Author: Tinamarie Rintye, Former Project Analyst at Source One Management Services, a Corcentric Company, now the Manager of Distribution and E-commerce at Esteé Lauder Editor’s note: This a...
The End of Competitive Advantage by Columbia Business School Professor Rita Gunther McGrath provides a perspective on the way businesses should develop and maintain their strategy to remain competitiv...
“I cannot guarantee whether you will be successful after a well-prepared negotiation, but I can 100 percent guarantee failure or finding yourself outsmarted and in a concessionary position if you choo...
“We can spot an Expensive Sentence by its impact. Expensive Sentences limit information. They end conversations. They create urgency and isolation. They reduce options. They steal choice.” (p. xviii) ...
“The traditional procurement environment dies hard. My advice is to change everything. Job title, roles, nomenclature, even work area change helps. If you are dedicated to cross functional teams a tru...
This week’s featured event was hosted by Sourcing Interests Group and presented by Denali Group’s John Evans and Grant Dearborn. Their ‘Five Steps To Creating A Successful Procurement Strategy’ logically started with their working definition of strategy, one that is specific to procurement:
“[Strategy] Defines a plan for optimizing external spend, procurement operations and other value contributions in a manner that supports the overall corporate agenda.”
This week BMP attended Gartner’s webinar titled ‘The Comprehensive Guide to Effective Vendor Management’ with Research VP Helen Huntley. Below are our notes. The archived recording can be found here.
This week’s webinar notes are from a February 3rd webinar hosted by SAP Ariba and presented by Ed Cone at Oxford Economics and James J. McDonald and Luisa Gonzalez at COACH. The event is available on demand here.
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.)”
The pace of the year will really pick up from here… I won’t have any recommendations next week because of the Thanksgiving holiday in the US, and then there are just three weeks of events left in the year. December is starting to fill in, so take a look ahead – there are some great events up already.
In particular, I recommend “The Psychology of Change” being hosted by The Myers-Briggs organization on December 5th. While it isn’t specifically for a procurement audience, it is a great opportunity to think about change management from a group and individual personality perspective.
BTW: If you haven’t already, sign up for our mailing list to be sure you get my weekly recommendations in your Inbox each Monday.