Big News – Art of Procurement Mastermind LIVE Fall is officially open for registrations! This event, which will take place on October 26th and 27th from 10am – 1pm ET, will give you all the tools you ...

Last week, I had the opportunity to provide live commentary during the hybrid sessions at the Supply Chain Insights Global Summit, and this week Procurement Leaders is holding a hybrid event based in ...

Thanks to everyone who joined us for Dial P for Procurement on Supply Chain Now last week. Scott Luton and I had an amazing conversation about risk, resiliency, and agility with Gartner’s Koray Kose a...

This week’s webinar notes are from a December 2013 event presented by Coupa and CFO.com with featured speakers from Deloitte and Blackstone Group. The event is available on demand on CFO.com and if you are interested in the content, there are two Deloitte whitepapers you can download:

• Charting the course - Why procurement must transform itself by 2020
• The Deloitte Global CPO Survey 2013

While the four trends defined by Deloitte’s John Mavriyannakis are new topics for procurement, he did offer some interesting updates, added to by practitioner commentary by Blackstone’s Scott Whitehill.

Last week I spoke with Donna Wilczek, Coupa’s VP of Strategy and Product Marketing, about the mid-January announcement that Coupa had acquired Contractually, described in the press release as “a cloud innovator based in Vancouver, Canada that helps reduce businesses’ reliance on antiquated processes or inadequate technology tools to version control or redline contracts.”

In September, Procurement Leaders ran an article by Tyler Chamberlain, Coupa’s global head of spend management, on the benefits of getting a solid procurement function established earlier in a company’s growth curve.

As he stated in the article’s title, “If it ain’t broke, don’t wait until it is.” The premise is that making investments in procurement talent and technology before problems arise prevents many problems from ever arising. Supplier records that are managed well from day one never need a massive clean up. Processes that have been in place as long as anyone can remember don’t have to overcome compliance hurdles. Spend that is managed centrally never has the chance to break between direct and indirect.

Perhaps more importantly, and as I had an opportunity to discuss with Chamberlain (click here to hear the conversation on BMP Radio), procurement has control of their internal image from the outset and can build their brand around positive results rather than problem resolution. When we hear Chamberlain’s message from this perspective, all organizations and procurement teams benefit from his recommendations, not just the start-ups.

Last week, Coupa ran a three part blog series based on a conversation I had with their marketing team about the role social media plays in supply market intelligence creation. You can read them here, here, and here. This is a subject that Jeanette Jones and I touched upon in our book, Supply Market Intelligence for Procurement Professionals, but it was certainly not our focus.

While social media is a great tool for news gathering and intelligence creation, it isn’t something that was ever part of my formal training – either in procurement or otherwise. I learned how to leverage the power of social media purely ‘in the wild,’ driven by the need to grow the footprint and brand recognition for Buyers Meeting Point. I am so glad that I did, both because we have seen clear benefits in our traffic, and because now I am in a position to apply what I have learned to the work that must be carried out by practitioners.