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Sourcing Procurement Talent

Special thanks to longtime BMP friend Charles Dominick, SPSM3 of theNext Level Purchasing Association for this guest post.

As a procurement professional, you need to be good at finding suppliers who work out as good or better than you predict.  As a procurement leader, you need to be good at finding employees who work out as good or better than you predict.  In this post, I’ll share some traditional and not so-traditional ways to find high-potential procurement talent.

 

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Vetting Procurement Talent

Special thanks to longtime BMP friend Charles Dominick, SPSM3 of the Next Level Purchasing Association for this guest post. Welcome back to this series on improving procurement capability.&n...

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Book Review: The Procurement Game Plan

The preface to The Procurement Game Plan by Charles Dominick and Soheila Lunney starts with the question, “Why another procurement/supply management book?” Good question.   For a constantly evolv...

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Webinar Notes: Getting the Most From Strategic Sourcing

This week’s featured webinar was presented by the Next Level Purchasing Association and featured Joe Payne and Bill Dorn from Source One Management Services as the main speakers. You may also know them as the co-authors of ‘Managing Indirect Spend’, a relatively new publication that walks through the challenges and opportunities associated with indirect spend as well as a few category-based case studies.

Like their book, the guys from Source One kept their speaking points to the practical learnings from their extensive combined procurement consulting experience.

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Weekend Extra: BMP’s Webinar Notes on 'A Case Study for Proactive Supply Chain Management' by Next Level Purchasing

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.

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Webinar Notes: Top-Notch Negotiations – Anyone Can Cook!

This week’s webinar notes are from an April 9th event presented by Puridiom and Lunney Advisory group. Dr. Soheila Lunney, the president of Lunney Advisory Group and the primary presenter, addressed a number of topics related to a professional environment that increasingly emphasizes collaboration and partnership over the aggressive winner take all approach.

Dr. Lunney is also the co-author of The Procurement Game Plan with Charles Dominick of the Next Level Purchasing Association. You can read my review of the book here, as well as Part 1 and Part 2 of our interview with Dr. Lunney.

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Webinar Notes: Herding of Cats: A Strategic Approach to Enterprise-wide Procurement

This week’s webinar notes are from the October Next Level Purchasing Association members-only webinar, and featured Donald Jean, CEO of Focused Buyer, a purchasing and trading website that also provides payment services and financial records support. If you are not already a member of NLPA, we highly recommend that you sign up. Membership is free and includes benefits such as their monthly webinars.

 

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Webinar Notes: Bridging the Gap Between IT and Procurement

This week’s webinar notes are from the Next Level Purchasing Association’s January webinar on IT and Procurement. Bill Dorn, the VP of Operations from Source One Management Services was the main presenter. You may also know Bill as the co-author of Managing Indirect Spend with Source One’s Joe Payne. Although the full event and presentation are only available to NLPA Premium members, I will share an exclusive excerpt of the audio in my weekly procurement update on Blog Talk Radio update on Monday, February 10th.

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Webinar Notes: Aligning Procurement Initiatives to Company Culture

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.

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Webinar Notes: 20 Ways To Create The Perfect Negotiation First Impression

This week’s featured webinar was the monthly event run by the Next Level Purchasing Association on 20 Ways To Create The Perfect Negotiation First Impression. If you missed the event, you can read a related blog post by Association President and CPO Charles Dominick.

You can also learn more about negotiation (among other topics) at the first Next Level Purchasing Association Conference in Pittsburgh, PA September 12-13, 2013.

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Webinar Notes: The Future of Procurement Technology: Portable, Powerful, Pivotal

This week’s webinar notes are from a July 25th webinar hosted by the Next Level Purchasing Association and presented by Santosh Nair, GEP’s Vice President of Client Services and Innovation. Although the on demand version is only available to NLPA premium members, you can read what they had to say about SMART by GEP in this recent blog post.

Despite the changes being seen in the consumer technology marketplace, enterprise solutions have been slow to take advantage of the growing availability of mobile technology. As demand increases for Smartphone and tablet solution accessibility, enterprise solutions in general, and procurement solutions in specific, will need to change at a rate faster than they have in the past.

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Webinar Notes: The Leading Influence

This week’s webinar notes are from an August 27th webinar hosted by the Next Level Purchasing Association and featuring Steve Burns from the Maxwell Team. Although only premium members of the NLPA have access to the event on demand, you can hear an exclusive audio excerpt in my September 8th weekly update on Blog Talk Radio.

The focus of the webinar was how to build influence for the purpose of becoming a more effective leader. Since leadership affects so many people, you might expect it to be a collective sort of topic, but it was the exact opposite.

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Procurement Decision Making - Who Empowers Who?

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...

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Is the Should Cost Model Obsolete?

Q: Does anybody still use the “should-cost” model?

A: Yes, and if they don’t, they should start.

 

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Instant Customer Service Feedback for Procurement

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.

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Force Majeure, Hardship, Impossibility, Hell or High Water, Act of God or all of the above?

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?

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Webinar Recommendations for July 27 - 31, 2015: Digital marketing spend, Selecting a spend analysis solution, and Early engagement in sourcing projects

With eight events in three days, webinar hosts must see this as a week that most people are back in the office from early July vacations. Click on the title of each event below to view the full description in our events calendar and connect to their registration pages.

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