(8/1/2011) BMP's Event Picks of the Week

You can view all upcoming events on our site in a weekly listing or on an ongoing basis in our monthly calendar. We visit over forty sources to come up with the listing so you can check one central place to see who is hosting webinars, conferences, and more.  We don’t help run the events or have any affiliation with the hosts. We see this as a valuable service we can offer to you.

If you'd prefer to LISTEN to an update, we also do a weekly Blog Talk Radio update on Jon Hansen's PI Window on Business program. Click here to listen to the latest episode. Please note that each Monday the update plays at 10pm EST. We will update the page with the newest episode is available.

Sourcing Interests Group is running a webinar dramatically called “Piercing the Veil: How to Use Market Pricing for Services Spend Intelligence.” I really like the idea of making more use of indexes and commodities to anchor contract or proposal pricing, and my category specialization was initially in services. Add the Spend Matters team to the topic, and you have a winner of a webinar. Now that all being said, in the description for the event, SIG says (quote) “Historically speaking, even though procurement has been one of the least analytical and data-driven professions, it should be amongst the most (end quote). “  Okay, so we could all use a little more practice using indices and commodity pricing to understand the market forces at play in our buying activity, but not analytical? Not data-driven? Them’s fightin’ words in my opinion. Or maybe it is just a clever ploy to get us to attend the event.

I’ve also started watching the events listings on LinkedIn for new event sponsors. This week I found one by Kinaxis called “An Introduction to Supply Chain Response Management – driving supply chain performance through responsiveness to unexpected events.” Sounds good to me – becoming better prepared for the unexpected is all the rage right now. I’ve already registered so I can pre-screen them as a future source of events, but the topic alone is very promising and you may hear more from us on this later in the week if it plays out.

Thursday, Zycus is sponsoring an event on increasing visibility into supply-side data as a means of bolstering relationships and increasing collaboration between buyer and seller.  The draw in this event is less the topic than the speaker, Roy Anderson, CPO at Metasys and one of Ardent Partners’ 2010 CPOs Rising.

If we hear of new events, we update our site throughout the week, so check back to see if anything new hits.