May 14

23 key considerations when reviewing your way of buying Electricity are listed on the graph below. Click to read

May 11

I’ve listed 40 opportunities on the graph below. Click to read the graph

May 10

22 Opportunities listed on the graph below. Click the graph to enlarge and read

May 08

18 Opportunities to improve the way you buy your fax/copier-machines are listed on the graph below. Click to read the graph

May 07

I’m initiating a “Strategic Sourcing Opportunity” Series based on the Magic triangle I presented some time ago in the post “Creating Value with Strategic Sourcing“. Purpose is to point out the best well-know opportunities one could think about when rolling down a Strategic Sourcing methodology for 12 specific and common spend-categories: stationary, fax machines, photocopiers, [...]

May 04

Some time ago, I’ve published a template to help you out positioning a SG (Sourcing Group) into the Strategic Sourcing’s 4-quadrant Matrix (I call it as well the CSSB matrix as ‘Commodity, Standard, Strategic, Bottleneck), based on the famous Porter’s 5-forces model. This template has the benefit to be easy to understand and to use. [...]

May 03

If you are wondering how good you are in managing your purchasing department performance, this post might be of some interest. Below you will find listed 8 questions – and the associated set of 4 possible answers from 1 to 4, 1 being the worse answer and 4 the best – I use to go [...]

May 01

I would like first to congrat Michael Lamoureux for his “Top Three Series” initiative, “asking professionals he knows to name their top 3 critical issues in the sourcing / procurement / supply chain space and discuss why the issue is important, what a company can do about it, and what could happen if it’s not [...]

Apr 30

If you’re running behind short-term savings, working on the ‘strategic quadrant’ products and services might be painful. Indeed, don’t expect short-term results there and moreover, be aware this quadrant needs a lot of time and effort to be properly worked out. However, middle term results can be much more significant than any others and such, [...]

Apr 23

In a previous post, I have defined the 7 steps of a robust strategic sourcing methodology (SSM). My intention is now to provide more details about each step. Step 1 – profiling (or qualifying) a Sourcing Group (SG) – comes first: it’s all about understanding the SG characteristics, which is quite an important stage as [...]

Mar 29

Based on my experience – of course! – but also on an excellent paper written in 2000 by Tim Duffie’s (UPS) about the difference between sourcing AND strategic sourcing and following the recent post of David Bush ‘Strategic Sourcing Success Factors‘, you will find on this post what I consider as the top 10 Strategic [...]

Mar 27

If you are about to renew a contract or even better in your way for running a strategic sourcing methodology, you’ll have to assess the strenghtes and weaknesses of your current contract not only from a specification perspective but as well from a pricing perspective. Below are my top 10 pricing-related questions to be answered [...]

Mar 02

eAuctions. Savings. I have the weird impression I have covered this topic in and out already (Read my 30 posts about eAuctions) but still needing to share about it, as if I was feeling it was not well understood by everyone. As a matter of fact and as I was reading with interest the commercial [...]

Feb 21

Some times ago, I’ve posted in this blog a template of the tool I used to position a Sourcing Group(SG) in the CSSB matrix (Commodity – Strategic – Standard – Bottleneck). May I remind you that this CSSB matrix enables to determine the strategy to apply and consequently the top tactics to use. Below are the [...]