Procure IQ

Performance measurement, the foundation of supplier performance management, scorecards, and outsourcing deals, is a key to supply chain success but, like everything else, it has to be done right. That’s why I enjoyed the article on the five traps of performance measurement (subscription required) that the Harvard Business Review published late last year. If you avoid your traps, you greatly improve your chances of success. Measuring Against Yourself While you should measure against past performance and goals to insure that you’re improving, what ultimately matters is how well you’re doing against the …

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Is Purchasing Magazine trying to give me a heart attack? Isn’t it enough that they refuse to acknowledge the presence of Sourcing Innovation (which, as you know, is one of the few blogs that brings you real supply management content you can use day-in, day-out six days a week, every week) which they dropped from their “News from the Web” feed years ago (when I first ripped apart one of their sloppy articles)? After reading a few of their recent articles, my blood is boiling!That’s right! That bullcr@p that Spend Analysis is expensive (see last Thursday’s post) …

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Recently, The Center for Supply Chain Research at the Penn State SMEAL College of Business published a report on Supply Chain Risks: Barriers to Manufacturing in Emerging and Developing Markets that reiterated what we’ve known for a while; that 73% of U.S. companies with revenue exceeding $1 Billion experienced supply chain disruptions in the past five years, that 70,000 companies went bankrupt in China in 2008, and that the average American company operating procurement in Asia found that the average company lost 8.2 Million over a three year time span due to illegal bribes and kickbacks.It also told us that …

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Recently Dan Gilmore, Editor of Supply Chain Digest, published a “first thoughts” piece on Understanding Supply Chain Analysts. In it he made a number of valid points, including: Analysts can provide useful information and insight Analyst research / opinions can have a significant impact on how a company views specific technology vendors and options. Technology vendors often change product roadmaps and messaging to match what they think the analysts want to hear. Some analysts are primarily vendor focussed on their client base while others are “consumer” focussed and …

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The simple act of placing data in front of people changes their behaviour.For example, as per this recent blog post from Andrew Winston’s Harvard Business Blog, if you put an energy meter inside a home and show people total usage in real time, a miraculous thing happens: they use about 10% less energy. This is because data makes people smarter and inspires them to make small changes to save money.So get yourself a real data analysis solution. And by this, I don’t mean a “spend visibility” system that gives you a high-level spend report once a day that …

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Today’s post is from Chris Jacob Abraham of IBM and blogmaster of @ Supply Chain Management.Are you pat down with the “V” shaped recovery or perhaps the “U” shaped recovery? Or perhaps, you’re attuned to stair stepping model of recovery that is headed to the dungeon of doom (nefarious toothless grin on my face)? As you might gather from the dates between the last post and this one, I’ve been so long in the dungeon of doom, it is so dark there, that I’ve made only the slightest efforts to surface albeit with a severe case of decompression. I am …

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Paul Patterson’s Beyond the Beaker, a book on How to Achieve Successful Market Adoption for Emerging Technologies, is a book that belongs on every innovator’s bookshelf. Whereas there are a lots of books on how to innovate, and even a fair number on how to take your product to market, there are very few that overview all of the relevant issues that need to be addressed and managed, fewer still that address both the innovator and corporate perspectives, even fewer still that illuminate the roadmap with real case studies, and next to none that uses successes and …

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As per Wikipedia, public relations is the practice of managing the communication between an organization and its publics. Let’s say it again. It is the practice of managing the communication. Not developing the communication. And certainly not developing the marketing plan that the communication is part of.So how come it’s now becoming the norm that not a week goes by where I don’t hear of yet another vendor engaging a PR Firm to develop its marketing plan and spending, at least in my view, an obscene amount of money for the privilege? (Now, I’m not saying you …

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A recent article over on Supply Chain Brain on preparing for uncertainty noted that:the imperative of capacity flexibility for design and development departments is especially high in the current uncertain climate. Even though the pressure on controlling operational cost is intensifying, leading to shedding excess capacity, not being able to fulfill demand when needed could lead to a lost customer. And losing customers due to capacity shortfall when demand does spike can lead to more losses than having excess capacity, which limits your loss to overhead. But how do you create flexible capacity? The article gives …

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Louis Gerstner recently said that short-term investment gains should be taxed at 80%. It’s one of the most logical things I’ve ever read. But such a logical plan to fix what’s wrong with our greedy economy by taking us back to good old-fashioned long term thinking would likely be the end of Wall [...]

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