This week I attended ISM's webinar on mitigating supplier risk. The event recording can be viewed here.

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.

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.

You can listen to an on demand version of the event here.

Effective this month, Buyers Meeting Point will start covering the release of the ISM Non-Manufacturing Report on Business. The report is released the first week of every month for the previous month. This month’s report can be found here.

If you have never read the report, it can take some adjustment. We are going to boil each report down to the basic and most useable components. I also recommend reading the ISM Report on Business Brochure.

This week I attended a webinar by Ariba and ISM on collaborative sourcing. And in this case, the collaboration ended up being not with the competition or others in the supply chain, but with between procurement and internal stakeholders. Not what I had thought (thanks a lot, Google. We'll talk later...) but still a valid topic and just as tricky.

The following are some of my notes on the webinar. Click here to connect to the archive.