This week's Wiki-Wednesday topic is the Pareto Principle - also known as the 80/20 rule. Many of us use it all of the time, but do we really understand the implications of the distribution principle? I'm sure I hadn't fully thought about it until reading up for this weeks' posting. Other things I did not know about the primciple are that it was incorrectly attributed to early 20th century economist Vilfredo Pareto because he observed that 20 percent of the landowners in Italy owned 80% of the land. (He also noted that 20% of the pea plants in his garden produced 80% of the peas...)

In August the SEC adopted a measure that will require public companies to publish a CEO pay ratio in their financial statements. The ratio, which compares median worker pay to the CEO’s salary, is a provision of the 2010 Dodd-Frank act and it takes effect in January 2017.

Some of the early, albeit unofficial, CEO pay ratios seem to demonstrate an enormous pay disparity between the leadership and workers in a company. In other cases, it calls attention to CEOs with strikingly low compensation for the position they hold. For instance, Apple’s Tim Cook has a CEO pay ratio of 43:1, Ford’s Alan Mulally has a 113:1, and Goodyear’s Richard Kramer has a whopping 323:1 ratio. IBM and Intel have ratios of 25:1 and 30:1 respectively.

Any time procurement is evaluating a publicly traded company, we naturally make use of their financial statements and annual reports, which are valuable sources of information. But is this new ratio relevant to the evaluation of a supplier for financial stability, risk, and collaborative potential? Should procurement take this information into consideration when ranking and selecting suppliers?

This week our audio comes from Acquire Procurement Services, a consultancy based in Australia specializing in establishing and re-negotiating contracts across sectors. Their video is titled 'Why do we treat employees and suppliers differently?' and is available on their YouTube channel. In it, they draw a contrast between the information companies share with their employees and how they handle sharing with suppliers who might perform the same or similar functions on their behalf.

You can listen to the podcast on the PI Window on Business Blog Talk Radio channel or on our Sound Cloud page.

Late last week, Proxima Group revealed the initial findings of research they commissioned into how consumers – American consumers specifically, feel about companies that find themselves on the wrong end of a supplier scandal.

According to the release, “The study of typical American consumers, commissioned by sourcing and procurement specialist Proxima, reveals that 74% of respondents stated they would be unlikely to buy products or services from a company involved in controversial supplier practices. Furthermore, nearly 66% would stop giving such a company their business even if that company was the most convenient and cheapest option.”

In his recent book Global Supply Chain Ecosystems, Mark Millar wrote, "…today's supply chains encompass complex webs of interdependencies, frequently spanning the globe, designed and deployed to optim...

According to joint research done by Design News and Exploration and Insights in 2014, 67% of companies have design cycles of 3-12 months. The remaining 33% of survey participants are almost evenly divided between design cycles requiring longer than a year and those taking less than three months. Regardless of their length, we can be sure all of those teams are looking for ways to shorten them, without sacrificing quality or functionality, so that they can be first to market and get the greater share of customers.

CLICK HERE TO READ THIS POST ON DESIGN NEWS

While the need to speed up design cycles is top of mind today, it is not a new initiative. In fact, 20 years ago, Design News published what you might call a “multi-generational design engineering retrospective.” As stated in “Engineering Megatrends,” published on Aug. 28, 1995, “Since the first caveman decided to capitalize on his best idea for a new club, businesses have operated on the principle that the first to get to market owns the market — at least for awhile.” With increased competition from all corners of the globe, and the nearly universal consumer fascination with having the latest, most innovative products, cutting time to market is now a critical element of competitive advantage.”

Despite this pervasive emphasis on “faster, sooner, better,” the same organizations that have multiple design cycles a year only update their approved vendor lists (AVLs) on an annual basis.

This week’s Wiki-Wednesday topic is financial statement analysis, and hopefully you’ll believe me when I say that if I can get comfortable with this, ANYONE else can too. Financial statements are not always easy to read, but with risk management and new supplier identification on the docket, the time has come for all of us to get used to doing it.

Thanks to the 1967 film Cool Hand Luke, one of today’s largest procurement/sales challenges is easy to put into words. We talk about the need for partnerships and collaboration, but how often do we successfully take the effort beyond talk so that it includes open and productive conversation with our reps and supplier account managers?

As we turn the corner into June, the pace of even virtual events has slowed back to what I would expect to see in the summer months of a ‘normal’ year, which this decidedly is not. One sign of light at the end of the tunnel is this: I added a live event (yes, live – in person and with people in attendance) for November of 2020. Time will tell if that is going to hold and what it will look like, but it feels like a glimmer of hope all the same.

We have another strong week of events this week – in fact, you may have noticed that there are several webinar series being hosted in the industry right now. The events this week from Tealbook and Corcentric are part of series where you can register once and receive sign in information for the entire series.

If you are planning your schedule further ahead, I’d love to have you sign up to join me on an event next week hosted by Fairmarkit and also featuring Jill Robbins, Senior Director of Global Indirect Procurement at Elanco, and Erin McFarlane, Head of Strategy at Fairmarkit, Click here to register.

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.

It’s a busy week in procurement with eight webinars on the calendar. I’m recommending two about intelligence and a third about the strategic positioning of suppliers. Click on the title of each event below to view the full description in our events calendar and to connect to their registration pages.

We have another ProcureCon event running this week – this time in Orlando, FL. For anyone not traveling to the Sunshine State, there are a full DOZEN webinars being held, half of which are on Thursday. I’ve recommended four below and provided my reasoning. Click on the title of each event below to view the full description in our events calendar and to connect to their registration pages.

This week is ridiculously busy – there are 15 webinars taking place: five on Tuesday, one on Wednesday, and NINE on Thursday. Given the wide range of choices, it wasn’t easy to pick the best ones, but my recommendations are below. Click on the title of each event below to view the full description in our events calendar and to connect to their registration pages.