The Point

This week’s featured event was presented by Supply & Demand Chain Executive and John Galt Solutions. The main speaker was Dr. Larry Lapide, the former director of the Demand Management Council at MIT, who also spent time in his career at AMR Research and Accenture.

This week’s featured webinar notes are from an event hosted on Thursday by Supply and Demand Chain Executive, “Supply Chain Risk Mitigation: Minimizing Exposure To Supplier Failure, Volatile Commodity Prices, And Manufacturing Disruption’.

This week’s featured webinar was presented by Supply and Demand Chain Executive. The approach that was emphasized in this webinar got back to old-fashioned data quality. Having a solid dataset to work from is the first line of defense against risk – or at least against missing and mis-information.

Joining Supply & Demand Chain Exec was Jon Bovit, VP of Enterprise Solutions and Chief Marketing Officer for CVM Solutions, a provider of supplier management solutions that enable clients to achieve operational excellence, drive cost savings and mitigate supplier risk.

This week’s featured event was sponsored by Supply & Demand Chain Exec: Vested Outsourcing: Five Rules that will Transform Outsourcing. The main speaker was Kate Vitasek from the University of Tennessee’s Center for Executive Education. She is also the Founder of Supply Chain Visions – a Top 10 Boutique Consulting firm specializing in Supply Chain Management and the author of a new book, Vested Outsourcing: Five Rules that will Transform Outsourcing.

The more complex societies get and the more complex the networks of interdependence within and beyond community and national borders get, the more people are forced in their own interests to find non-zero-sum solutions. That is, win–win solutions instead of win–lose solutions.... Because we find as our interdependence increases that, on the whole, we do better when other people do better as well — so we have to find ways that we can all win, we have to accommodate each other....

—Bill Clinton, Wired interview, December 2000.^[3]

 

Applying proper motivational techniques can be much harder than it seems. Steven Kerr notes that when creating a reward system, it can be easy to reward A, while hoping for B, and in the process, reap harmful effects that can jeopardize your goals.

-Wikipedia, Incentive Theory

I’m planning to cover the ‘Changing Face of Procurement’ as soon as it comes out this afternoon, but this morning I’d like to briefly take you through this week’s Supply & Demand Chain Exec webinar on ‘Identifying and Managing Supply Chain Risk sponsored by Aravo. A Principal Analyst at Forrester made use of some fabulous vocabulary words as she spoke about managing risk. I’ll give you my favorite two here with definitions. I love it when people dust off truly descriptive “big words” and use them comfortably in a presentation. Professional development is not just about getting a better understanding of the subject being discussed, but also giving our minds something fresh to chew on. See if you can both words in conversation today – without getting yourself in any trouble of course.

As I mentioned in this week’s update on PI Window on Business, the level of interaction between procurement and finance is steadily increasing, and in order to represent procurement in its best light to this new audience, we need to make sure we are comfortable talking their talk.  As we learned last week in the S&DCE event on procurement performance measurement, 1/3 of procurement organizations report into finance. Tuesday and Wednesday this week on BMP will be dedicated to getting a better understanding of cash flow – both in terms of its value to the organization, but also in how we are in a position to affect it.

As a starting point, I reached out to The Sales Guy, who is recently back in touch with us after the close of the third quarter, to see how payment terms come up in final negotiations. If you feel like you need a little more background on payment terms and terminology, come back to the site tomorrow as we will be covering them in our Wiki-Wednesday topic.

This week's featured webinar was hosted by Supply & Demand Chain Executive and sponsored by Puridiom and Ardent Partners. My notes are below, and unless you are a member of S&DCE you won't be able to listen to the event archive. Another very good lesson that comes from this event is that you should always register for an event you are interested in, even if there is a chance you can't make it. Everyone that registered for the event received a complimentary copy of a relevant Ardent Partners report that is listed at a cool $399 on their site. You aren't going to get a better offer than that.

I recently discovered a white paper that speaks to the exact premise of “The Flip Side” here at Buyers Meeting Point – that sales and procurement have a lot to learn from each other: ‘When Sales and Procurement Collide’.