1 New York Times has an interesting article on a tariff increase on solar panels. While the panels came from China, that’s not the interesting part of the story. The interesting part is that CBP (The US Customs and Border Protection department — successor to the US Customs Service) announced the tariff increase eight months ago and nearly the entire solar panel industry missed it.To summarize, one US company asked CBP for …

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Editor’s Note: Today’s post is from Dick Locke, Sourcing Innovation’s resident expert on International Sourcing and Procurement. (His previous guest posts are still archived.) It appears that Mexican drug cartels are taking advantage of the US’ C-TPAT program to occasionally put marijuana into trucks that have been granted expedited clearance into the US. How serious is this?Here are a couple of articles:Trucker Program Attracts Drug SmugglersMexican Drug Smugglers Taking Advantage of New Program That Speeds Truckers Across the BorderIf you dig into the articles you will see that there are about 5 million north-bound truckloads crossing the Mexican border annually. …

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Well, I’m glad the Doc is publishing his material on cultural differences. I’ve promised a blog entry on international topics every two weeks, but I’ve been suffering from blogger’s block. I’m tired of debating whether China is manipulating currency or not. I’m sure the ‘cultural differences’ series will generate lots of comments. This gives me a chance to write something on a more general topic: training supply management personnel on quality assurance basics. What brought this to my attention was a discussion over on Strategic Sourcing and Procurement’s discussion board. It struck me how many KPIs (Key Performance …

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Here are a couple of eye openers from a New York Times article:For the first nine months of 2009, for instance, Buick sold 312,798 vehicles in China; in the United States, it sold 72,389. — and — The idea of creating a new Buick in a design studio in China, as General Motors has done with the 2010 LaCrosse, is not as loopy as it might sound. Buicks have a certain cachet in China, dating back some eight decades to when the emperor bought one.So, there are 1.346 billion Chinese. They like Buicks, they design Buicks, and they build them …

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Share This on Linked In Editor’s Note: Today’s post is from Dick Locke, Sourcing Innovation’s resident expert on International Sourcing and Procurement. (His previous guest posts are still archived.) Back on August 1 of this year, I posted an article that included these paragraphs:Here’s the tactic for the day. Run a grammar [...]

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Share This on Linked In Editor’s Note: Today’s post is from Dick Locke, Sourcing Innovation’s resident expert on International Sourcing and Procurement. (His previous guest posts are still archived.) After I made a brief comment on international contracting, the doctor suggested that “maybe I could write an expert piece about international contract [...]

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Share This on Linked In Editor’s Note: Today’s post is from Dick Locke, Sourcing Innovation’s resident expert on International Sourcing and Procurement. (His previous guest posts are still archived.) The issue of global supply chain risk gets a lot of attention nowdays, and it certainly should. However, I’ve seen a few silly [...]

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