The Point

This week’s eSourcing Wiki-Wednesday topic is barriers to success – and those barriers are specific to strategic sourcing organizations. Broken down into the main categories of leadership, team and project issues, these nine barriers are a who’s-who list of worst case scenarios that should help you diagnose the root cause of the challenges you are facing in your organization.

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.

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”.

“The second step to cure procurement's PR ills is to bring more big personalities and aspiring leaders into the ranks -- folks who aren't afraid to create controversy and manufacture a ruckus internally. It's precisely these types of larger-than-life personalities who previously might have gone into sales, corporate development or finance that our function needs to continuously call attention to itself and shame the business into prioritizing changes that save money. -– Jason Busch, Spend Matters: July 10, 2009

This week I attended the Procurement Leaders / Emptoris webinar on procurement transformation featuring BP Lubricants.  They don't have the archived recording posted yet, but click here for a page on the event - the archive should be available soon.

Buyers Meeting Point attended the February 23rd Procurement Leaders webinar "A Better Way of Buying Contract Labour" sponsored by Beeline and took the following notes. You will notice that several times we reference information at time intervals. The sides were not numbered (as we could see) but it is very easy to navigate within the recording by time.

You can access the archived recording by clicking here.