"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet."
-- William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
We often talk about how procurement and supply management professionals need to focus less on negotiating savings and more on creating value. But the actually process we are supposed to follow to acco...
This week Zycus and Ardent Partners presented ‘Sourcing for Value: Using Non-Price Attributes to Find the Best Suppliers’. Historically, not making an award decision based predominantly on price has been a reason stakeholders give for not wanting to follow the strategic sourcing process. Today, procurement professionals and the technology they use are accustomed to incorporating quantitative and qualitative measures of value into optimization scenarios and award decisions.
This week’s Wiki-Wednesday article is about the challenges of capturing savings due to cost reduction and avoidance. One of the sections addresses Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), and the difficulties of calculating and reporting on those costs.
This week’s featured webinar was presented by the Next Level Purchasing Association and featured Joe Payne and Bill Dorn from Source One Management Services as the main speakers. You may also know them as the co-authors of ‘Managing Indirect Spend’, a relatively new publication that walks through the challenges and opportunities associated with indirect spend as well as a few category-based case studies.
Like their book, the guys from Source One kept their speaking points to the practical learnings from their extensive combined procurement consulting experience.
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.
The preface to The Procurement Game Plan by Charles Dominick and Soheila Lunney starts with the question, “Why another procurement/supply management book?” Good question. For a constantly evolv...
Written by the co-chairmen of the Deloitte Center for the Edge, an organization that helps senior executives make sense of and profit from emerging opportunities on the edge of business and techn...
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.
Today’s eSourcing Wiki-Wednesday topic outlines the many roles and responsibilities associated with being a successful sourcing professional. One of those roles is to provide ‘deep domain expertise’:
Management, members of the individual procurement organizations, and stakeholders will all expect the procurement professionals in the center of excellence to have deep domain expertise, especially in strategic categories.
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.
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.
At Buyers Meeting Point, we often have opportunities to recommend the publications we have read, reviewed and endorsed to our supply management colleagues. Vested Outsourcing by Kate Vitasek...
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’.
For anyone that has ever run an eSourcing project, there is a typical flow that most processes follow. The project kicks off, and everyone’s focus is split between costs and known issues with the incumbent suppliers(s). Procurement uses historical spend to put together a list of line items with quantity and specification data. The company’s standard list of supplier questions is loaded into the eRFX system, along with any additional questions for suppliers that relate to the category of spend in question or new developments in the industry being sourced from. Everyone works frantically until the day the RFP opens and then – you wait. The project comes to a complete standstill for the two weeks (e.g.) that the RFP is open. Then the mad dash begins again as you wade through and evaluate supplier responses, pricing, and attachments.
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.
This week’s eSourcing Wiki-Wednesday topic is Metrics for the Rest of Us – an article that breaks metrics down into Cost Avoidance and Reduction, Process Improvement, Operations, Customer Service, and Asset Utilization.
The last of the Cost reduction and avoidance metrics, “Spend Under Management” is defined as: Total Spend Under Management / Total Spend.
As noted in the eSourcing Wiki, this is a straightforward calculation. The problem is not with our ability to divide one number by another, but in defining the inputs to the equation. Total spend should be easy, although your department may use either total annual spend or total addressable spend (which is likely to exclude taxes and salaries). The real question is to decide what spend is designated as being ‘under management’.
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 eSourcing Wiki-Wednesday topic is Sourcing Success Enablers. Under the Organizational Best Practices heading is a brief paragraph that gets to the heart of what all procurement and supply management departments need to stay focused on:
“As part of a supply chain focus, successful companies do not overlook indirect categories. Chances are some categories (such as office equipment, professional services, etc.) consume a significant part of the total organizational spend and will also benefit from a review. Strategically source everything. (Often strategic sourcing means outsourcing procurement of non-critical, low value spend, or commodity categories to external organizations that also follow strategic sourcing principles.)”
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.