The Point

In addition to the events recommended below, please join me on Tuesday, April 17th for a webinar I am co-presenting with Zycus’ Richard Waugh: “Love Your Sourcing Strategy by Letting it Go.” We’ll be talking about the challenges and rewards of embracing a more distributed approach to sourcing and procurement.

If you like to plan further ahead, I recommend “The Ultimate Measure of Customer Value: Tackling the Amazon Effect” from SCNRadio and TalentStream on May 22nd. Click on the title of each recommended webinar below to view the full description and register.

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I have a bit of a ‘bone’ to pick with this week’s webinar hosts. Usually the week of Thanksgiving in the U.S. is a sleepy time – at least professionally. We all wind down Monday and Tuesday so that on Wednesday we are ready to load up the car and head for Grandma’s house. I was assuming that this year would be the same – including a quiet week for me. Not so much! This week's hosts may be 'turkeys' but their topics and speakers certainly aren't. Not only are there four events taking place on Tuesday, they all look fantastic! Click on the title of each recommended webinar below to view the full description and register.

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.

 This week includes one of the best slates of webinars I have seen go by in a long time. Of the 10 events taking place, HALF of them deserve recommendations. Maybe this is the last ‘big hurrah’ before the official start to summer next weekend? Click on the title of each webinar below to view the full description and register.

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.

This week I had an extraordinary opportunity to learn from and network with some of the brightest minds in procurement. At the first annual CPO Rising Summit, hosted in Boston, MA by Ardent Partners, over 150 attendees saw and heard a remarkable amount of thought leadership in just two days. The speakers – all accomplished executives from world class companies – shared the lessons they learned on their journey to this point as well as their vision for the future of procurement.

If you missed this year’s event, you can get a glimpse of what was shared in the recap webinar being hosted by Ardent Partners on April 12 (click here to register).

This week’s webinar notes are from a March 31^st event sponsored by SAP/Ariba and presented by Andrew Bartolini of Ardent Partners. I assume it will be made available on demand on Ariba’s Resource Page – you can click Show Search Options and Search by Type to focus on webinar replays.

This is Ardent Partners’ 10^th annual CPO Rising research and report. This year’s participant group included 318 CPOs (and similarly positioned procurement leaders) in the survey and a group of 26 who were interviewed for additional information and context.

A new year is upon us and many use that as a time to revitalize their goals and establish resolutions. Very common themes are losing weight, exercising more, paying off those bills and on it goes. As a procurement professional, another resolution could be to advance your career through strengthening your skill set.

Many organizations use the calendar year as their fiscal year so that would include a new budget to be measured against. In order to meet those demands, companies often evaluate if they have the right talent and resources to accomplish those goals.

When I was reading “The Implications of 2015’s Talent Vortex” by CPO Rising, it was during a big cold snap in our region. The wind chill was up to -50F or -45C. That is cold! Certainly not conducive to keeping that resolution about exercising more!

The article discusses three areas that will assist in closing the talent gap for procurement.

• Improved collaboration between procurement and human resources
• Focus on analytics to help understand the complexity of information
• Blending of the technology tools available to best get to an answer

Organizations will state “Our employees are our most important asset” and that is still the case for 2015.

What are you doing in 2015 for a resolution? Are you caught in the Talent Vortex? How is your organization working collaboratively to select and retain their “most important assets?”

 Share your thoughts by commenting below or tweeting us @BuyersMeetPoint.

As seasons change, we clean out our closets and freshen up the household. We may wash windows, and take on household projects like painting and planting gardens.

We love vacation. Who doesn't? The glorious freedom from schedules and responsibilities. Time for adventures and to spend with our friends and families.  Sometimes we like to plan the next one while we are on the current one. That way the post-vacation blues are not so intense. We can look forward to the 'next big thing' as far as vacation goes anyway. 

This week’s webinar notes cover yesterday’s delivery of Ardent Partners’ annual ‘CPO Rising’ report, sponsored by Ernst & Young. The presentation and report are the result of a survey of 273 Chief Procurement Officers and in depth interviews with 24 CPOs. The key word in this year’s report is convergence, as procurement increases their influence over the spend and operation of other functions such as Finance, Marketing, and Business Travel.

The world has been captivated by the Winter Games in Sochi for 17 days. Our family is glued to the events every evening. When they conclude on Sunday, there will be significant withdrawal in our household and many others next week for sure.

This week’s webinar notes are from a January 23rd event presented by Ardent Partners, and sponsored by Puridiom and BravoSolution. An on demand version of the event is available through Puridiom's site.

This week’s featured webinar was a joint effort between ISM, Zycus, and Ardent Partners. It was presented in advance of a two part research series that will be published later this month. The research was “designed to help procurement organizations develop a transformation "blueprint" — a holistic view of the source-to-settle process and the underlying architecture required to support sustainable business process improvement.” (ISM event description).

This week’s featured webinar was presented by Ardent Partners: ‘Game of Thrones: How a Strong CFO-CPO Alliance Can Command Top Performance’. I’ve only seen one episode of the HBO series Game of Thrones – I didn’t have the nerves or the stomach to watch another – but luckily for me there was no violence or bloodshed involved in this webinar.

This week’s featured webinar was hosted by Supply & Demand Chain Executive and sponsored by SAP: Realizing Hard-Won Savings at H.J. Heinz.You can access the event on demand here.

This week’s featured webinar was hosted by BravoSolution with main speaker Andrew Bartolini of Ardent Partners. In addition to being the Managing Partner and Chief Research Officer at Ardent Partners, Andrew also does most of the writing for their blog, CPO Rising. If you are interested in the movement of major corporate CPOs in and out of their roles, that is a great place to track them.

This week Zycus and Ardent Partners presented ‘Sourcing for Value: Using Non-Price Attributes to Find the Best Suppliers’. Historically, not making an award decision based predominantly on price has been a reason stakeholders give for not wanting to follow the strategic sourcing process. Today, procurement professionals and the technology they use are accustomed to incorporating quantitative and qualitative measures of value into optimization scenarios and award decisions.

This week’s featured webinar was presented by CPO Agenda: ‘Practical Steps to Strategic Sourcing’.  Their selection of this topic has interesting timing, as Strategic Sourcing was just crowned as the ‘champion’ in the CPO Rising March Madness tournament. 

Has anyone found a blog they found worth sharing with others this week? Let us know so we can review and highlight it as well. I was reviewing several blogs and found that I could not just pick one and call it the blog of the week...