As a procurement professional, I am frequently tasked with conducting a spend analysis on behalf of current and potential clients, but for those outside of the industry, this may be an unfamiliar exer...

One of the reasons procurement has always been a process-driven function is because we are tasked with managing buyer behaviors as much as we are addressing and analyzing spend. Spend is trackable, re...

Editor's note: Buyers Meeting Point would like to thank partner and colleague Jeanette Jones of Cottrill Research for this week's webinar notes. The original posting can be viewed on the Cottrill blog. For our readers without a background in etymology or taxonomies, an ontology is the study of categories of bring as well as their interrelations. In a procurement context, this can most clearly be seen in spend analysis through the category structure and hierarchy used by the company to group and organize transactions.

There are many articles and reports about using Big Data for supplier risk, but there is still confusion about what Big Data is and how exactly one moves forward. Tom Fishburne at marketcartoonist.com succinctly sums it up with this gem, “many companies struggle with small data, let alone big data.”