The Point
Buyers Meeting Point attends many sales AND procurement webinars/webcasts. One of the interesting things about consistently reading content from quality sources is that you start to notice trends. It is amazing how often the same topics arise at the same time in different places. We use this blog as a way to help you stay on top of the major themes in procurement and supply chain management.
The Benefits of Optimization
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!
Optimization: Playing the What If Game
Most of us ask the 'what if' question to ourselves about many of our personal decisions. "What if I eat another piece of cake?" "What if I take this job?" "What if I say yes to.....". For such a small word, "if" carries a lot of weight.
In the use of optimization for your analysis of a procurement bid, using "what if" scenarios also carries a lot of weight. In this week's featured eSourcing Wiki article, we introduced the idea of Optimization.
Webinar Notes: Taking Strategic Sourcing to the Next Level at A.P. Moller-Maersk with Procurement Leaders and CombineNet
The featured speaker on this event was Jacob Gorm Larsen, head of eSourcing at Maersk procurement. I’m almost always impressed by the key speakers on these webinars, but Jacob is the first speaker that I would absolutely want to work with. You can watch the on-demand version of the webinar by clicking here. If you are interested in doing some additional reading, you can check out our Wiki-Wednesday page on Mathematical Optimization or our blog post on Optimization in the Real World.
Optimization in the Real World
This week’s Wiki-Wednesday topic is Mathematic Optimization, and that article is the source of all quoted text below. We are covering it because of the CombineNet/Procurement Leaders/A.P. Moller – Maersk event on taking strategic sourcing to the “next level”. For many companies, whether they have implemented a strategic sourcing solution or not, optimization functionality may take a little longer to make use of, both because it is a more complex part of the software but also because the categories that can truly make use of optimization are not low-hanging fruit.
You can read an excerpt from the Wikipedia page on mathematical optimization here, but I am going to take this opportunity to break it down and use examples from procurement/sourcing. The article starts with a straightforward definition of optimization as “the selection of a best element from some set of available alternatives”.