“Simply put, business happens. Things change, including the underlying deal covered by the contract.”  - Contracting in the New Economy, p. 46   I’ve read most of the Vested books, so I came...

The following events are the ones I recommend attending this week out of all the webinars taking palce. Click on the title of each event below to view the full description in our events calendar and to connect to their registration pages.

In today’s competitive market landscape, simply having a centralized procurement organization is only the first step to better managed supplier relationships and spend. Leading organizations are quick...

Billions of dollars are spent annually on Statement of Work (SOW) projects. Yet, despite this considerable financial investment, many organizations are attempting to manage this area through overburdened internal resources and/or ill-fitting ERP, SMS or HRM systems – if they’re capturing the details of SOW spend at all. 

In part 1 of this series, we explained SOW management and described the common challenges currently face with it. In this post, we will describe the benefits of outsourcing SOW management to the organization as a whole and to the many individual stakeholder groups.

That’s the question Attorney Mark Grieco asked procurement and supply management professionals attending a member meeting of ISM-Greater Rhode Island at Banneker Industries in North Smithfield.

Thank you to everyone in the Buyers Meeting Point community that join Art of Procurement’s Mastermind LIVE Fall last week! If you missed some (or even all) of the sessions, be sure to sign up for a fr...

Buyers and suppliers, they make the commercial world go round. -        The POD Model, p. 1   The POD Model: The mutually-beneficial model for buyers and suppli...

In last week’s episode of Dial P for Procurement, I shared my monthly full-length interview: a feature with Ken Yearwood from McKinsey and Company. We spoke about leading supplier diversity practices ...

Last week, we ran the first episode of season 2 of The Sourcing Hero podcast. This is a collaborative effort between Una and Art of Procurement – one that will bring forward new stories and perspectiv...

 Over the past few years, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been cracking down on unethical billing practices at major telecom carriers like Verizon and AT&T. This past October, Verizon ...

Now that it is September, the fall conference season is upon us. Even though few will have the opportunity to gather in person, we can still make the most of these virtual chances to connect and learn...

This week’s webinar notes are from a February 18^th event presented by Selectica and featuring Ardent Partners‘ Andrew Bartolini. The event is available on demand on Selectica’s site.

This week’s webinar notes are from a March 5^th webinar hosted by Gartner. Douglas Laney, a Gartner Research VP, who made the presentation, was a strictly no-nonsense guy. He opened the webinar by introducing himself as not being either a tech/tools or Magic Quadrant guy.

That combination definitely benefitted the audience, as the following presentation on analytics, data, and information, was application or function agnostic and offered real insight for any team in an organization attempting to harness the power of data for competitive advantage. Not all companies display the same attitude towards information and its potential perhaps because, as Laney pointed out, information is not yet a balance sheet asset.

Last week I attended the IACCM/Exari webinar on ‘Converting Your CEO into a Contract Management Champion in 3 Simple Steps.’ I came away with three topics, but they weren’t the ones I was expecting to get. Rather than ways to sell the CEO on contract management, I was surprised by the broad range of connections back to contract management that were offered up by Exari’s Founder and Chief Product Officer Jamie Wodetzki.

Last week I spoke with Donna Wilczek, Coupa’s VP of Strategy and Product Marketing, about the mid-January announcement that Coupa had acquired Contractually, described in the press release as “a cloud innovator based in Vancouver, Canada that helps reduce businesses’ reliance on antiquated processes or inadequate technology tools to version control or redline contracts.”

I live in the Boston area, so when the 2016 Nobel Prize for Economics was awarded to Dr. Bengt Holmstrom, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Dr. Oliver Hart, a professor at Harvard, it made a considerable splash in the local news. I love economics in action, so I started reading more - but I never expected to find contracts as the center of their work.

Each of the newly selected Nobel laureates has a different area of focus, but both are relevant to procurement and supply chain professionals.

Although we don’t necessarily have much more of a visibility horizon than we’ve had for months, things at least seem to be stabilizing. Events are starting to focus on next year, and they provide a sense of what is within our control. That is far more productive and positive than continuing to focus on everything that is out of control.

It would seem that we are going to have a summer slowdown after all. There weren’t enough events to pick from last week, so I skipped my recommendations post, and there are only a few for this week but they are worthwhile. On the bright side, I already know there will be event recommendations for next week as well.

Following is a list of the upcoming webinars that are worth of an hour of your (scarce) time. Some I recommend for the topic, others for the speaker, but all of them will give you something new to think about – and goodness knows, we can all use more good ideas to stand up to the challenges 2020 has handed us.