The Point by Buyers Meeting Point

The idea of being green is certainly not new to corporations or to purchasing professionals for that matter. That does not mean that the effort is easy, or that the path to sustainable purchasing is clear. ‘Green Purchasing & Sustainability’, written by purchasing professional, author, speaker, trainer and consultant Robert Menard, is a practical book that will help you get started down that road.

In this week’s featured event, Bryan Ball and Bob Heaney, Abredeen research analysts, recapped the major findings from the 2013 Supply Chain Management Summit in Chicago. The event is available on demand, as are event highlights and approved presentations.

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.

Each week I attend two or three webinars. Usually, I pick the most interesting event to share in this Friday webinar notes post. This week, there were two events on procurement transformation: one from Procurement Leaders/CombineNet/Kellogg and another from Sourcing Interests Group/Zycus/Capgemini. Both were good events in their own right, but combining what I heard in the two events provides a rich look at one of the hottest trends in procurement today.

Last Saturday, Cindy highlighted a blog post by John Maxwell, a leadership coach, on how to fail successfully. There is much to be learned from our failures, and in many cases they are the price of admission to the victory celebration at the end of the journey. Thomas Edison is a fantastic, if complicated, example of success despite setbacks. We all know how many tries to took to make the light bulb a reality, especially because of the quote Cindy used to open her post:

This week’s featured event was presented by Supply Chain Insights and marks the official launch of the Supply Chain Index. Here is a brief excerpt from their event description:

‘The [Supply Chain] Index is based upon financial performance of companies from 2006 forward. Using market valuations of publically traded companies, we have built a formulaic representation of supply chain excellence using supply chain ratios (E.g. Ratios like Days of Inventory, Operating Margin, Revenue/Employee). … The Supply Chain Index allows companies to better understand the relationship between supply chain ratios and financial performance.”

The reality of today’s 24/7 highly interconnected professional environment is that work follows us home whether we like it or not. We get emails during dinner, invites at the grocery store, phone calls during our kids’ hockey practice and text messages while we’re trying to get from one place to the next. Even when we are successful in the effort to have some kind of personal life away from the pressures of the office, we know they are waiting for us, just across the room, on that addictive little device.

This week’s featured webinar was hosted by Sourcing Interests Group and presented by Neo Group, a services firm focused on gaining efficiencies through low-cost country providers and outsourcing in general. The focus of the event was global sourcing governance, and how, when leveraged appropriately, it can help companies go ‘from good to great’.

In this week’s Procurement on YouTube post, we are going to look at one source of supply risk and that is resource scarcity. As procurement professionals, we pride ourselves for our ability to buy quality goods and services at an efficient price. But what if the materials we need to buy are not available? In this video, Edmond Cunningham, a member of PA Consulting Group, gives a brief overview of the approaches companies make take when faced with resource scarcity.

This week’s featured webinar was a Procurement Leaders Thought Leaders event on the topic of supplier relationship management. Innovation with suppliers is a critical component of competitive advantage, but in order to turn potential into performance procurement needs a plan. In this webinar, we heard from Hubwoo, BMO Harris Bankcorp, and P&G about supplier segmentation, key success factors, and achieving innovation.

I’ve reviewed quite a few books – most of which are on spend management or negotiation. Some have made me laugh, like Negotiation Mastery and Profitable Buying Strategies. A few have made me cry, and those will remain unnamed here. But I don’t think I’ve ever felt compelled to review a single chapter from a book until now.

This week’s featured webinar was presented by Directworks, the new name for Co-eXprise, on the state of direct materials sourcing. If you have questions about the rebrand or the reasons behind it, you can read the press release here.

This week’s featured event was presented by CombineNet and took us ‘Beyond the Merchandise’ for a look at ‘Victories in Retail Indirect Procurement’. Click here to view the event on demand.

Since our inception, Buyers Meeting Point has always made Corporate Social Responsibility part of our mission. We have always had a selected charity that we donate to at the end of the year – most recently Plan International and Livestrong.

We have some active discussions in the Buyers Meeting Point Group on LinkedIn, most recently, an exchange about what makes a good buyer. Ironically, it was asked by someone who is not a buyer themselves.

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.

In this week’s Procurement on YouTube post, we are going to continue down a path we started with the March 9^th Buyers Meeting Point blog pick of the week. Each week, my partner Cindy Allen Murphy selects a single blog post to focus on. Sometimes they are direct from one of the well-known supply management thought leaders, but other weeks she pulls interesting topics from a wide range of general business, industry, and professional development sources. Last week she chose to highlight a post by customer service author and speaker Shep Hyken.

The week’s featured events is ‘The New Rules of Supply Management’ hosted by ISM and presented by Ardent Partners and Ariba, with a client case study from SunTrust Bank woven in.

In this week’s Procurement on YouTube post, we’re going to hear from GreenBiz and Trucost on sustainable supply chains. The conversation takes place between Joel Makower, Executive Editor of GreenBiz Group and Richard Mattison, CEO of Trucost. Trucost insn’t new to the supply management space. In 2011, Trucost and Rosslyn Analytics worked together to launch the first sustainable procurement app, and their partnership continues to this day. 

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.