The Economist has a good article this week (actually last week, but I’m just getting to it now) on innovations in emerging markets. Two of the three innovations are particularly interesting: Scaling out not scaling up: Economies of scale have long been viewed as the key driver for price but many products and services are [...]
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I’ve yet to meet a vendor of outsourced back office solutions who hasn’t said as part of their sales pitch “And the employees are more engaged because they are our front office – not your back office!” This is simply not true. There’s no correlation between employee engagement and outsourcing, either positive or negative. Sometimes [...]
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For the better part of the past year, I’ve been setting up a finance & accounting shared services centre in India. During this time, I have gained a much deeper understanding of the transactional bedrock underlying supplier relationships. I started my career as a lawyer reflecting on contractual nuances and I now find myself at [...]
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It’s been an exciting few months in my world. Over the past year I’ve been moving out of procurement / vendor management and into shared services more broadly. This has culminated in a couple of promotions and posting to Delhi for a year were I’ll be working out of our Gurgaon office. Given my new [...]
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I’ve just received a newsletter from a local procurement consultancy that opens with the following …For all the recent grim news and economic forecasts, 2009 is shaping up to be one of those years where anything could happen. The current set of economic conditions provides a huge opportunity for procurement to demonstrate how the function [...]
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Designing a new system? The single most important question to ask is what do I not need?
Apple asked how few controls do we really need to operate an mp3 player and the iPod was born. Asus asked what does a user really need to surf the net and the eee pc burst onto the market. [...]
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