The Point

This week’s featured webinar was presented by ISM, Ariba, and CFO Research Services. It was based on a recent study of 263 finance executives from North America, Europe and Asia about their perceptions of procurement. The study was originally conducted in 2007, so this can also be considered a five-year revisit.  If you are interested in reading the full report, you can download it for free (without registration) from CFO.com.

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.

This week’s event pick was hosted by Sourcing Interests Group and sponsored by Ariba but the team from McDonald’s absolutely stole the show. They shared information so detailed that SIG was unable to share the slides from the webinar even with their own members. In an effort to respect their wish to contain the detailed information they shared within the live session, I will focus on their general recommendations regarding a successful category management program and how it is different than traditional strategic sourcing.

We are all guilty of getting comfortable with what we know. It is easier to get complacent with what you know than to stretch to find alternatives. This is true when sourcing the same category multiple times. Looking for additional suppliers and more in depth RFP questions takes WORK - not that!

This blog from Sourcingmfg.com discusses just that topic. How to match buyers and suppliers?

This week I attended a webinar by Ariba and ISM on collaborative sourcing. And in this case, the collaboration ended up being not with the competition or others in the supply chain, but with between procurement and internal stakeholders. Not what I had thought (thanks a lot, Google. We'll talk later...) but still a valid topic and just as tricky.

The following are some of my notes on the webinar. Click here to connect to the archive.

This week brought us an insightful webinar from Ariba and SIG called “Vision 2020”.  Since this was the largest SIG webinar ever (over 800 attendees) many of you may have been there – in fact I hope you were.  It was a fast-paced, exhilarating (and sometimes scary) hour that I am glad I didn’t miss.

The webinar covered just the tip of the findings from Vision 2020 – a collaborative effort between Ariba and a panel of global C-level executives with experience managing $1B in spend each. The full document can be downloaded HERE free  from Ariba’s site. I think we all owe it to ourselves to read it and carry it with us to meetings, and refer back to it until it is tattered and worn!