The Point

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.

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.

In this year-opening Procurement on YouTube feature, we'd like to kick off the year on a lighthearted note. The team at Market Dojo has put together a series of six very entertaining videos on how to save your company money.

This week’s Wiki-Wednesday article is about the challenges of capturing savings due to cost reduction and avoidance. One of the sections addresses Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), and the difficulties of calculating and reporting on those costs.

Note: This post by Kelly Barner originally appeared in the March 2012 PSD Group Procurement & Supply Chain Newsletter.

In this week's eSourcing Wiki-Wednesday excerpt on Seven Facets of Cost Reduction and Avoidance, compensation structures are brought into question as they incent procurement professionals to behave a certain way, 'Like all employees, a supply manager will engage in behaviors rewarded by the company. This will create a problem if cost avoidance or cost reduction efforts beyond hard savings do not count toward a supply manager’s compensation and performance.'

As organizational expectations of procurement increase, many practitioners are questioning the structure of their compensation plans. Traditionally, procurement professionals received a straight salary. If there was a bonus structure in place, the bonus was typically based on corporate performance against stated goals and qualitative individual performance rather than savings targets.

This week’s event pick was hosted by Sourcing Interests Group and sponsored by Ariba but the team from McDonald’s absolutely stole the show. They shared information so detailed that SIG was unable to share the slides from the webinar even with their own members. In an effort to respect their wish to contain the detailed information they shared within the live session, I will focus on their general recommendations regarding a successful category management program and how it is different than traditional strategic sourcing.

We are all familiar with the line from the "Jerry Maguire" movie - SHOW ME THE MONEY! In procurement we are often asked to SHOW ME THE SAVINGS! The blog of the week discusses just that which is why I selected it.

This week’s BMP event pick, “Quick Wins to Boost This Year’s Savings Total” by CPO Agenda and CapGemini, was an absolute winner.

The event had an interesting format - four speakers, same topic: quick savings wins. While all of the speakers were qualified, two set themselves aside by taking on the harsh realities of trying to increase savings for the year with only a sort time left to go.

This week's Wiki-Wednesday topic is CAPEX (Capital Expenditures) v. OPEX (Operating Expenditures). Once you understand the difference between them, the next step is realizing the impact that distinction has on negotiated savings recognition.