Strategic Sourcing Europe

France entered the international television news market (CNN, BBCworld and Al-Jazira International mainly) yesterday with the launch of France 24 — a round-the-clock network in French and English with a brief to broadcast a different perspective on world events. France 24 is the first french channel broadcasted in English as well as in French and [...]

Browsing my RSS feeds about Sourcing, Procurement and Technology with my preferred Netvibes Tab, I went through a post of Jason Busch about SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) which, I have to say, ‘triggered’ me. One, because it is the first time I was hearing about it – nobody is perfect – while it is not [...]

Alf Noto is vice-president indirect sourcing at Nokia. He wrote a  great article  about  5 major differences between indirect/direct procurement . You can read it at  European Leaders Network. In a nutshell, let me summarize the differences raised by Alf Noto and leading to say that you need to develop different leadership competencies to manage [...]

Every year The Gartner is releasing “Hype Cycle” reports for different trendy IT models. With regard to SaaS, the Gartner has issued its report “Hype Cycle for Software as a Service (SaaS)” in August 2006 and reveals that eSourcing has reached maturity while eProcurement (Procurement Transaction Management) is still… “on the rise”: Hype Cycle helps [...]

From “The Forrester Wave™: eSourcing Suites, Q4 2005″, Andrew Bartels issued a specific report about Verticalnet in November 2006 and said: Verticalnet’s eSourcing suite ranks third in current offering, behind Ariba and Emptoris but ahead of other specialists.It scores well on spend analysis (behind Emptoris but ahead of Ariba) and RFx and auction support. It [...]

At a certain point, it’s not even anymore an option. It’s a must have: You can’t survive without a tool to remember all of your usernames-passwords and helping you overcoming the pain of filling all those forms requested to get access to some good content, reports or white papers. Personnaly I’m using Roboform. I tried [...]

I felt on this compelling powerpoint presentation from the Forrester, issued in late-november 2005, and titled ” Market overview of Procurement and Sourcing application”, a bit old I confess but still. According to Forrester here are the leading providers of Spend Analysis automation: Ariba, Emptoris, VerticalNet, Zycus, Global eProcure, Ketera, Perfect Commerce, Silver Oak SynerTrade. [...]

Zycus, one of the leading provider of Spend Analysis Automation, is partnering with UNSPSC and has issued a quite complete and instructive 47 page report called “UNSPSC for better Spend Analysis”, a report about adopting UNSPSC as a product classification standard. In this document, available for free on the UNSPSC website, you will learn about: [...]

Since a couple of years now, Procuri is delivering web seminar in a regular basis. This is a great idea. I believe that distributing and sharing information through internet-based video will become a standard considering the amazing success of VOD (Video on Demand), YouTube and Co. Within 3 to 5 years for sure, describing products or services [...]

Last time, I’ve explained in the post SSOA Part II/IV how to define which strategy and tactic to apply per SG. The third and next step is to define priorities. Which SG shall you start with, knowing you will launch consecutive ‘strategic sourcing waves’ limited to the resources you can mobilize? Basically, priorities depend on [...]

This might be useless but I thought that anybody considering to improve his purchasing performance would look after a consulting firm to make a strategic sourcing methodology deployment faster. So, if it is good for employees to work in those firms, it might be good as well for the customers…not sure this makes really sense, [...]

If you want to have a quick overview of the fastest growing back-office area of BPO (i.e. Procurement BPO) which is forecasted to be a billion-dollar market by 2010, here you go. “As interest grows in procurement outsourcing, the nascent market is expected to soar to unbelievable heights.” By Rachael Stormonth In short, you will [...]