Last week I was interviewed by Scott Luton, host of the Supply Chain Now podcast, for their ‘Full Access’ series. (You can listen to the podcast here.) Scott and I go ‘way back’ so it was easy to find things to talk about, but he also asked me some great questions about how I reached this point in my career and what advice I would give to people just getting started.
“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” – Seneca (Roman Philosopher, 5 B.C.) Randy Pausch was a computer engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon until 2008 when he lost his b...
Just joining us? Last week we looked at performance reviews from a procurement manager’s perspective. This week we are looking at the same topic from the perspective of the person being reviewed. You ...
Leadership is a rare and valuable attribute that will separate a good professional from a great one. A leader will possess a unique vision and the ability to transform this into a tangible reality. Mo...
“Great procurement professionals are not born, they are bred…"
- Dawn Evans, President and CEO, Sourcing Interests Group, July 2014 'Letter from the President'
I place a great deal of value in the fact that I have been able to work well and productively with all of the professional associations in our space. Each one is a little different and meets a specific need for a particular subset of the procurement professional community. I am not an active member of any professional association – including Sourcing Interests Group (SIG). My comments here have less to do with advocating for them in particular than being concerned about the resources available to the procurement community as a whole. I would have made the same argument on behalf of Spend Matters PRO or Procurement Leaders if they were the subject of some budgetary misclassification.
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.
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.
We got feedback through our recent survey that you want more category insight from us. We're working on a way to bring you resources on that front, but in the meantime, Cindy and I have a lot of direct experience that we'd like to share. What are your unique category experiences and what did you learn from them? We'd love to hear about it:
We have sort of an interesting event dynamic this week – three events, all on Thursday between 8am and 1pm ET. Of the three, I think there is one standout event, detailed below. Looking at the current calendar, clearly webinar organizers are expecting the bulk of summer vacations to be over by the week of August 28th, and September is already starting to take shape. Click on the title of each webinar below to view the full description and register.
BTW: If you haven’t already, sign up for our mailing list to be sure you get my weekly recommendations in your Inbox each Monday.
