We are marking so many important events this week. Monday, March 31st is Memorial Day in the U.S., a day set aside to honor the men and women who gave their lives while serving in the military. If you...

Supplier diversity is a concept with multiple definitions.  Most commonly, a supplier diversity program focuses on the utilization of women owned, minority owned, and else certified diverse busin...

Anyone who has ever completed a Request for Proposal (RFP) has had the unfortunate experience of informing all but one or two suppliers they have not been awarded the business.  It may be difficu...

In the first part of this two-part series, I established the reasoning behind establishing a diverse supply chain in the nontraditional sense. Emphasis on maintaining a supply chain that is diver...

You’ve invested a lot of time and money. You may even have staked your reputation on backing a supplier. So when is it time to replace them? At a recent executive meeting, the subject of incumbent sup...

When you just look at a purchase from a pricing perspective, it would be reasonable to think that purchasing products directly from the manufacturer be an effective way to reduce unnecessary overhead ...

It had been a particularly hard week for the whole team. Factory audits had been going on with the accuracy of a Swiss watch (plane, factory, hotel, plane, factory, hotel...). That Friday night we wer...

Buyers and suppliers, they make the commercial world go round. -        The POD Model, p. 1   The POD Model: The mutually-beneficial model for buyers and suppli...

Hello everyone – long time no speak! There have been very few events since mid-December, so I’m only now getting the weekly procurement event recommendations up and running. If you look at the calenda...

In 2015, MyPurchasingCenter talked to William Moore, Senior Vice President, Sales and Channel Development at SKF USA. Moore sees value in frank discussions between procurement and suppliers, especiall...

This content was made possible by a collaboration with the team at JAGGAER Category management is one of the many processes – like spend analysis, supplier performance management, and strategic sourci...

The term supplier is banded around with such ease, yet has it devalued the relationship and removed the individual, resulting in generic and stale business relationships? The supplier The associated b...

This week’s featured event was sponsored by Supply & Demand Chain Exec: Vested Outsourcing: Five Rules that will Transform Outsourcing. The main speaker was Kate Vitasek from the University of Tennessee’s Center for Executive Education. She is also the Founder of Supply Chain Visions – a Top 10 Boutique Consulting firm specializing in Supply Chain Management and the author of a new book, Vested Outsourcing: Five Rules that will Transform Outsourcing.

Editor's note: Buyers Meeting Point would like to thank partner and colleague Jeanette Jones of Cottrill Research for this week's webinar notes. The original posting can be viewed on the Cottrill blog. For our readers without a background in etymology or taxonomies, an ontology is the study of categories of bring as well as their interrelations. In a procurement context, this can most clearly be seen in spend analysis through the category structure and hierarchy used by the company to group and organize transactions.

There are many articles and reports about using Big Data for supplier risk, but there is still confusion about what Big Data is and how exactly one moves forward. Tom Fishburne at marketcartoonist.com succinctly sums it up with this gem, “many companies struggle with small data, let alone big data.”

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

This week’s featured webinar was hosted by Emptoris and Procurement Leaders, with a supplier lifecycle management (SLM) case study from The ABB Group. You can view an on demand version of the event by clicking here. ABB is a global leader in power and automation technologies that enable utility and industry customers to improve their performance while lowering environmental impact. In 2010 they had $32B in revenue. As a 120 year old organization, they were decentralized with five divisions.

This week’s webinar notes are from a January 9^th event hosted by Procurement Leaders and sponsored by iValua, with a case study presented by Whirlpool. The event is available for replay on iValua's site. If you are interested in more on the topics covered in the webinar, you can also download a free report (no registration required) that shares the results of iValua’s first Procurement Executives survey.

This week’s webinar notes are based on a May 13^th webinar presented by IASTA and Efficio, their European consulting partner. The event was recorded, and the on demand version is available on Slideshare. You can also download the presentation itself, which included quite a bit of data, directly from IASTA’s website.

This week BMP attended Gartner’s webinar titled ‘The Comprehensive Guide to Effective Vendor Management’ with Research VP Helen Huntley. Below are our notes. The archived recording can be found here.

This week’s webinar notes are from a March 25^th webinar presented by the Outsourcing Institute and Alsbridge. This is too soon to expect the on demand version to be available (assuming it will be) but here is the link to the page where OI posts their on demand events. There was also talk of a whitepaper related to the webinar content, and I will post the link to that’s as soon as I am sure which one it is.