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Webinar Notes: The State of Direct Materials Sourcing

This week’s featured webinar was presented by Directworks, the new name for Co-eXprise, on the state of direct materials sourcing. If you have questions about the rebrand or the reasons behind it, you can read the press release here.

 

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Webinar Notes: Beyond the Merchandise – Victories in Retail Indirect Procurement

This week’s featured event was presented by CombineNet and took us ‘Beyond the Merchandise’ for a look at ‘Victories in Retail Indirect Procurement’. Click here to view the event on demand.

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Procurement Wants Top-Down Support, But What Does it Mean?

We have some active discussions in the Buyers Meeting Point Group on LinkedIn, most recently, an exchange about what makes a good buyer. Ironically, it was asked by someone who is not a buyer themselves.

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Webinar Notes: Calculating and Driving Sourcing Savings to the Bottom Line

In this week’s featured event we heard from the Sourcing Interests Group Thought Leaders Council. They offered their definitions of savings as well as best practices. If you are interested in more about the members of the Council, read the SIG page about them in the Resource Center.

The Thought Leaders Council advises SIG on the build-out of the SIG Resource Center, makes regular contributions, serves as subject matter experts, and conducts working groups. The Council is representative of the SIG Membership, in that the majority of members are sourcing executives from the Buy-side. The Working Groups take suggestions from the SIG community and build guidelines for sourcing initiatives and categories.

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Webinar Notes: The New Rules of Supply Management

The week’s featured events is ‘The New Rules of Supply Management’ hosted by ISM and presented by Ardent Partners and Ariba, with a client case study from SunTrust Bank woven in.

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Webinar Notes: When Procurement Met Finance - How to Achieve the Hollywood Ending

This week’s featured webinar was hosted by Hubwoo and featured Jason Busch of Spend Matters. ‘When Procurement Met Finance - How to Achieve the Hollywood Ending’ evoked the long bumpy road for Harry and Sally (played by Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan) in the 1989 romantic comedy. The connections between the movie and the challenges of the procurement/finance relationship may not obvious, but Jason did a great job keeping the theme going.

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Webinar Notes: Bridging the Strategic Sourcing and Savings Implementation Gap

This week’s featured event (hosted by ISM and sponsored by Zycus) was primarily presented by Spend Matters’ Jason Busch. The webinar was recorded and will be available on ISM’s webinars page.

 

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Webinar Notes: From Tactical to Strategic: Retooling for Better Category Management

This week’s featured webinar was presented by Denali Group and Sourcing Interests Group. Two members of the Denali Group team discussed four challenges procurement organizations face as they attempt to move away from tactical work and retool themselves for strategic category management:

  • Strategic partnership
  • Resource limitations
  • Organizational expectations
  • Skills gaps
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A Conversation with Author Dr. Tom DePaoli

This month’s featured publication is Common Sense Supply Management – click here to read our review or to order a copy from Amazon.com. Since we have worked with author Dr. Tom DePaoli in the past, we...

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Webinar Notes: Using The Category Sourcing Scorecard To Build A Smarter, Faster Sourcing Pipeline

In this week’s featured webinar, we heard from Ardent Partners Chief Research Officer Andrew Bartolini in an event presented by BravoSolution. Andrew shared a Category Sourcing Scorecard he and his team designed to support sourcing team efforts to build out pipelines that can help allocate team resources and prepare for opportunities.

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Webinar Notes: Aligning Procurement Initiatives to Company Culture

This week’s featured event was hosted by the Next Level Purchasing Association and was presented by Tim Reis, a procurement manager with 10 years of experience, a regular columnist for Next Level Purchasing’s online magazine and a holder of the SPSM certification. Most importantly, he is an active practitioner.

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Book Review: Common Sense Supply Management

Two years ago, we posted our review of ‘Common Sense Purchasing’ by Dr. Tom DePaoli. In September 2012 he published a new book that reflects a broader perspective on his experience and our profession....

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Webinar Notes: Excellence in Purchasing Indirect Categories

This week’s featured webinar had an interesting premise – for the first time this year, My Purchasing Center and ProcureCon Indirect have partnered to sponsor the Excellence in Purchasing Indirect Categories (EPIC) Awards competition – EPIC for short. This week’s webinar recognized the finalists for their achievements in indirect spend procurement by having them present.

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Book Review: Vested: How P&G, McDonald's, and Microsoft are Redefining Winning in Business Relationships

Earlier this year, we reviewed ‘Vested Outsourcing’, the first book in what has become a series of publications by Kate Vitasek and her colleagues on the evolving potential of mutually beneficial rela...

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Webinar Notes: Empowering the CPO Through Data

In this week’s webinar notes we’ll feature two webinars that addressed the idea of empowering CPOs through data or business intelligence: ISM with the Aberdeen Group and IASTA with Forrester Research.

Both events addressed the need for procurement to have sufficient analytical capabilities to support the CPO’s efforts to develop strategies for improvement and risk mitigation, and acknowledge that even the best analytics are not actionable without external benchmarks. As a result, best-in-class companies are making investments in the technology solutions and services needed to improve procurement’s capabilities.

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Procurement Decision Making - Who Empowers Who?

This week’s Wiki-Wednesday article is part of the series on Next Generation Sourcing: Empowerment. As a strategy in procurement, empowerment has the potential to change the course of a project at many...

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Webinar Notes: Strategic Sourcing in Mergers & Acquisitions

This week’s featured webinar comes from the Global eProcure webcast library. If you are interested in viewing this or their other webinars, click here to select a webinar and provide some basic registration information to view.

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Webinar Notes: Putting the ‘World’ into World Class Procurement

This week’s featured webinar was hosted by Sourcing Interests Group: ‘Putting the “World” into World Class Procurement’. Chris Sawchuk, a Principal in the Global Procurement Advisory practice at The Hackett Group, discussed how leading procurement organizations achieve world-class performance by leveraging the strength of a global network. You can access the presentation slides from the webinar here.

 

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Webinar Notes: A Programmatic Approach to Sourcing: Delivering Real, Lasting Value

This week’s featured event was hosted by Sourcing Interests Group and featured two senior members of Denali Group’s team sharing their experiences with the use of strategic and non-strategic category sourcing to meet overall goals. The right balance of the two supported by an efficient balance of people, process, and technology opens the door to long-term value creation and impact within the organization. If procurement organizations are going to excel in today’s climate of scarce resources and high expectations, we need to explore every opportunity to the fullest. And of course the real goal of accomplishing all this is securing a voice for procurement in the strategic planning process of the company.

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Book Review: Negotiation Mastery

One idea plus one idea equals three ideas or more. You have a cow, I have a bull, together we have a business. When the output is greater than the sum of the inputs, this is value creation and it is t...

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