The Point

This week’s featured event was presented by Sourcing Interests Group and Emptoris (an IBM Company). The main speaker, Mitch Plaat, is Con-way’s VP of Procurement and CPO and has been with the company for 22 years. He has overseen quite a transformation, starting six years ago with the decision to engage Emptoris for help in the form of solutions and services.

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.

This week’s SIG webinar (sponsored by MFG.com) gave us an interesting look inside the procurement, product design, and engineering teams at Kimberly-Clark (NYSE: KMB). There is a good chance that you have a number of K-C products in your home right now: Kleenex, Scott, Huggies, and Cottonelle are just a few of their brands. Unless you are a SIG member you can’t listen to the event on demand, but there is a case study overview available from MFG.com.

This week’s SIG webinar provided a great case study of a procurement transformation – taking an organization from tactical purchasing to a true procurement organization. In this case, the focus was on HealthNet, a health insurance provider looking to bring their indirect spend (effectively all of their spend) under management.

Every three years, AT Kearney conducts their ‘Assessment of Excellence in Procurement’ global study. One of the interesting things they do is look at the participants and segment the very best (based on a number of practices and dimensions) into their leaders category. Of the 200+ participants thus far, only 17 have been designated as leaders – that’s just 8.5%. As they presented the findings of their study on the SIG webinar, they compared the 2011 results to the 2008 results, but they also compared the ‘Leader’ results to the ‘Follower’ results.

This week our webinar notes come from Tuesday’s Sourcing Interests Group presentation of “VMO Models and Guide to Structuring” with speaker Michele Flynn, president of Enterprise Management Solutions.

Sadly, SIG’s webinar archives are only available to their members. On the other hand, EMS has posted the slides here so you can at least take a look at those.  While the commentary from a webinar always adds significant value, there are a couple of specifics slides that I will highlight in my notes below.

This week’s webinar on legal process outsourcing by SIG was an interesting look at a profession in much the same position as procurement; legal departments are cost centers whose responsibility can be fairly clearly divided into strategic and tactical responsibilities, leading corporations to outsource some of the work in order to minimize overhead. You can read more about the parallels between legal and procurement in my recent blog post ‘Professional Responsibility in Procurement’.

As you’ll read more about on Friday, this week’s BMP event pick is the Ethics of Legal Process Outsourcing presented by Sourcing Interests Group. As a tie in, today’s Wiki-Wednesday topic is “Professional Responsibility” – mostly because the phrase “competent representation” doesn’t exist as a Wikipedia page. Without stealing all my own thunder for later in the week, the event was very interesting, and it gave me an opportunity to consider some parallels between the outsourcing of legal services and procurement’s contribution to an organization.

Only SIG members can listen to archived recordings of their webinars. If you are a member, you’re in luck. If not, it’s not too late to register for an upcoming webinar – they do one each Tuesday. The following are our notes from attending this week's event.

This week, BMP attended a webinar on nearshoring by Sourcing Interests Group. Unfortunately, you have to have a membership to listen to the recording, but they put on a webinar each Tuesday. Visit our events calendar for a listing.

As the session involved a company called Softtek, and so the geographical focus of the nearshoring was Canada and Mexico. You can read a white paper on nearshore outsourcing on their website.

I've always thought of Knowledge Management systems as databases full of documents. Unwieldy, outdated, only updated when your boss reminds you that participating will be part of your annual review cycle. As it turns out, most of what we already do can be worked into a knowledge management program - we just have to be deliberate about where information goes. The other take-away isn't a new one, but it seems to be one of the hardest ones to maintain.  At the end of a project, it is important to download and record your experiences and lessons learned - for yourself next time or someone else down the road.

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!

SIG Webinar: Next Generation Sourcing Strategies For Facilities And Maintenance Transformation, Presented By A.T. Kearney (Daryl Watkins, Senior Sourcing Manager and Bernard “Bud” J. Going, Director of Procurement).

BMP viewed Sourcing Interests Group’s recent webinar, “Uncovering the Telecommunications Spend Treasure Trove” Presented by Emptoris, on February 22, 2011 and took the following notes.

We haven’t found the archived copy posted on either SIG or Rivermine/Emptoris’ websites yet, but if you are sourcing or managing telecom category spend, there are several other webinars and a series of whitepapers available on Rivermine’s website. (Emptoris announced their acquisition of Rivermine on January 6, 2011)