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That’s the question Attorney Mark Grieco asked procurement and supply management professionals attending a member meeting of ISM-Greater Rhode Island at Banneker Industries in North Smithfield.

In addition to the virtual events recommended below, this week also brings us ISM’s annual conference in Houston, TX. If you are going, make sure to go see my good friend Rod Sherkin (President of ProPurchaser). He’s presenting in the Challenges track on Tuesday morning at 10am: Cost Transparency– Catalyst for Achieving Negotiating Goals.

If you are planning your webinar schedule beyond this week, I recommend either ‘Supply Chain Tech Update: Drones & IoT’ from Supply Chain Now Radio, Talent Stream, and APICS Atlanta on April 26th at 12n ET or the next session of AoP Live: Automate Procurement Without Spending a Dime: Harness the Power of Group Purchasing on April 25th at 2pm ET from Art of Procurement and UNA GPO.

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.

The February ISM-New York Report on Business was released on March 4th at 9:45am Eastern and is available for download here. Please see the end of this commentary for additional information on the ISM-New York Report on Business.

In August 2017, Hurricane Harvey struck a significant blow to the Houston, Texas metro area, home to the sixth largest import terminal in the world as well as all of the shipping lanes in the Gulf Coast area. Given the strong economic linkages between the Gulf Coast and the country as a whole, Harvey impacted the U.S. economy far beyond the local region.

Supply management professionals were on the front lines of the economic side of this environmental disaster. Imagine yourself as one of them: your facility and/or your suppliers’ facilities are in the hurricane’s path. Damage is done during the storm, and you will have to deal with the after-effects, including ongoing impacts on transportation and labor. How do you prepare for the unexpected? How will you cope with the aftermath? What do you do? 

Picture this: your organization needs to create a multi-year contract covering critical components for its manufacturing process. Because of the technical nature of those components, management requests that the team creating the contract be led by procurement but also include engineering, R&D, and finance. Each of the people involved will have different priorities, even though all agree on what they want the end result to be. How do you present a united front at the negotiation table?

What would you do?

In a new effort, announced this week at ISM2016, ThomasNet is looking to put their considerable weight behind one of the trickiest cross-products in all of supply management – the attempt to align demand from corporate procurement and with the innovation and agility of small suppliers. In advance of their announcement, I interviewed Ed Edwards, Manager of Audience Outreach, and Travis Sherbine, Vice President of Marketing and Product Management, from ThomasNet about the realities of making a formal SMB program work.

Let’s face it, there is something unnatural about the fit between big (or even medium sized) corporate procurement and small businesses (hence my labradoodle reference above). But, just like lovable, low-shed labradoodles, there is huge upside for procurement AND small suppliers if they can invest the additional effort required to make their interaction a success.

I recently got the opportunity to have access to the 2016 class of ThomasNet / ISM 30 Under 30 Rising Supply Chain stars. I looked through the whole list of impressive young professionals, and one individual really stood out to me. Michael Raezler is a Purchasing and Supply Management Specialist with U.S. Postal Service.

I specifically requested his insight (as captured in the following Q&A) partly because he has accomplished amazing things in his short professional tenure and partly because he is a living example of excellence in a segment of the public sector that all too often goes unrecognized and under-estimated. The procurement profession – and the U.S. Postal Service – are lucky to have him as part of our community.

If you are interested in the entire class of 30 Under 30 Rising Supply Chain stars, click here to read more.

With eight events in three days, webinar hosts must see this as a week that most people are back in the office from early July vacations. Click on the title of each event below to view the full description in our events calendar and connect to their registration pages.

This week our audio comes from the ThomasNet and ISM 30 Under 30 Supply Chain Rising Stars program. They hosted a panel-style interview and discussion with some of the 2014 award recipients at this year’s ISM conference. The full hour-long conversation is available on Sound Cloud if you want to hear it.

The podcast starts with each of the participating recipients and program mentors introducing themselves and then moves on to a press-conference style question and answer session with some of the most recognizable names in procurement media – including the Hackett Group, Manufacturing Talk Radio, and Spend Matters.

The excerpt I selected to share starts with a question from Supply Chain Management Review’s Editorial Director, Bob Trebilcock, as he asks how these rising stars ended up in supply chain.

You can listen to the podcast on the PI Window on Business Blog Talk Radio channel or on our Sound Cloud page.

In my PI Window on Business Podcast this week (listen here), I shared audio of Mark Hager, an author and a professor at Arizona State University, talking about why people join professional associations and how that is changing.

The interview was loosely based on a paper he wrote on the same subject (you can read it here) and which digs deeper into the idea of private (individual) versus public (collective) motivations for joining an association.

This week at ISM, my Supply Market Intelligence for Procurement Professionals co-author Jeanette Jones presented a session on supply market intelligence specifically for risk. I couldn’t be in Phoenix this week, but I wanted to contribute to the session, so I committed to making a 10-minute intro movie. After all, I do a podcast every week - and I have a Mac - so how hard could a video be?

If you are at ISM2015 in Phoenix this week, you may have seen Deem unveil their new Shopping application Monday morning. I got a sneak peek at it, and my primary take-away was that Deem Shopping is a highly visual experience. You can learn more on Deem's site. 

Shopping, which is primarily intended for use by the buying (rather than sourcing) colleagues in your organization, was designed to incorporate some of the key user-friendliness aspects of B2C shopping sites, including machine learning focused on tracking the frequency of use of templates and items. It also involves something I didn’t initially recognize the importance of – the space between graphics. Apparently, the amount of white space you incorporate into a display is connected to how user friendly an application is. And we all know what user friendliness leads to: ADOPTION.

If you happen to be going to ISM2015, be sure to mark your schedule to attend the breakout session being run by my Supply Market Intelligence for Procurement Professionals co-author, Jeanette Jones. She is in the risk track on May 6^th – here are the details:

Supply Market Intelligence: Risk Assessment and Research Resources

Presented by Jeanette Jones, Founder of Cottrill Research 
Session JE | Audience Level: Experienced, Leadership
9:45 a.m. – 10:45 a.m.

The authors of Supply Market Intelligence for Procurement Professionals: Research, Process, and Resources, present an overview on how to design a supply market intelligence program, focusing on risk management and strategic sourcing initiatives. Various key third-party risk research resources will be covered, particularly those with supplier diligence/monitoring and geopolitical offerings.

Next week, professionals will gather in Phoenix, Arizona for ISM2015, the annual conference that marks the 100^th anniversary for one of the most recognized institutions in all of procurement. There will be impressive keynote speakers, informative breakout sessions, fun giveaways, and plenty of chances to network. All of the resulting ‘brouhaha’ and ‘ballyhoo’ may belie the fact that procurement is in a time of serious transition right now.

Companies are spending more with suppliers than ever before. Supply chains are longer (or shortening) and are full of risk. The fixed cost of a high headcount procurement organization is starting to look less and less logical as the type of project we manage becomes increasingly long term and one-off. Baby boomers are retiring and Millennials are bursting onto the scene with their work life balances and crazy new ideas. Dare I even mention Procurement-as-a-Service?

Does this fluid set of circumstances really lend itself to a Centenarian association and old school networking? A couple of weeks ago, I don’t know how I would have answered that question.

This week’s webinar notes are from an April 9^th webinar hosted by ISM and presented by Mark Dunn, Lexis Nexis’ Due Diligence Segment Leader for Risk and Compliance. ISM’s previous web seminars are listed on the lower portion of this page on their website.

This event, titled “Mitigating Risks and Impact of Sanctions Regimes on Your Supply Chain,” specifically addressed risks that are outside of the norm for most supply chain and procurement professionals: money laundering, bribery, corruption, and diplomatic or economic sanctions. The sanctions, which might be in place as the result of violating international law or human rights violations, can be established against countries, organizations, companies, individuals – even specific vessels. The measures against these entities may be restrictive or coercive in nature.

This week’s webinar notes are from a January 13^th event run by ISM and presented by IBM. It is available on demand on ISM’s website. The presenter was Steve Peterson from the IBM Institute for Business Value, and he spoke about the findings of their 2014 CPO Study, the results of which were released by IBM in December. The focus of the study was on procurement role models – or leaders – and what they are doing differently than the rest of the pack. There were three ideas that appealed to me as new ‘angles’ on familiar problems presented in this event.

Some days I think I eat, sleep, and breathe procurement and supply chain webinars. On a weekly basis I update the calendar. I consider the topics, the speakers, the hosts, the likelihood of promotional content versus thought leadership. I make my recommendations every Monday (on Blog Talk Radio) and share my notes on Fridays.

In 2014 I covered 29 webinars by sharing my notes on Buyers Meeting Point and through social media. They covered a broad range of subjects, including risk, talent, organizational issues, negotiation, and global supply chains. When I look back at the hits per post over the course of the year, there are 5 that stand out for getting over 1K hits each. You might think it was a simple matter of time, and there is something to that – some of our oldest event notes have over 50K hits – but these five events were pretty evenly distributed over the course of the year. They also all have unique hosts, presenters, and topics.

This week’s webinar notes are from a July 31^st event hosted by ISM and presented by LexisNexis. The event is available on demand on ISM’s site. If you are interested in more on the topic, LexisNexis has made available a white paper and accompanying infographic titled “Leveraging Market Intelligence to Better Manage Supply Chain Risk.

The presenter, Eric Walsworth, LexisNexis’ Director of Supply Management, illustrated each of his points about risk management by drawing comparisons to the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. I won’t embarrass myself by trying to recreate any of that – if you’re interested in the soccer angle you’ll have to watch the webinar on demand.

Walsworth took a need – risk management - that is overwhelming for many procurement teams and broke it down into very clear phases and efforts. Although each of these elements is important to a supply risk management effort, they must all work together in order to be effective. Additionally, although the following seem to be a linear process, they must all be executed in parallel.

The entire professional community, procurement included, is bracing for the impact of the Millennial generation. Managers and executives want to position their company or department as a team that will appeal to the brightest, best upcoming achievers. ISM and ThomasNet recently joined forces specifically for the purpose of gathering nominations for their ’30 Under 30’ Supply Chain Rising Stars program. Corporate leadership teams are concerned about being flexible enough, mobile enough, and ‘sexy’ enough to compete for young talent. Professional associations are scrambling to make sure they demonstrate their relevance on an ongoing basis.

This week’s webinar notes are from a July 23 webinar hosted by ISM Vermont and presented by Verian Vice President Tommy Benston on ‘Five Steps To Eliminate Maverick Spending.’ Although an on demand version was not available as of the posting of my notes, it will be available on Verian’s site shortly.