This month’s featured publication is Common Sense Supply Management – click here to read our review or to order a copy from Amazon.com. Since we have worked with author Dr. Tom DePaoli in the past, we...

In this week’s featured webinar, we heard from Ardent Partners Chief Research Officer Andrew Bartolini in an event presented by BravoSolution. Andrew shared a Category Sourcing Scorecard he and his team designed to support sourcing team efforts to build out pipelines that can help allocate team resources and prepare for opportunities.

This week’s featured event was hosted by the Next Level Purchasing Association and was presented by Tim Reis, a procurement manager with 10 years of experience, a regular columnist for Next Level Purchasing’s online magazine and a holder of the SPSM certification. Most importantly, he is an active practitioner.

Two years ago, we posted our review of ‘Common Sense Purchasing’ by Dr. Tom DePaoli. In September 2012 he published a new book that reflects a broader perspective on his experience and our profession....

This week’s featured webinar had an interesting premise – for the first time this year, My Purchasing Center and ProcureCon Indirect have partnered to sponsor the Excellence in Purchasing Indirect Categories (EPIC) Awards competition – EPIC for short. This week’s webinar recognized the finalists for their achievements in indirect spend procurement by having them present.

Earlier this year, we reviewed ‘Vested Outsourcing’, the first book in what has become a series of publications by Kate Vitasek and her colleagues on the evolving potential of mutually beneficial rela...

In this week’s webinar notes we’ll feature two webinars that addressed the idea of empowering CPOs through data or business intelligence: ISM with the Aberdeen Group and IASTA with Forrester Research.

Both events addressed the need for procurement to have sufficient analytical capabilities to support the CPO’s efforts to develop strategies for improvement and risk mitigation, and acknowledge that even the best analytics are not actionable without external benchmarks. As a result, best-in-class companies are making investments in the technology solutions and services needed to improve procurement’s capabilities.

This week’s Wiki-Wednesday article is part of the series on Next Generation Sourcing: Empowerment. As a strategy in procurement, empowerment has the potential to change the course of a project at many...

This week’s featured webinar comes from the Global eProcure webcast library. If you are interested in viewing this or their other webinars, click here to select a webinar and provide some basic registration information to view.

This week’s featured webinar was hosted by Sourcing Interests Group: ‘Putting the “World” into World Class Procurement’. Chris Sawchuk, a Principal in the Global Procurement Advisory practice at The Hackett Group, discussed how leading procurement organizations achieve world-class performance by leveraging the strength of a global network. You can access the presentation slides from the webinar here.

This week’s featured event was hosted by Sourcing Interests Group and featured two senior members of Denali Group’s team sharing their experiences with the use of strategic and non-strategic category sourcing to meet overall goals. The right balance of the two supported by an efficient balance of people, process, and technology opens the door to long-term value creation and impact within the organization. If procurement organizations are going to excel in today’s climate of scarce resources and high expectations, we need to explore every opportunity to the fullest. And of course the real goal of accomplishing all this is securing a voice for procurement in the strategic planning process of the company.

One idea plus one idea equals three ideas or more. You have a cow, I have a bull, together we have a business. When the output is greater than the sum of the inputs, this is value creation and it is t...

“What pressures are coming to bear now, or in the foreseeable future, that may impact your supply chain and the ultimate sale of your products or services? Gathering market intelligence should include an understanding of what is happening in the economies of both your consumer’s as well as your supplier’s locations. This market intelligence can be used to both react to conditions and to take advantage of potential cost savings opportunities.”

--‘Understanding Market Pressures’ Managing Indirect Spend, Joe Payne and Bill Dorn

This week’s featured webinar was hosted by ISM with contributions from Constantine Limberakis, Senior Analyst in the Global Supply Management practice at Aberdeen Group, and John Lark, Director of Solutions Marketing at Ariba. If you are interested in the subject but didn’t make it to the webinar, you can download a related Aberdeen Group report on ISM’s site. You can also follow Constantine @ABG_SpendMngmt or John @AribaProcure on Twitter.

 A cardinal principle of Total Quality escapes too many managers: you cannot continuously improve interdependent systems and processes until you progressively perfect interdependent, interpersona...

This week’s featured webinar was hosted by Emptoris and Procurement Leaders, with a supplier lifecycle management (SLM) case study from The ABB Group. You can view an on demand version of the event by clicking here. ABB is a global leader in power and automation technologies that enable utility and industry customers to improve their performance while lowering environmental impact. In 2010 they had $32B in revenue. As a 120 year old organization, they were decentralized with five divisions.

I can tell you that windsurfing is very easy – except for the wind. The wind makes it tricky, of course. It’s not particularly difficult to find and rent great equipment, and the techniques are fairly...

I won’t rehash the full approach here, for that you can read today’s excerpt on our site or on the eSourcing Wiki, but there are three key take-aways worth calling out, and giving more thought to...

Stop me if you’ve heard this one… an analyst, a practitioner, and a provider walk into a bar…  okay, not exactly…

This week’s featured webinar was hosted by Aravo with speakers from Spend Matters and General Electric. The combination of speakers gave a nice balance of practitioner, analyst and provider perspectives on one central theme: supplier information management, or SIM. All three addressed how to manage incumbent and prospective supplier information to improve decision-making and relationship building.

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.