There’s been a lot of chatter in the market these past few weeks about acquisitions. Some larger players are clearly headed to Costco to look for warehouse bargains (smaller formats and Ma and Pop shops aren’t worth the time for these larger players,…
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The other week, I had the chance to catch up with an old friend and colleague, Paul Martyn, who runs marketing in North America for BravoSolution. According to feedback I’ve heard from several parties who’ve looked at their tool recently, BravoSoluti…
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In the first column in this prediction series on building supplier transparency, I focused on the area of financial and business transparency. But this is only one type of supply chain transparency on which companies will focus on building in 2010, h…
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Over on Supply Chain Management Review, an article by two Wipro consultants suggests that business intelligence (BI) software, such as the kind acquired by SAP and Oracle in recent years, is key to building supply chain visibility. The two argue that…
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Contract Document Control
In contract development, the party that controls the physical production of the contract document and the wording changes during negotiations generally has a distinct advantage. This is particularly true in long or complex c…
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In the last post, I described how price adjustment clauses are commonly misunderstood and end up causing pricing problems between buyers and suppliers.
So, what can you do to ensure that price adjustment provisions are adhered to when math isn’t ever…
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When a buyer is in a position to apply some leverage in negotiations with software vendors, there are three critical provisions that can be used, but may require a significant push:
Maintenance fees as a percentage of the discounted license fee, not t…
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In this penultimate post of this eight-part series, I’m going to help you understand the subtleties of using escalation clauses.
Wait. There’s a problem already.
Do you know what it is?
Well, think about the term “escalation clause.” What d…
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Aberdeen recently released an informative research brief entitled The Supplier Enablement Challenge that pointed out the importance of supplier enablement. They found that Best-In-Class companies that had achieved decent supplier enablement had 15% more spend under management (78% to 63%), requisition-to-order costs that were 30% less ($22 vs $32), requisition-to-order cycles that were [...]
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I ran across an interesting article, which continued my recent trend of running into a great deal of new content about reverse auctions. Sort of a strange phenomenon, but true. This one was discovered on CFO Magazine and tells the story about research being done to create software which attempts to infer the [...]
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