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Chemical & Plastics Prices – 2023 & Outlook

2023 was a very good year for purchasing, where most products showed price decreases. This is in contrast to 2022, which was one of worst years for purchasing over the last 16 years. In August of last...

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Chemical & Plastics Prices – 2023

In January of this year my article, Chemical Prices Through Pandemic and War, published by Buyers Meeting Point, provided price analyses from 2019 to 2022. The article also predicted, based on third-p...

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Chemical Prices Through Pandemic and War

Chemical & Polymer (C&P) prices are volatile due to supply/demand balance and feedstock prices like Crude Oil and Natural Gas, and, most certainly, specific events like the pandemic and geopol...

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Patent Ownership v. Private Company Incentive

Editor's note: In July of 2022, Wen Xie, a Patent Attorney, joined me for an episode of Dial P for Procurement that considered whether the World Trade Organization's decision to waive COVID-19 patents...

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RPA and Soft Skills: Why you shouldn't fear being replaced by a robot

It has become increasingly common to hear about technological disruptions. Every day there is a new tool, software, methodology or someone trying to do something different. And this is excellent! Tech...

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Why Even Medium-Sized Companies Need P2P Software to Ensure Operational Efficiency

When SMBs launch, they tend to have informal procurement processes. This informality might work with four to five employees and a handful of customers, but it simply isn’t practical for a growing busi...

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Why is data management hard for procurement? The challenge of data combination

What is procurement data? Procurement data includes vendor data, master data, contract data, bills of material, performance data, sustainability score cards, transaction data, purchase order details, ...

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What is democratization of data? Resistance and a new paradigm

Data democratization is making digital information accessible to wider audience so that the data is available, accessible, and understandable. Democratized data is accessible in a timely manner and un...

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How to Drive Spend Visibility and Control in Tail Spend

Procurement organizations employ spend analytics as one of their major tools for proactively identifying savings possibilities, managing risks, and maximizing their purchasing power. Spend analys...

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Chemical Industry – Snapshot at Pandemic

The Chemical industry has two unique characteristics. It has the most diversified end-use markets across all manufacturing industries, and its biggest customer is the Chemical industry itself (27%). S...

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Applying Digital Procurement to Today’s Business Challenges

Procurement is a significant business function, having operational and commercial impacts on multiple departments. Although procurement process excellence and strategic sourcing initiatives can drive ...

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The Future of Procurement is SRM

Author: Joe Payne, SVP Source-to-Pay at Corcentric Editor’s note: This article is part of the MyPurchasingCenter content archive. It was originally published in 2015 and appears here with minor t...

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Five Questions to Ask in Building Successful OEM Collaboration

Companies spend millions developing and implementing new technology and processes to enable more effective MRO supply chain management practices. The goal is to better manage the flow of spare parts w...

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Chemicals and Plastics - Global Outlook January 2021

The year 2020 witnessed a global Covid pandemic and the biggest GDP reduction since the Great Depression of 1929. Of course, Chemicals & Plastics (C&P) have also been affected globally, but there is no public data available yet for the year.

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Understanding Value Added Resellers in the Procurement Technology Space

Today, most supply chain and procurement software solutions rely on value added resellers as part of their go to market strategy. ‘Resellers.’ as the name suggests, act as the sales, solutioning, impl...

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The Disaster Cycle of Crisis Procurement

One of the aspects of ever-growing experience is the sorrow of knowledge. In times of economic turbulence, procurement could be dragged into a cycle of faulty practices that starts well before the cri...

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How to Use Emotional Intelligence in Procurement and the Supply Chain

My first recommendation on Emotional Intelligence is for procurement and supply chain professionals to benchmark their own personal emotional intelligence aptitude. I used the book Emotional Intellige...

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The Role of Emotional Intelligence in Negotiations

Procurement and supply chain professionals must be aware of and strive to improve their emotional intelligence. It has a key impact in negotiations. Soft skills are becoming more important - even in the digital age.

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Bad Buying – Organizational Competence is Key to Avoiding It

Since I stepped back from running Spend Matters Europe at the end of 2018, I have had more time for cycling and my bass guitar (although if you heard me, you might not be convinced that I’ve improved ...

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Hail to XaaS!

Many years ago, our telecom operator outsourced customer bill printing. That was an example of the basic outsourcing, as the business process still stayed fragmented between the external provider, our...

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