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 Zycus sponsored webinar featured main speaker Robert Handfield, the Bank of America University Distinguished Professor of Supply Chain Management at NC State. My notes from the event are below. As of these notes being posted, the webinar is not yet available on demand but if it becomes available we will link to it so you can listen for yourself.

What happens when somethings disrupts your supply chain?

Before I even begin my notes, let me just point out that if you are not a member of the Next Level Purchasing Association, you are missing out. Next Level Purchasing offers the SPSM (Senior Professional in Supply Management) certification program. Joining the association is absolutely free and comes with a number of benefits, such as members-only webinars, newsletters, and networking opportunities. If you want to get your feet wet with the kind of programs they offer, there are several mini-courses they offer, completely online and for less than $20! Interested? Good for you! Click here to learn more by clicking on the NLP logo on our partner page. That way Buyers Meeting Point gets credit for your purchase and a portion of the proceeds go to charity.

This week’s webinar notes are actually on an event from a couple of weeks ago: “An Introduction to Supply Chain Response Management – driving supply chain performance through responsiveness to unexpected events release” presented by Kinaxis. I missed it that week, but really wanted to go. Now that I’ve gotten to hear it, I can share my notes with you.

I was really looking forward to this event, and it did not disappoint. This is the first event I have attended by Preparis (providers of an emergency preparedness suite) and I will add them to my list of sources for future webinars. Kudos to Bill Michaels (CEO, ADR North America), David Landsman (Director of Strategic Alliances, MFG.com) and Armistead Whitney (CEO, Preparis) for an exceptionally well done event. You can click here to listen to the event archive.

Recent disasters, whether earthquakes, tsunamis, or tornadoes, have threatened business continuity for many industries. As has been pointed out in many recent procurement webinars, this presents an opportunity for us to step up and prove our strategic value to the organization. We cannot, however, rely solely upon the stories in the news.  We need to educate ourselves and be prepared with suggestions.

BMP viewed Gartner’s recent webinar, “Supply Chain Excellence: how to Reduce Costs and Improve Agility in 2011”, on February 3, 2011 and took the following notes.

The complete archived webinar is available on their site and can be seen (after a quick registration process) by clicking on THIS LINK.

Allow yourself more than the literal time of the webinar to review the presentation materials. Some of the graphic slides are very dense, but are well worth the time to pause the webinar and absorb the content.