The last three years have been a time of unprecedented disruption. Combined disturbances from the pandemic, war in eastern Europe, uncertainty in Asia, weather patterns, labor strikes, regulatory chan...

Author: Vengat Narayanasamy Editor’s note: This article is part of the MyPurchasingCenter content archive. It was originally published in 2016 and appears here without revision.   Why do com...

Author: Joe Payne, SVP Source-to-Pay at Corcentric Editor’s note: This article is part of the MyPurchasingCenter content archive. It was originally published in 2015 and appears here with minor t...

Back in 2012, Chrysler Group allowed a modest-sized company to manage all of the chemicals and related supplies on a trial basis for one of its North American assembly plants. Like any Chrysler supplier, ChemicoMays had to prove itself on cost, quality and its capacity to deliver.

This content was published on the Thinkers 360 member blog on July 23, 2020 If you’re a small business owner, you’re certainly not alone in being fed up with “us” – meaning corporate procurement. That...

Leaders of procurement teams at manufacturing and process companies are decisive. They know what they want in a supplier. They want a supplier with a similar culture and competitive quality, service a...

In part 1 of this series, I addressed the misaligned nature of the past relationship between procurement and marketing – as well as the disruptive potential for companies that can bring these two team...

We’ve seen a recent trend of Fortune 1000 companies reducing their agencies by almost half to optimize spend and increase productivity within marketing.  This has been a gradual, strategic consol...

In my article Data & Socially Responsible Procurement, I discussed how data analytics is located at the intersection of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and procurement. In particular, I expl...

CSR is No Longer an Option . . . In an evolving landscape of regulations, social values, and consumer preferences, the Triple Bottom Line has become an essential framework of business design. The conc...

“The only time they don’t say ‘Drop your pants’  now is at the Christmas party.” (p. 10, Epstein on sales' common interations with procurement))   The Ultimate Showdown Sales vs Procurement:...

Companies today are spending significant amounts of money on contingent workers, with businesses allocating hundreds of billions of dollars for these engagements. As a result, the C-suite is increasin...

Imagine walking into your office and being tasked with a new challenge: finding an offshore supplier in a region from which you don’t usually source.  Once you start, the task gets even harder: y...

“This supply chain is the bridge between the customer needs of a market segment and the value-added of a product. If we can’t connect the two, then we have a show stopper.” (p. 4) Supply Chain Constru...

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 ...

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...

A value chain is the overall set of internal and external resources – human, physical, financial and informational – that require to be marshalled and managed in order to achieve the objectives of any...

“The essence of supply chains is to match supply and demand. But what happens with supply chains and, particularly, what can supply chain performance be, in the context where the demand is neither dic...

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...

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.