This week’s webinar notes are from an April 30^th event hosted by Sourcing Interests Group and presented by Denali’s Alan Veeck and special guest Paul Smith from ‘Lead with A Story’, a coach, speaker, and author.

The webinar explored how professionals can leverage the techniques of storytelling to build influence and communicate an important message in an effective way. In Smith’s terms, storytelling is simple, timeless, contagious, and memorable, and it works across demographics.

Within the context of procurement, Denali has been incorporating storytelling into the training they provide to category managers. With the wide range of responsibilities being handled by category managers today, they have to function within an operating model that allows for proper division of labor. Coaching them is like cross training, bringing together a range of diverse skills that will help them become more strategic.

The lessons from this webinar combine to create something like ‘communication theatre’ that you can leverage to get your message through – as long as you are willing to put in the effort up front. What the speakers did not directly address in this event, but that should not be underestimated, is the time and planning required to apply storytelling. You have to know your audience, craft a story in such a way that it has the desired effect, and choreograph the execution carefully.

These webinar notes are from a May 19^th event sponsored by GEP and presented by the Hackett Group’s Kurt Albertson. If you are interested in viewing it on demand, GEP has it up on their site, accessible after a free registration.

This event was very ‘man-moment-machine’ in its approach to procurement’s current status and future potential. Albertson opened the event by talking about the facts that net margins have not returned to their pre-recessionary (2007/2008) levels and revenue growth is down. While this sounds like bad news and more bad news, it is really a confirmation that procurement’s search for something new is right on target. Companies as a whole are going to have to make changes in order to be successful going forward. Innovation and expanding into new markets have become the priorities as companies strive to improve their growth rates and potential.

“The bigger you are, the more likely you are to fail because of the change required in aggregate.” – Thomas Young, Founder and Managing Partner of RUMJog Enterprises

“This is real.” - Frank Casale, Founder of the Institute for Robotic Process Automation and the Outsourcing Institute

These webinar notes are from a May 28^th event run by the Institute for Robotic Process Automation (IRPA), which was founded by the Outsourcing Institute’s Frank Casale. Casale was joined in the event by a panel of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) experts: Raheem Hasan (CMO, IRPA), Pat Geary (CMO, Blue Prism), and Thomas Young (Founder and Managing Partner, RUMJog Enterprises).

These webinar notes are based on a June 17^th event hosted by Puridiom and presented by Andrew Bartolini from Ardent Partners. If you are interested in viewing the full event on demand, you can do so here after a quick registration.

Based on Ardent Partners’ CPO Rising 2015 Report (which you can read more about here) this event focused in on the CPO’s agenda around collaboration, which is arguably one of the highest priorities for everyone in procurement. Even more interesting are the observations we can make when you look at the relationship between collaboration and influence.

These event notes are based on a webinar presented by Supply Chain Insights on June 25, 2015. The webinar can be viewed on demand without any registration requirements here. I advocate seeing it for a look into some of Supply Chain Insights’ research on trends in supply chain talent development as well as to hear the stories shared by the panelists.

Along with moderator (Supply Chain Insights founder and CEO) Lora Cecere, the event panelists were Andrew Byer, P&G’s Associate Director of Supply Network, and Fran O’Sullivan, IBM’s General Manager of Systems, Strategy, and Operations.

These notes are from an August 18^th webinar by the Institute for Robotic Process Automation (IRPA). The primary speakers were Barry Matthews Managing Director at Alsbridge, and Eric Shander, Vice President of Global Technology Services at IBM Global Services.

I’ve been covering all of the Robotis Process Automation (RPA) events based on IRPA’s recently released ebook meant to educate people about RPA. The most important things to know are that RPA is best suited to logic-based, repeatable tasks currently performed by in house employees or third party outsourcers. In some cases, robots can even provide governance or oversight of other robots. The other thing to know is that these aren’t mechanical robots – they are software robots: programs designed to handle tasks and learn over time.

The piece of this particular event that I found the most compelling was the potential for negative impact, or the ‘bad and ugly’ as they put it in the webinar. Let’s face it, as much as people decry the impact of offshoring, RPA’s cost structure and scalability raises a significantly larger concern about job loss. The honest truth is that RPA will have an effect on jobs, but it may not be quite what people think.

These notes are from an August 25^th webinar hosted by Sourcing Industry Group and presented by Zycus. The two speakers were Ian Hinke, Vice President of Sourcing and Vendor Management at PHH Mortgage, and Richard Waugh, Vice President of Corporate Development at Zycus.

This event showcased the results of Zycus’ annual Pulse of Procurement study. This year, the participants included 400 respondents, 80% of which were from large companies (<$500M in annual revenue) in North America (68%). Three quarters of the respondents were in procurement management positions.

Although most of the questions were the standard ones about performance metrics, maturity, and technology adoption, there were some very interesting findings between the lines…

These notes are from a September 2^nd webinar presented by Alexander Linden, Research Director at Gartner. The event is available on demand and can be viewed here. You don’t have to be a hard core analyst to benefit from this event – the take aways were interesting and applicable to procurement even though it wasn’t a procurement-specific event.

These webinar notes are from an October 8th webinar on ‘Supply Chain Risk Management: How to Turn Worst Practices into Best Practices’ hosted by SIG and presented by Rolf Zimmer and Laura Enny at riskmethods. The webinar can be viewed on demand here.

The event opened with a look at what riskmethods considered to be the top megatrends: globalization, outsourcing, digitization, and climate change. Running through all of these trends is the changing role that suppliers, and therefore the supply chain as a whole, plays in our ability to understand complexity and the elevated risk levels and additional risk types it leads to.

Procurement has a tendency to think of supply chain complexity as improving the flow of goods, services, funds, and information between suppliers or tiers of the supply base. Although this expanded perspective is an improvement over where we have been in the past, it is still too simplistic. As Zimmer pointed out in the webinar, supply chains are not just lines from point A to point B, but complex networked structures where half of all disruptions take place beyond the first tier of the supply base.

These notes are based on attending an October 13^th webinar hosted by HfS Research. The event can be viewed on demand here.

The panel included two HfS team members (Phil Fersht and Charles Sutherland) and two executives from Cognizant: Robert Hoyle Brown and Matt Smith. I listened to the event end to end twice – once live and once on demand. The topic of automation is fascinating and it was well covered and discussed in this webinar. My challenge was to figure out what this growing trend means for procurement.

These webinar notes are from a November 5^th event co-presented by Peter Smith from Spend Matters UK/EU and Daniel Ball from Wax Digital. The webinar is available on demand on Wax Digital’s site.

Peter Smith opened this event by offering up a powerful statistic from Wax Digital's own research: when asked, 44% of procurement teams said they have a close working relationship with the business. Unfortunately, only 18% of those business stakeholders agree. This amounts to a 25% ‘relationship leakage’ – or as Smith said in the event, self delusional procurement organizations. And that doesn't even touch on the 56% of procurement teams that DON'T think they have good relationships with stakeholders...

The idea of this event was to look at multiple kinds of integration that procurement has responsibility for. When Smith talked about the three models for procurement (see below), the focus was decidedly on information and communications flows rather than data and technology. In my opinion, that is fantastic because it expands the role and potential impact of procurement through our understanding of our own way of working.

This week’s webinar notes are from a November 19^th event hosted by BravoSolution and presented by Mickey North Rizza, their VP of Strategic Services and former AMR Research/Gartner analyst. As of December 2^nd, the event was not yet available on demand on their website. In the meantime, BravoSolution does have a whitepaper with the same title written by North Rizza if you are interested in more. Click here to download it.

This week’s webinar notes are from a December 1^st event hosted by the Harvard Business Review. The speakers/presenters were Michael Porter (yes, that Michael Porter) and PTC CEO James Heppelmann. The event is available on demand here.

This week’s webinar notes are from a January 27^th event hosted by BravoSolution and presented by Sigi Osagie (author of ‘Procurement Mojo’) and Peter Smith (Managing Director, Spend Matters UK/Europe). Once the event is available on demand, it should be available here.

This week’s webinar notes are from a February 3^rd 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 webinar notes are from an event presented by Bertrand Maltaverne, Senior Business Consultant at Pool4Tool, and hosted by Procurify. You can view the webinar on demand here. In the meantime, you may enjoy listening to a recent BMP Radio podcast with Bertrand and “Sourcing Doctor” Michael Lamoureax. Bertrand also has a great blog on Medium: check it out here. 

This week’s webinar notes are from a September 8^th webinar sponsored by APICS Southeast and presented by Melissa Wright, VP of Supply Chain at Prayon Group. The event is available on demand on YouTube.

Last week, Procurious ran a webinar on cognitive technology along with panelists from IBM, Cognitive Scale, and the Entrepreneur’s Fund. The webinar is available on demand as a free, 2-part course on Procurious. For more about the webinar, or to view it on demand, click here.

As you might expect, terminology and definitions were very important in this webinar. What is cognitive computing? How is it different than AI? And who, exactly, is Watson?

This week’s webinar notes are from a May 23^rd event hosted by BravoSolution (part of their 2017 Real World Procurement Series) and presented by Dr. Rob Handfield, Executive Director of the Supply Chain Resource Cooperative, and the co-author of The Procurement Value Proposition and a new title being released in June, The LIVING Supply Chain: The Evolving Imperative of Operating in Real Time. The webinar is already available on demand here.

These webinar notes are based on an April 26th webinar presented by Resilinc and Hogan Lovells and hosted by Supply & Demand Chain Executive Magazine. Here is the link to the on demand registration page.

As I mentioned in my weekly webinar recommendations post, I trusted S&DCE as the host of this event because I’ve seen them cover equally ‘hot button’ topics with balance and a high degree of professionalism in the past. This event was no different – in fact, Resilinc CEO & Founder Bindiya Vakil opened the webinar by making the comment that the topic would be handled as a business issue – not a political one.