Strategic Sourcing Europe

As the news is now officially released on Achilles Group website (the European leading provider of Supplier Management Information, i.e.  a supplier pre-qualification database service provider) let’s congrat Andrej Vaughan who joined Achilles after 5 years of adventure, fun and pain with Eutilia NV. Below is what you shall find on Achilles website:

Former Eutilia e-sourcing [...]

7 ‘cool-quotes’ extracted from the Harvard Business Review (August 2002) about “How do you boost an organization creative potential?”. Reading them Ithough they applied quite well to Sourcing and Procurement professionals and strategic partners where innovation and creativity is key:

Make it the norm – Craig Wynett GM P&G
Don’t Fear Failure – Michael Dell, Dell [...]

The success of YouTube on consumers in un-de-ni-a-ble. On businesses however, it is another story and actually… YouTube is not meant – yet – for B2B . Nevertheless, as I am convinced VoD will invade the online B2B-network landscape and space, I couldn’t resist to search what YouTube can currently offer to Purchasing professionals. Guess [...]

The office for official publication of the European communities is a publishing house whose multicultural and multilingual orientation makes it unique. Anyone can consult uits book catalogue at the EU bookshop, the online bookshop for all official publications of the European Union. Many publications can be downloaded free as PDF documents.
I’ve browsed the EU bookshop [...]

Not willing to reinvent the wheel but to efficiently circulate information and know-how amongst a community of interest for purchasing, I will issue, from now on and on a weekly base, the most compelling purchasing links I go by, with a short title-description. Here is the first post of this category.

Links to worldwide Supply [...]

There are many ways to evaluate the quality and extend of your SRM processes, depending on your objectives and specific environment. On the other hand, it is not so much the value of an indicator which is important but its variation. Here are my preferred high-level KPIs that I consider anyone should monitor to rate [...]

End of November 2006, The Forrester offered a teleconference to give its views of the worldwide market for eProcurement, eSourcing, contract life-cycle management (CLM), spend analysis, electronic invoice presentment and payment (EIPP), and supplier networks for 2006-2008. The analysis, presented by Andrew Bartels Vice President Forrester Research, is based on 60 leading vendors You can [...]

Reading the latest IBX’s newsletter this morning, I discovered their new – to my eyes! – European Purchasing Magazine called “Efficient Purchasing“, published twice a year. Pretty good I must say, here is how the magazine is introduced:
Efficient Purchasing is a new industry magazine for sourcing and procurement professionals in Europe. It aims to be [...]

Don’t tell me you are not interested to know how your own salary benchmarks with other european purchasing professionals… The European Institute for Purchasing Management (EIPM) is offering the resource you need: a salary survey. Already 1975 individuals have participated. The only constraint will be to disclose, anonymously however, your own salary package: no [...]

I have presented in the post SSOA III/IV how to prioritize SGs, depending on 1) the potential savings they could generate and 2) their easiness of implementation. The next and last phase is to define the implementation plan of your Strategic Sourcing program. There’s no obligation at all to translate your excel spreadsheet with SGs [...]

First post about The European Institute for Purchasing Management (EIPM). EIPM has developed and is offering free on its website a powerful internet based “skill self-assessment tool” for purchasing and supply management positions called “the Bee Resource“. You can use it on a individual basis, to check your own skills, or on a company base, [...]

When the time comes to evaluate the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of a product/Service, it is better not to forget any critical element in the calculation of the Total Acquisition Cost (TAC). Here is a useful graph that might help, underlining as well the ‘usually forgotten’ elements.

Click image to enlarge
Case study example: considerations [...]

In phase I/IV of a Strategic Sourcing Opportunity Assessment (see my HOWTO scope purchases post), you need to distribute your Sourcing Groups into 4 different categories (Standard, Commodity, Strategic, Bottleneck), depending their business impact and their supply-market-complexity. Below is a useful template to categorize each of your Sourcing Groups, based on the famous Porter’s 5 [...]

I found this article on SupplyManagement.com.
Technology could make buyers redundant within the next five years. This is the view of professor Richard Lamming, director of the school of management at the University of Southampton. Technology trend to replace manpower is obvious. Now, if you want my opinion, having buyers redundant within the next 5 years [...]