Strategic Sourcing Europe

Another good 20 page white-paper from SAP © 2006 describing 6 easy-to-use best practices and a couple of tips to support successful adoption of an eSourcing solution. Not rocket science, just basic change-management key success factors used in any transformation project but applied to eSourcing: Deming PDCA, Simplicity, quick wins and communication…what else?

In 2006 SAP has issued a white paper about reverse auction best practices. You can find it now on its knowledge hub. Here you go. You will learn the essential, i.e. when to use RFx and reverse auctions, how to sell auctions to internal stakeholders, how to get supplier buy-in, how to choose the right auction settings and to run an auction.

PwC is proposing an online tool to benchmark a purchasing function through 39 criteria. Collecting data – to complete this benchmark – is announced to require 4 to 6 hours. This benchmarking tool is part of PwC’s Global Best Practices Knowledge base. Compare performance with other companies by using this quantitative diagnostic tool created to [...]

Below are some interesting links providing screenshots of  Purchasing Management Dashboards (Sourcing, Procurement, Commodities…) as well as KPIs descriptions. Commodity Supplier Management Dashboard | Purchasing Dashboard Procurement Management Dashboard | Purchasing KPI Dashboard Purchasing KPIs for Dashboard and Reporting – 1 Management Dashboard Dashboard Purchasing KPIs – 2

Following is an indicative framework of 130 useful questions when assessing or benchmarking Purchasing processes and organisation performance. When on a consulting assignment, I used to design the “current state analysis” stage by ensuring I’ll get answers to most of those questions. 1. What is your main means of purchasing office supplies? 2. What application [...]

Today a Dutch collegue sent to me a link to a powerpoint presentation he wanted me to view and read. The powerpoint presentation was available and hosted on SlideShare, “the best way to share your presentations with the world.” You can let your ideas reach a broad audience, share them publicly or privately, even add [...]

I’ve just been informed by PAA (Peter Arnold Associates), a marketing service provider selected by Quadrem, that a BPO agreement for SRM, between SAP and Quadrem, will be officially press-released early next week. Below is the sales-pitch I received. Reading the article, you might miss, as I do, some information and a case study to [...]

” BravoSolution has registered impressive organic revenue growth for its entire six-year history. Profitable since 2004, BravoSolution has averaged 55% annual turnover growth since inception, and brings a culture of aggressive growth to its new BravoSolution US operations. In addition to impressive independent growth, BravoSolution enjoys the strong financial backing of its parent company, Italcementi, [...]

A good and detailed guidance note from the NePP (National e-Procurement Project) written in 2004 but still valuable. You can download it here: NePP eAuctions. You will learn: – how to get started, – what are the challenge, – where to get more information The structure of this document is: Section 1 contains a definition [...]

If you still feel uncomfortable deciding or not to go auction, you should use the eAuction Decision Tool, provided by OGC, in order to receive assistance in evaluating whether an eAuction is suitable for an intended procurement. To access the eAuction Decision Tool click the link below and, if prompted, click on the enable macros [...]

Browsing for eProcurement news, I found the last Forrester Wave (07Q2) on BasWare website (here) , discovering by the way the sensational coming-out of BasWare which belongs nowadays amongst the happy few eProcurement market leaders. Funny enough, I found back the eProcurement Forrester Wave from 04Q4. As you can see, Commerce One was already gone [...]

A European survey 2007 on “Responsible Purchasing” (involving 300 CPO) has just been released, published by HEC Business School, EcoVadis and Ariba. The objective of the survey was (read my former post) to identify the ‘tools’ which will help the better an organization to make Sustainable Procurement practices a reality. The report is worth reading [...]

7 months ago from now I was writing on this blog “Even a ‘loose-partnership’ like Hubwoo – Procuri doesn’t make sense to me: interlocutors for e-Procurement are not the same as interlocutors for eSourcing and in general, nobody likes to hear they have to use a specific application here because they have this other application [...]

I discovered Openbravo today. Could anyone enlight me about this open source software and company? I found out that Red Herring has selected Openbravo as a winner of Red Herring 100 Europe 2007, an award given to the top 100 private technology companies based in the EMEA region (Europe, Middle East and Africa) each year. [...]