This is an incredibly busy week for procurement and supply chain webinars! The end of 2016 is filling up fast. In fact, there are only really 7 weeks left in the year once you subtract the weeks of Thanksgiving and Christmas. Click on the title of each webinar below to view the full description and register or visit the BMP events calendar to see what’s on tap for the rest of the month.

If there was any doubt that managing the supply chain is also an exercise in managing risk, just ask someone who works in procurement – particularly the world of direct procurement. These professional...

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...)

This week's Wiki-Wednesday topic is an excerpt from th Wikipedi page on Dr. W. Edwards Deming, the American statistician that taught post WWII Japan to manage quality, but wasn't discovered in the U.S. until the very end of his career. Not many business strategies would survive that kind of test of time, but his does.