The Point

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.

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.

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.

Aberdeen’s 2011 Chief Procurement Officer Summit took place in Boston on November 15^th and 16^th. During the webinar, Aberdeen shared the primary themes from the event, key recommendations from all the presentations, and data points collected from Summit attendees. They also outlined their supply management research, event and content plans for 2012.

I see this week's ISM event as being part of a recent increase in interest about the procurement of services.  I’ve worked in this category and it is truly a beast all its own. They mentioned visibility in their event description, and although that is a common enough concept in procurement it is the whole deal with meetings spend. While all services projects are complicated due to the relationships in place, addressing meetings spend has its own sensitivities. Not only is it a relationship-heavy category, but the times when meetings need to be managed are usually of high importance and high visibility.

You can listen to an on demand version of the event here.

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.

The featured speaker on this event was Jacob Gorm Larsen, head of eSourcing at Maersk procurement. I’m almost always impressed by the key speakers on these webinars, but Jacob is the first speaker that I would absolutely want to work with. You can watch the on-demand version of the webinar by clicking here. If you are interested in doing some additional reading, you can check out our Wiki-Wednesday page on Mathematical Optimization or our blog post on Optimization in the Real World.

I have a background in services, both professional and otherwise, and this is always an interesting topic. In my opinion, the most important take-away from the event is that more companies are breaking down the wall and not only addressing services spend but having success. Although there are complexities with services like legal and marketing that don’t exist with straightforward services like facilities maintenance or contingent (temporary) labor, procurement groups are more than capable of handling those complexities just like they have done with complex materials spend.

Last week’s event on sourcing complicated services is now available on demand by clicking here.

This week, our webinar notes are on ‘What’s Next for Procurement”, the monthly Next Level Purchasing Association member call featuring Peter Nero from Denali Group.  If you are not a member of the NLPA, I encourage you to join – it is easy and free.  Click here for more information.

While this presentation is not available as a recording, you can read a whitepaper by Denali Group on their Procurement Innovation Research for 2011.

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.

I had a unique opportunity yesterday to participate in a live event – an international conversation of sorts. Source One presented a webinar at the University of LaSalle's School of Business in Mexico City about a topic near and dear to their hearts: nearshoring. While this isn’t a new topic, the presentation was so completely different that it was hard not to feel enthusiastic about the opportunities that exist. In the last 10 months, I have attended roughly 100 webinars. None of them had a live video feed from another country and none of the presentation formats were able to capture the enthusiasm that this audience expressed. I highly encourage more event planners and hosts to try to incorporate applause into their events – somehow it makes the message more exciting.

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.

If you read (or listened to) our event update on Monday, you know one of the events I was looking at seemed to be a re-run of a CPO Agenda webinar run last month. “Strategic Sourcing – Quick Wins to Boost this Year’s Savings Total” by ISM and CapGemini was anything but a repeat. Different speakers, different format, different message – but every bit as worth attending.

Covering the September ISM Non-Manufacturing Report on Business this week, with the uncertainty of the supply availability and prices of Diesel Fuel, reminded me of a very good webinar I attended last month but didn’t have an opportunity to share with you. My notes are below, but you can also view the webinar recording and download the sides from CombineNet’s site.

As CombineNet did, I’ll start my notes with some background information on sustainability itself, aside form any transportation specific concerns. I have also included some additional reading at the end of my post if you want to know more.

Despite the fact that this is prime conference season, not all of us have the time or budget to attend all of the events we would benefit from. We were lucky to have eyes and ears on the ground at this year’s eWorld Purchasing & Supply conference in London. I would like to thank BMP community member Bernard vanHaeften of Variations Procurement Consultancy for his willingness to help make the content and discussion topics from the event accessible to the rest of us. He secured permission for us to share the event presentations with you, and in true Buyers Meeting Point style, his notes are below so you can get through the highlights quickly.

Maybe it is the dynamic speaking skills demanded by the internet radio format Jon Hansen knows so well from his PI Window on Business program, but his remote keynote speech at eWorld makes the case that being physically present is no longer necessary to contribute to a conference.  (Besides, who doesn’t speak more eloquently when given the opportunity to secretly present in bunny slippers?) The content is the critical component to any speech, and ‘The Changing (or Changed) Face of Procurement’ does not disappoint.