After last week’s busy schedule – including a number of webinars and the ISM conference in Houston, this week falls back to a slower pace. I’m seeing a ‘clustering’ effect for the next two weeks, where a bunch of webinars are being offered, but they all seem to overlap. Even this week’s three recommended events all occur on Tuesday within a three-hour window.

If you are planning your webinar schedule beyond this week, I recommend ‘Accelerating Supplier Enabled Innovation – Harnessing the True Power of Supplier Relationship Management’ from Zycus and Four Pillars’ David Atkinson on April 23rd at 11am ET.

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.

 

How Digitized and Transformed Procurement Can Empower the Future Supply Chain (GEP, Procurement Leaders)

April 16th at 10am ET

Just as we need to standardize and centralize enterprise information before we can hope to feed the data consuming automation machine, we need to achieve cross functional understanding before procurement transformation is possible. In this webinar, Paul Blake and Vivek Soneja (both from GEP) will talk about the connections and alignment we need to insist upon between process and technology, strategy and operational decision making.

 

Change Management with a Marketing Mindset (IACCM, ConcordNow)

April 16th at 11am ET

In my opinion, too many procurement technology implementations (contract management ones especially) fall short because we don’t sell them right to the rest of the enterprise. Users want to be wooed and wowed, and talk of governance, standardization, and process compliance don’t move the needle on either front. In this event, we’ll hear from Concord Now’s communications experts on reaching power users, change management, and success metrics.

 

Loss of Innovation, Not Automation, is Hurting US Manufacturing (C-suite Network)

April 16th at 1pm ET

I’ve already registered for this webinar because I think they’ve hit on an important point: falling behind the curve on automation is not the primary reason manufacturing struggles with productivity and production – it is a lack of innovation. As they point out in the event description, U.S. patent filings by U.S. based companies now represent less than half of the total. It isn’t really a surprise – innovation is hard and exhausting (and can be expensive) while automation sounds fast and easy and sort of magical. What we really need is corporate competitive advantage and market share fueled by wild creativity and plain old ingenuity. In this webinar, we’ll hear what companies can do to ensure that their R&D teams continue to innovate and evolve in the face of rising global competition.

 

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