The Point

This week’s featured webinar was presented by ISM, Ariba, and CFO Research Services. It was based on a recent study of 263 finance executives from North America, Europe and Asia about their perceptions of procurement. The study was originally conducted in 2007, so this can also be considered a five-year revisit.  If you are interested in reading the full report, you can download it for free (without registration) from CFO.com.

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 was presented by IASTA, with speakers from Spend Matters and Cushman Wakefield (a global real estate and facilities management firm). Together they provided a fair balance of general recommendations and practitioner perspective. You can view the slides (with audio) on Slideshare.

This week’s featured webinar was presented by CPO Agenda: ‘Practical Steps to Strategic Sourcing’.  Their selection of this topic has interesting timing, as Strategic Sourcing was just crowned as the ‘champion’ in the CPO Rising March Madness tournament. 

This week’s featured event was presented by Procurian, the new name for ICG Commerce. They officially changed their name in February of this year, at the same time as they launched a philosophy the call “New Procurement”. New Procurement is based on six principles, ranging from leveraging market intelligence to identifying and fueling new sources of growth.

Click here to view the event on demand.

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 featured webinar, The Politics of Outsourcing Roundtable Webinar, was sponsored and hosted by the Outsourcing Institute on March 20^th. You can listen to the webinar on demand here.

This event was conceived in response to Outsourcing Institute members who had concerns about political policy regarding outsourcing based on President Barack Obama’s 2012 State of the Union Address. One quote that was called out in the event overview was that it is time to "stop rewarding businesses for taking jobs out of the country and start rewarding them for bringing jobs back home." (Note: if you are interested in hearing the relevant portion of the State of the Union, listen to the Buyers Meeting Point Weekly Update for March 19th on Blog Talk Radio.)

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 Flip Slide notes are from ValueSelling Associates, a sales training and professional skills development organization. The audio from the webinar as well as the slides are available on their website.

As with the other content we cover on The Flip Side, the message of this sales training session is absolutely applicable to a procurement audience. In fact, if once I’ve shared the list of the ‘5 Keys’ with you, it doesn’t even really look like advice for sales.

On Wednesday, the Sustainable Business Forum hosted "Supplier Management - Social Responsibility" presented by SGS, the world’s leading inspection, verification, testing and certification company. The Sustainable Business Forum is a platform for the voices of leading experts and promotes constructive discussions on business sustainability, focusing on the crucial topics that make up the core of sustainable business strategy.

Last week, MyPurchasingCenter hosted a webinar called, ‘Innovating With Suppliers To Cut Costs, Support Growth, And Navigate An Uncertain Economy’. The main speaker was from Vantage Partners, a Boston-based management consulting firm specializing in negotiation skills development. We don’t usually cover events presented to a buy-side audience on The Flip Side, but this particular event shared a significant amount of supplier perspective on innovation between buyer and supplier.

You can view/listen to the event on demand on MyPurchasingCenter's site.

This week’s featured webinar is ‘Tail Spend Management: How to Squeeze Savings from the Most Fragmented 20% of Spend’ by Proactis. If you are interested in more after reading our notes, you can access a white paper on Proactis’ site.

This week’s featured webinar was the combined effort of Hubwoo, SpendMatters, and CONSOL Energy. The event was a fair balance of product info, background on supplier networks and then the case study by CONSOL. You can listen to the event on demand or download the slides by visiting Hubwoo’s site.

This week’s featured event was sponsored by TradingPartners with key speaker Andrew Bartolini, the Chief Research Officer at Ardent Partners and Editor of the blog CPO Rising.

Beyond the high quality of the presentation itself, I appreciated the global perspective on procurement's activities and opportunities for responsibility and value creation. This was the kind of event that I think would open a lot of C-level eyes to the value of the function that they already have in house. You can request a copy of the slides or listen to the presentation on TradingPartners' site.

This week’s featured webinar was run by ISM and provided a “how-to” on market intelligence with examples of market data usage, potential sources of information and some real-world examples of why this topic is so important (or should be). Although Reed Elsevier (owners of LexisNexis) sponsored the event, it was remarkably non-salesy. The event is available on demand (as are the slides) and can be accessed on ISM’s site with their other Previous Web Seminars.

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.

As I mentioned in this week’s PI Window Blog Talk Radio update, I don’t usually feature previous events, but last week’s Gartner event deserves to be an exception. “Looking for Talented Leaders to Take Sourcing & Procurement to the Next Level!” was an informative half hour event that is pertinent to all career supply management professionals. The event and slides are both available on demand on Gartner’s site.

Last week I attended a webinar called “Negotiating To Win: Strategies And Tactics For Sales Professionals”, presented by ValueSelling Associates. Even though the intended audience was sales professionals, negotiating is negotiating, regardless of which side of the table you are sitting on. As a reminder, if you like the “Flip Side” perspective, check out our sales blog and resource directory for our favorite sources of sales information.

Although we are supposed to be spending the next few weeks resting and planning for 2012, I couldn’t resist taking in one more webinar for 2011. This week’s featured event was based on a research study into the procurement practices of the U.S. Fortune 100 (the top 100 companies in the Fortune 500) conducted by Trading Partners.  You can view the slides here. You can also request a full copy of the research report by emailing This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

For more information about TradingPartners, click here to view their page in our vendor directory.