Strategic Sourcing Europe

Just for you to know:  I’ll be there, very much excited to get back to the Netherlands where I spent 6 years of my life…and of course to share with several hundreds customers our experience and roadmap for the future… for the Cloud!
If you didn’t register yet, you can do that here.
If you are wondering [...]

How do you calculate your savings performance? This is a recurring question and I found a nice thread on linkedin “Savings performance calculation”.

Do you have a clear understanding of what Supply Risk Management means, of what other professionals think?
Are you not interested in sharing your vision? If so, the survey described below and initiated by the MIT might worth being completed.

2 and 3 years ago, I did this exercice already; comparing the online footprint of leading Spend Management Solution vendors with Alexa.  You’ll find below the update 2009  including for the first time Quadrem, Zycus,  Hubwoo and MFG as I appreciate them belonging to the  leading players. At the very bottom you’ll get  additional information [...]

In response to Charles’ Post and question mark a couple of weeks ago, indeed Ariba Exchange is definitly the “next hot destination for Sourcing Professional”. Launched softly in October, Ariba Exchange is the first and unique online community to facilitate discussions among customers, prospects and Ariba’s subject matter experts (SME), embedding videos, polls, group rss [...]

Aberdeen revealed Top 4 pressures in its April 2009 report. Pretty basic, standard and ‘to be expected’ in current economic turmoil, but speed in responding to those market requirement will be the key success factor. Those 4 pressures are listed below and prioritized in the ‘figure 2′ included.

Leveraging the article “Dashboard leads global procurement to success” from Purchasing.com,  think about using those 6 obvious KPIs to generate 10-12% savings on appropriate direct commodities:

Delivery lead time,
Inventory days,
Supplier count
Part shortage,
Price reduction,
ppm (parts per million) defect levels per part.

“An Achievable Approach to Master Data Management” is a FREE one-hour Web video featuring Forrester Research and hosted by the Institute of Supply Management (ISM), delivered the 12th of February.
This webinar is tailored for supply chain professionals evaluating how to cope with dirty and inconsistent vendor data. Take an hour to hear Forrester’s latest research [...]

Right, it’s only my point of view. Anyone can think differently and believe that the value of the merger lies on the synergies of the 2 companies, but I don’t myself, motivated by following arguments:
- The functional coverage of the 2 apps offered by Ariba and Procuri is more or less similar,
- The growth [...]

Supplier Enablement is one of my favorite topic. To my eyes, it goes much beyond a deployment of a e-catalogue-based procurement-process and ‘flirt’ with the ‘good-old-magic’ “plug and play extended-enterprise” concept, which is the end-game of successful B2B ASP/SAAS applications.
Andrew Bartolini, research director at Aberdeen, just released a new report about Supplier Enablement (with [...]

To me, Spend Analysis is a critical area to get under control and where a good-size company should invest in. I’ve mentioned it several times and lately in a post I wrote on Michael Lamoureux request. Early this month, Purchasing.com issued a nice and 3-part series “The ABC of Spend Analysis”:
Acquire the data [...]

For those of you still doubting about it, a new study from CAPS Research is underlining the importance of the purchasing management line for supply-management end-results. Sounds obvious but still, it reminds us that:

Purchasing performance needs leadership,
the purchasing function needs to a strong positionning within an organisation to be efficient.

Tempe, AZ, March 14, 2007 [...]

AMR Reviews the Spend Visibility Landscape | spend analytic vendors are making progress; from Jason Busch
Purchasing News Roundup | nice list of links from ‘purchasing blog’. The one I enjoyed the most is Entrepreneurial Culture Why European economies lag behind the U.S. (from Mr. Phelps, a professor at Columbia University ; 2006 Nobel Laureate [...]

“Spend Analysis, A European perspective”. That’s the official title for this one hour free webcast sponsored by one (THE?) spend-analytics market leader Zicus, and below is a short description of the topics to be covered:
“In this one hour long webcast, one of the leading thought leaders in the Spend Management sector Andrew Bartels, VP and [...]