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Everyone has bad habits, but for procurement, bad habits can put a major dent it in the ROI of your sourcing tools. That’s because strategic sourcing is complex and challenging – success requires more than fancy software purchases. You must have a plan in place to measure how well (and how much) your team is [...]

With M&A season in full swing, there’s a new epiphany driving (and nixing) acquisitions that goes far beyond the typical high-level revenue and cost savings projections. Market volatility is ruling today’s economy, making timely acquisitions difficult. Complicating M&A negotiations are commodity prices – like metals, oil, food, and real estate – which are trading far [...]

GPOs have the difficult task of reducing spend while sourcing for healthcare goods. As anyone who’s made purchases with someone’s health at stake knows – this is not an area you can cut corners. At the same time, physician preference items can be some of the costliest categories of spend facing the industry. For healthcare [...]

When the White House issued the Executive Order for Streamlining Service Delivery and Improving Customer Service on April 27, 2011, I’m pretty sure that the procurement officers in federal agencies weren’t called into the meetings on how the organization would move forward on creating the customer service plan called for by the President. After all, [...]

From Forbes: “Boeing (BA) faces new delays in the delivery of the Dreamliner. GM (GM) slows or shutdown production in U.S. factories due to a shortage of parts. Toyota (TM) expected to lose $73 million for every day its factories are shuttered. If there was any doubt left about the impact of globalization of the [...]

So far in this series on Avoiding Procurement Malpractice, we’ve examined spend visibility and analysis as critical elements of best-in-class procurement practices. In this final installment, we look at the role of process. The complexity of today’s trading partner relationships and business volatility combine to increase the pace and pressure on procurement organizations to make [...]

In this 3-part series, we’re looking at the procurement disciplines that can help procurement executives and teams design and execute truly effective sourcing strategies in face of whatever the global economy brings. In the first post, we looked at using spend analysis to gain visibility across enterprise-wide spend as paramount to identifying the opportunities to [...]

I keep hearing that the recovery is here. I’m pretty sure that most of us want to believe that 2011 will see the lifting of the dark and gloomy economic cloud that’s dampened our days for almost 3 years. But people I respect when it comes to these questions are pointing to real indicators that [...]

So far in this series on complex sourcing, we’ve looked at the nascent trend toward collaboration in transportation sourcing and how best practices can accelerate success. In this final entry, I’ll address the use of technology in the collaborative process. Sourcing complex categories is not easy. The volume and sheer variability of the information render [...]

In my first post Logistics Sourcing: Collaboration Key to Solving Complexity in this series on complex sourcing, I laid out the argument that collaboration in transportation sourcing can deliver positive outcomes for all and improve supply chain performance. Of course, it’s one thing to say that shippers and carriers need to collaborate; in this post [...]

In my last post, I likened sourcing complex categories to solving a Rubik’s Cube, making the case that not all sourcing events are alike and that only by first understanding the unique starting point, i.e., the problem to be solved, can companies learn to collaborate with suppliers for the best possible solution. Logistics represents a [...]

Most organizations have a diverse spend portfolio that includes many simple, several moderately simple and a few complex spends. To address each spend appropriately, we need to understand the dynamics that make each event complex. For starters, let’s look to another ‘multi-faceted’ puzzle; the Rubik’s Cube. Invented in 1974 by Erno Rubik, Rubik’s Cube has [...]