The Point

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.

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.

I have a background in services, both professional and otherwise, and this is always an interesting topic. In my opinion, the most important take-away from the event is that more companies are breaking down the wall and not only addressing services spend but having success. Although there are complexities with services like legal and marketing that don’t exist with straightforward services like facilities maintenance or contingent (temporary) labor, procurement groups are more than capable of handling those complexities just like they have done with complex materials spend.

Last week’s event on sourcing complicated services is now available on demand by clicking here.

Last week I attended a great webinar (sponsored by the Next Level Purchasing Association) on Procurement Innovation where Peter Nero from Denali Group discussed just how critical a customer service orientation is to the future of procurement within the organization. While I listened to him discuss some of the changes procurement will need to make to improve the status quo, I couldn’t help but think about how sales reps deal with demanding customers on a regular basis. And for them, not satisfying those customers often means not getting a sale.

This week, our webinar notes are on ‘What’s Next for Procurement”, the monthly Next Level Purchasing Association member call featuring Peter Nero from Denali Group.  If you are not a member of the NLPA, I encourage you to join – it is easy and free.  Click here for more information.

While this presentation is not available as a recording, you can read a whitepaper by Denali Group on their Procurement Innovation Research for 2011.

This week I attended a webinar put on by IASTA and Gartner titled: Building Sourcing Credibility. The archived recording is available on IASTA's website here. My take aways and reactions are below.

Many of the approaches below assume that the sourcing program in question is early in its lifecycle: unproven to the organization and somewhat inexperienced with the political dynamics of the larger organization.  That being said, nothing covered in this webinar is untrue for more mature organizations, and most of the information still applies.