Thanks to the 1967 film Cool Hand Luke, one of today’s largest procurement/sales challenges is easy to put into words. We talk about the need for partnerships and collaboration, but how often do we successfully take the effort beyond talk so that it includes open and productive conversation with our reps and supplier account managers?
I see this week's ISM event as being part of a recent increase in interest about the procurement of services. I’ve worked in this category and it is truly a beast all its own. They mentioned visibility in their event description, and although that is a common enough concept in procurement it is the whole deal with meetings spend. While all services projects are complicated due to the relationships in place, addressing meetings spend has its own sensitivities. Not only is it a relationship-heavy category, but the times when meetings need to be managed are usually of high importance and high visibility.
If you’ve spent any time on our site this week, you’ll see that we are having a customer-service centric week. It all started when I attended last week’s Next Level Purchasing Association webinar where Peter Nero of Denali Group shared his thoughts on what is next for procurement. The answer was better customer service.
As a follow up, we spoke with The Sales Guy about the kinds of internal customer service he thinks procurement can provide, and this morning we read the Wikipedia article on customer service. We’re not looking to turn procurement into a transactional call center, but some of the traditional wisdom about how to keep your customers happy applies to the relationship between us and our internal stakeholders.
Gypsum was the first category I was asked to do research for – truthfully, it was very early in my career and I think my manager was trying to productively keep me busy. But the process was a good learning experience and I think I added real value to the team. For lack of a reason to pick any other product or service, I’ll start with gypsum here too.
Gypsum is used to make plaster and plasterboard – basically drywall. So if you are sourcing in the construction category, and your General Contractor is not responsible for materials costs/purchases, you might find yourself bidding this out.
I had a unique opportunity yesterday to participate in a live event – an international conversation of sorts. Source One presented a webinar at the University of LaSalle's School of Business in Mexico City about a topic near and dear to their hearts: nearshoring. While this isn’t a new topic, the presentation was so completely different that it was hard not to feel enthusiastic about the opportunities that exist. In the last 10 months, I have attended roughly 100 webinars. None of them had a live video feed from another country and none of the presentation formats were able to capture the enthusiasm that this audience expressed. I highly encourage more event planners and hosts to try to incorporate applause into their events – somehow it makes the message more exciting.
This week’s Wiki-Wednesday topic is financial statement analysis, and hopefully you’ll believe me when I say that if I can get comfortable with this, ANYONE else can too. Financial statements are not always easy to read, but with risk management and new supplier identification on the docket, the time has come for all of us to get used to doing it.
This week’s featured event was sponsored by Supply & Demand Chain Exec: Vested Outsourcing: Five Rules that will Transform Outsourcing. The main speaker was Kate Vitasek from the University of Tennessee’s Center for Executive Education. She is also the Founder of Supply Chain Visions – a Top 10 Boutique Consulting firm specializing in Supply Chain Management and the author of a new book, Vested Outsourcing: Five Rules that will Transform Outsourcing.
The more complex societies get and the more complex the networks of interdependence within and beyond community and national borders get, the more people are forced in their own interests to find non-zero-sum solutions. That is, win–win solutions instead of win–lose solutions.... Because we find as our interdependence increases that, on the whole, we do better when other people do better as well — so we have to find ways that we can all win, we have to accommodate each other....
—Bill Clinton, Wired interview, December 2000.[3]
Applying proper motivational techniques can be much harder than it seems. Steven Kerr notes that when creating a reward system, it can be easy to reward A, while hoping for B, and in the process, reap harmful effects that can jeopardize your goals.
-Wikipedia, Incentive Theory
This week’s Wiki-Wednesday topics are Revenue (Net Sales) and Net Income (Earnings After Taxes). As at least a third of all procurement teams report into finance, pressure is mounting for us to articulate our value in financial terms. I’m covering both at the same time because while traditionally procurement has focused on Bottom Line (net income, EAT) impact, the time has come to start looking at the Top Line (revenue, net sales) as well.
When I was planning out this week's content, covering Master Data Management as our Wiki-Wednesday topic seemed like such a good idea. We were already looking at the subject through Philip Gunn's presentation from eWorld and I didn't know as much about it as I would have liked. Then Tuesday came and I found myself less jazzed about the idea than I had been. The irony of that feeling is that many of you probably feel the same way when it comes to tackling your own master data challenges. But you can't escape the fact that if you don't have a solid foundation of clean, current data, you can't be effective or accurate. So the mutual attitude adjustment starts... NOW.
I’m taking a break from the usual this week, and rather than covering a webinar, I’d like to share a new series of YouTube videos with you. Don’t get your hopes up – there are no home movies of cute cats falling down stairs or into grocery bags. Instead, I’d like to introduce you to a series of 5-7 minute videos made by Dr. Jim Anderson of Blue Elephant Consulting, and the writer of “The Accidental Negotiator” blog.
When I am reading the books that may end up on the Buyers Meeting Point Endorsed Publications list (in the Procurement Library), I often find that they are missing a certain… something? Now I know wha...
Last week I attended an excellent supply chain risk management webinar sponsored by the Next Level Purchasing Association and featuring a global supply chain manager from a Fortune 500 company. The event followed the story of this particular corporate supply chain through the 2010 tsunami in Japan (you can click here for my notes).
One of the lessons this particular company learned was about finding the right place for addressing the human side of a very complicated business issue. I was impressed with the efforts they had made, particularly for such a large company. A thought started to form in my mind: what contract clauses were put aside in order to have an appropriate response to the devastation while not creating serious business continuity issues?
Before I even begin my notes, let me just point out that if you are not a member of the Next Level Purchasing Association, you are missing out. Next Level Purchasing offers the SPSM (Senior Professional in Supply Management) certification program. Joining the association is absolutely free and comes with a number of benefits, such as members-only webinars, newsletters, and networking opportunities. If you want to get your feet wet with the kind of programs they offer, there are several mini-courses they offer, completely online and for less than $20! Interested? Good for you! Click here to learn more by clicking on the NLP logo on our partner page. That way Buyers Meeting Point gets credit for your purchase and a portion of the proceeds go to charity.
This week’s webinar notes are actually on an event from a couple of weeks ago: “An Introduction to Supply Chain Response Management – driving supply chain performance through responsiveness to unexpected events release” presented by Kinaxis. I missed it that week, but really wanted to go. Now that I’ve gotten to hear it, I can share my notes with you.
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.
This week I attended a webinar by Genpact, a business process management, operations, and analytics firm that was formerly part of GE Capital Finance. The webinar was on managing the volatility of the inputs to the products and services your company may produce.
This week's Wiki-Wednesday topic is the Pareto Principle - also known as the 80/20 rule. Many of us use it all of the time, but do we really understand the implications of the distribution principle? I'm sure I hadn't fully thought about it until reading up for this weeks' posting. Other things I did not know about the primciple are that it was incorrectly attributed to early 20th century economist Vilfredo Pareto because he observed that 20 percent of the landowners in Italy owned 80% of the land. (He also noted that 20% of the pea plants in his garden produced 80% of the peas...)
This week's Wiki-Wednesday topic is an excerpt from th Wikipedi page on Dr. W. Edwards Deming, the American statistician that taught post WWII Japan to manage quality, but wasn't discovered in the U.S. until the very end of his career. Not many business strategies would survive that kind of test of time, but his does.
I was really looking forward to this event, and it did not disappoint. This is the first event I have attended by Preparis (providers of an emergency preparedness suite) and I will add them to my list of sources for future webinars. Kudos to Bill Michaels (CEO, ADR North America), David Landsman (Director of Strategic Alliances, MFG.com) and Armistead Whitney (CEO, Preparis) for an exceptionally well done event. You can click here to listen to the event archive.