The Point

The eSourcing wiki series this week is about the Benefits of Contract management. There is a very positive story with statistics to back it up on why organizations should choose and implement a process for managing contracts. 

As a buyer, have you ever noticed how much effort sales teams put into the training, strategy, and education of their people? If you type "sales training" into Google, you get well over FOUR MILLION hits. In order to put that figure into perspective, typing "procurement training" into the same search engine pulls only 235,000 results.

Many organizations have difficulty with contracts in two ways. First is getting it through the contract cycle in the first place to finish the sourcing initiative. The longer that takes, the longer it is until the new pricing, service or program is in place. In Jason Busch's 10 Ways to Drive Procurement Influence, Number 2 is moving sourcing into contracts.

This week’s featured webinar was presented by IASTA, with speakers from Spend Matters and Cushman Wakefield (a global real estate and facilities management firm). Together they provided a fair balance of general recommendations and practitioner perspective. You can view the slides (with audio) on Slideshare.

Everyone has a story of a partnership or business relationship that changed over time and eventually dissolved. That is the nature of things. What is difficult is when that was not solidified from the beginning with a contract of some kind to protect both parties and the continuity of the business and the clients. No one likes that type of drama or thrill added to their workday! 

This week’s Flip Side post takes us to a sales article on ‘Selling to the Four Temperament Styles’ by John Boe.

The preface to The Procurement Game Plan by Charles Dominick and Soheila Lunney starts with the question, “Why another procurement/supply management book?”

Good question.

Written by the co-chairmen of the Deloitte Center for the Edge, an organization that helps senior executives make sense of and profit from emerging opportunities on the edge of business and technology.  John Hagel the third, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison authored ‘The Power of Pull’ to talk about a shift in dynamics based on accurate forecasting and predictable market dynamics to transforming corporations from a leadership position on the edge.

Earlier this week, we discussed the Many Hats a procurement professional wears. With that comes the many skills that are needed. I know the breadth of it can seem daunting. You need to be a good analyst, negotiator, influencer, presenter, and communicator. How does anyone fit all those talents into the same resource? And how do you begin to try to train existing staff as they want to develop in their career?

This week’s featured webinar was presented by CPO Agenda: ‘Practical Steps to Strategic Sourcing’.  Their selection of this topic has interesting timing, as Strategic Sourcing was just crowned as the ‘champion’ in the CPO Rising March Madness tournament. 

Today’s eSourcing Wiki-Wednesday topic outlines the many roles and responsibilities associated with being a successful sourcing professional. One of those roles is to provide ‘deep domain expertise’:

Management, members of the individual procurement organizations, and stakeholders will all expect the procurement professionals in the center of excellence to have deep domain expertise, especially in strategic categories.

This week on The Flip Side, we look at a blog post from SalesTrainingAdvice.com on The Most Underutilized Strategic Advantage. With such a promising title, the answer to the question must be something big – huge even to be THE MOST underutilized strategic advantage.

When I read this blog, I found a lot of correlation to raising children. Don't promise if you can't deliver and don't threaten if you won't carry through. I know my son was a fussy eater. One day he was given a choice to either eat the supper or go to bed. It was only 5PM and he choose to go to bed. Needless to say, we would have been the losers in that battle so out came the peanut butter.

As procurement professionals, we are in constant negotiation. These tactics from sales associates often include various types of strong arming.

This week’s featured event was presented by Procurian, the new name for ICG Commerce. They officially changed their name in February of this year, at the same time as they launched a philosophy the call “New Procurement”. New Procurement is based on six principles, ranging from leveraging market intelligence to identifying and fueling new sources of growth.

Click here to view the event on demand.

Basic Advice for staying healthy - KEEP ON MOVING! Walk, swim, play tennis, golf - whatever! Just keep moving! Certainly nothing fancy about that but not always easy to execute on. There is always something more important or pressing in the schedule.

The same is true for our professional health. KEEP ON MOVING - attending webinars, reading and learning new tools and strategies. 

When I was growing up, we had shortcuts to our friends houses in the neighborhood. There was a well worn path through the backyards. Grass did not have a chance of ever growing!!

Everyone loves the benefits of shortcuts. Easier and faster! This week's esourcing Wiki is about the benefits of utilizing optimization. A fancy word for shortcut!

As the economy starts to rebound and leverage positions change, becoming a ‘customer of choice’ is being discussed in many procurement conference rooms. You would think that us sitting around discussing how to be the most fabulous customers possible would be music to a sales person’s ears!

We spoke a few days ago about What is today in 100 years? The theme was about sustainability and adopting that strategy and practices into your procurement organization. Buyers Meeting Point has a motto of Learn, Share, Grow. Certainly as we do that with sustainability practices, we move as a whole faster to a better environment.

You might not think so, but watching the mainstage speakers from AribaLIVE in LasVegas this week was an excellent substitute for being there in person. Somehow the picture in picture slides plus camera angle streaming video captured the energy from the live audience and the enthusiasm of the speakers.

There is a lot of news lately about the Titanic and the voyage of 100 years ago. With that in mind, I looked at today in history and saw many interesting facts from hundreds of years ago to just a few years ago. It always strikes me that something I think just happened was actually in 1980 or 1990 something.

 So how does all this tie into procurement. What are you doing today that someone will look at 100 years from now?