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Feb 26 – March 1: Freight Spend, Digital Outcomes, Digital Twins

If the start of the year has seemed busy – you’re in luck this week! We pick up a 366th day of the year on Thursday. Make the most of your leap year extra day, and then get ready to spring forward int...

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Feb 19 - 23: Procurement on the Defense, Top 10 CPO Priorities, Risk Readiness

Many of the conversations we’re having these days relate to procurement orchestration, combining tech and process to improve procurement’s experience and effectiveness. Art of Procurement is running a...

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Feb 12 - 16: Top 10 Supply Chain Priorities, Supplier Perspectives on Procurement Change

This is a slow week for procurement and supply chain events, so if you have a little time on your hands and want to contribute to an ongoing effort to study procurement orchestration, take this 5-minu...

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Oct 30 – Nov 3: Beyond Average, Transformative Value, and CPO Insights

There is just one week left to go before the stage lights go on for AOP Mastermind LIVE 2023. We have lined up FOUR HOURS’ work of enlightening speakers, each of whom has a timely topic they are eager...

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Oct 9 - 20: Obsolete Accounting, Outsourcing Risk, Opportunity to Evolve

Have you registered for Mastermind LIVE 2023 yet? Take a look at the full agenda and save the time on your calendar: November 7th from 10am – 2pm ET. If you are planning your event schedule ahead of t...

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Can Real Human Beings Be Good at Procurement?

This guest post is part of The Procurement Revolution. To share your thoughts or join the conversation, use #ProcureRev on Twitter or use the comment functionality below.   I'm Ovidiu Slimac and ...

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Exceptional Leadership Traits for Procurement and Supply Chain

Running a procurement or supply chain organization poses unique leadership challenges. These organizations are constantly “fighting fires,” handling unique crises, and influencing a broad network of people - internally and externally.

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Hail to XaaS!

Many years ago, our telecom operator outsourced customer bill printing. That was an example of the basic outsourcing, as the business process still stayed fragmented between the external provider, our...

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Applying Digital Procurement to Today’s Business Challenges

Procurement is a significant business function, having operational and commercial impacts on multiple departments. Although procurement process excellence and strategic sourcing initiatives can drive ...

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RPA and Soft Skills: Why you shouldn't fear being replaced by a robot

It has become increasingly common to hear about technological disruptions. Every day there is a new tool, software, methodology or someone trying to do something different. And this is excellent! Tech...

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Book Review: Profitable Buying Strategies

Mike Buchanan, author of Profitable Buying Strategies (as well as Two Men in a Car, Guitar Gods in Bed, and The Marriage Delusion), agreed to participate in a Q&A session with Buyers Meeting Point...

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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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Book Review: The Technology Procurement Handbook

“Naturally, Industry 4.0 requires a new procurement. The factors driving the change are the hyper-competition, globalization, supply chain risks, resource scarcity and many more. But the most importan...

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Book Review: Bad Buying

“No industry or country is immune from bad buying; it exists in every nation in the world, and in almost every organization.” - Peter Smith, p. xi Bad Buying: How organisations waste billions through ...

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August 14-18: Purpose-Driven Procurement, Managed Services, Empowering the Future

If you are planning your event schedule beyond this week, Art of Procurement just opened registration for Mastermind LIVE 2023 on November 7th. Join us as we collectively imagine the art of the possib...

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August 7-11: Categorypalooza 2023, Future of Procurement, Digital Highways

We’re wading through the depth of the summer but based on what we’re seeing at Art of Procurement, this is going to be a very busy fall! We’re currently working on five different live, virtual events ...

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June 28 – July 2: Full Visibility, Lessons Learned, What We Keep Getting Wrong

This week we officially cross into the second half (or ‘H2’ as my cool business development friends say) of 2021. I personally feel like we spent the first half of the year looking over our shoulder t...

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SPECIAL EDITION: #SAP #SAPPHIRENOW Procurement Sessions

In this special edition procurement event recommendations post, I will focus on the procurement sub tracks and sessions taking place on June 8 (for the North American audience). Keep in mind that the ...

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Webinar Notes: Procurement Knowledge Management

I've always thought of Knowledge Management systems as databases full of documents. Unwieldy, outdated, only updated when your boss reminds you that participating will be part of your annual review cycle. As it turns out, most of what we already do can be worked into a knowledge management program - we just have to be deliberate about where information goes. The other take-away isn't a new one, but it seems to be one of the hardest ones to maintain.  At the end of a project, it is important to download and record your experiences and lessons learned - for yourself next time or someone else down the road.

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The Pareto Principle at Play in Procurement

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...)

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