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?

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.

This week’s webinar notes are actually on an event from a couple of weeks ago: “An Introduction to Supply Chain Response Management – driving supply chain performance through responsiveness to unexpected events release” presented by Kinaxis. I missed it that week, but really wanted to go. Now that I’ve gotten to hear it, I can share my notes with you.

This week's Wiki-Wednesday topic is CAPEX (Capital Expenditures) v. OPEX (Operating Expenditures). Once you understand the difference between them, the next step is realizing the impact that distinction has on negotiated savings recognition.

This week I attended a webinar by Genpact, a business process management, operations, and analytics firm that was formerly part of GE Capital Finance. The webinar was on managing the volatility of the inputs to the products and services your company may produce.

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.

I was really looking forward to this event, and it did not disappoint. This is the first event I have attended by Preparis (providers of an emergency preparedness suite) and I will add them to my list of sources for future webinars. Kudos to Bill Michaels (CEO, ADR North America), David Landsman (Director of Strategic Alliances, MFG.com) and Armistead Whitney (CEO, Preparis) for an exceptionally well done event. You can click here to listen to the event archive.

This week I attended a webinar by Ariba and ISM on collaborative sourcing. And in this case, the collaboration ended up being not with the competition or others in the supply chain, but with between procurement and internal stakeholders. Not what I had thought (thanks a lot, Google. We'll talk later...) but still a valid topic and just as tricky.

The following are some of my notes on the webinar. Click here to connect to the archive.

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.

This week I attended the Procurement Leaders / Emptoris webinar on procurement transformation featuring BP Lubricants.  They don't have the archived recording posted yet, but click here for a pag...

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.

Recent disasters, whether earthquakes, tsunamis, or tornadoes, have threatened business continuity for many industries. As has been pointed out in many recent procurement webinars, this presents an op...

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.

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: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

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

I spent the last couple of weeks reading The Contract Negotiation Handbook by Stephen R. Guth Esq., and despite how it may initially sound, I came away with one critical realization: I am a pop tart. ...

We’ve read as many of the news stories on this topic as possible to bring you the following synopsis. Most of the details are widely available across all sources, but in the case that an interesting detail or fact came from one particular article, we’ve cited the source (see our footnotes). Otherwise, there is a listing of articles for further reading at the bottom of the page, with date, source and a link (click on the article's title to access it at its source).

“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...

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...