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“Because however brilliant our category strategies or engagement roadmaps, relationships still do matter, and nowhere more so than in how we interact with our critical internal stakeholders.”

Reading “A Procurement Compendium: Advice, analysis and humour for buyers (and those who sell to buyers) everywhere” by Peter Smith, former Managing Editor of Spend Matters UK/Europe, is more like having a conversation with a friend than it is absorbing a career’s worth of insights by yourself. I know Peter is fond of meeting up with colleagues at the pub to discuss procurement – or at least he did before he retired, now he probably wants to discuss anything but procurement. That said, the tone and content of this book might have been lifted right out of those conversations.

This week is busy, but it is really only a warm up for next week, which contains a practical webinar grudge match on Thursday. This week's topics and speakers are varied, and I've picked what I think are the best three below. Click on the title of each event below to view the full description in our events calendar and connect to the registration pages.

This week’s webinar notes are from a February 4^th event hosted by Zycus and presented by Peter Smith (Spend Matters EU/UK) and Richard Waugh (Zycus). Once it is available on demand (assuming it will be) it should be listed on Zycus' website.

This week’s webinar notes are from a December 10^th webinar hosted by Directworks. The event will be available on demand in case you were unable to attend – we’ll add the link here once it becomes available.

The event took on an ambitious list of topics in quick dive rapid succession. In addition to Greg Anderson and Michael Cross of Directworks, the speakers included Spend Matters’ Pierre Mitchell, Steve Rogers of Havi Global Solutions, and – oh yes – yours truly.

This week’s webinar notes are from a October 15^th webinar sponsored and hosted by Nipendo and featuring Pete Loughlin (Purchasing Insight) as moderator, Pierre Mitchell and Jason Busch (Spend Matters), and Ed Berger (Nipendo’s VP of Sales). The webinar is available on demand in its entirety here.

This week’s webinar notes are from an event run on September 3^rd by Spend Matters EU/UK, Selectica, and IASTA. The event is available on demand here.

Once you get this classic Pink Floyd tune stuck in your head, it is likely to stay, and maybe that was the idea with this event title. Far from being a strategic sourcing solution ‘add on’ contract lifecycle management requires its own program considerations, including its impact on global supply chains, corporate strategy, and enterprise wide implementation and leadership. In other words, not allowing your next executed contract to be just another brick in the wall.

“Great procurement professionals are not born, they are bred…"

- Dawn Evans, President and CEO, Sourcing Interests Group, July 2014 'Letter from the President'

I place a great deal of value in the fact that I have been able to work well and productively with all of the professional associations in our space. Each one is a little different and meets a specific need for a particular subset of the procurement professional community. I am not an active member of any professional association – including Sourcing Interests Group (SIG). My comments here have less to do with advocating for them in particular than being concerned about the resources available to the procurement community as a whole. I would have made the same argument on behalf of Spend Matters PRO or Procurement Leaders if they were the subject of some budgetary misclassification.

This week’s webinar notes are based on a May 29^th panel webinar hosted by Proxima. The event is available on demand for free after an email registration here. In addition, anyone interested in the webinar should also read a recent HBR.com article discussing the four fundamental reasons why ‘Leaders Can No Longer Afford to Downplay Procurement,’ by Matthew Eatough, Proxima’s CEO.

“Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.”

-- Henry Ford about the Model T Ford (My Life and Work (1922), p. 71)

This week’s featured webinar notes are from an April 16^th webinar presented by ivalua with guest speakers from Spend Matters and HAVI Global Solutions. The event is available on demand here

This week’s webinar notes are from a January 14^th webinar presented by Spend Matters’ Pierre Mitchell and KPMG’s Mani Mangalathumadam and sponsored by Hubwoo. The event can be viewed on demand here.

This week’s featured event was hosted by SciQuest and featured Spend Matters Lead Analyst Thomas Kase and a case study by German Torres of FMC Technologies, a $6B oil and gas company. You can view the event on demand here or register to download the accompanying white paper.

This week’s featured webinar was hosted by ISM, sponsored by Hubwoo and presented by Spend Matters. ‘Doing More with Less in Procurement: a punch list of 25 items to improve your productivity’ was based on a snap poll taken to help participants benchmark themselves relative to their peers in this area. As you might expect, prioritization is key, and we will hear more in the ongoing discussion of tactical versus strategic efforts and how to keep the machine cranking efficiently.

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.

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.

This week’s featured webinar was presented by IASTA, with speakers from Spend Matters and Cushman Wakefield (a global real estate and facilities management firm). Together they provided a fair balance of general recommendations and practitioner perspective. You can view the slides (with audio) on Slideshare.

This week’s eSourcing Wiki excerpt is a description of the three most common procurement organizational models: centralized, decentralized, and center-led. Each has its advantages and disadvantages, and while one model or another may be en vogue for a time, getting the right fit should be based on how to best serve the organization at large.

This week’s eSourcing Wiki-Wednesday topic is Metrics for the Rest of Us – an article that breaks metrics down into Cost Avoidance and Reduction, Process Improvement, Operations, Customer Service, and Asset Utilization.

The last of the Cost reduction and avoidance metrics, “Spend Under Management” is defined as: Total Spend Under Management / Total Spend.

As noted in the eSourcing Wiki, this is a straightforward calculation. The problem is not with our ability to divide one number by another, but in defining the inputs to the equation. Total spend should be easy, although your department may use either total annual spend or total addressable spend (which is likely to exclude taxes and salaries). The real question is to decide what spend is designated as being ‘under management’.

It is impossible to turn on the tv, check a news site or pick up a newspaper this week without being confronted by a wave of bad economic news. Here are just a few example headlines from August 10th:

"Stocks Dive on Europe, Economy Fears" - WSJ.com

"Shares Plunge as Eurozone Woes Return" - FT.com

"Discovering the Real reasons for the Market Plunge May Take Time" - TheEconomist.com

So despite the fact that you feel a little queasy each time you check in on your 401K, what reaction are you supposed to have - specifically in your role as a procurement or supply chain professional?

Buyers Meeting Point attends many sales AND procurement webinars/webcasts. One of the interesting things about seeing both sides is that you start to notice trends. Sometimes those trends are aligned, and sometimes… well, read on and see.