Report from European reSource 2007

Add comment December 4th, 2007 David Bush - Iasta

I spent all of last week in the UK preparing for our users conference. This was a follow up to our US based user conference, which was a big success and prompted us to build a similar event meant for our European user community. Without having gone through all of this in May, it would have been impossible to do it in the UK. I was very impressed how the whole thing turned out as we had a great mixture of users. Of course, there were a significant number of our European clients that attended, but also US headquartered clients that have rolled out SmartSource in other continents and included countries such as England, Scotland, Ireland, Switzerland, Poland, Israel, Holland and Belgium.

From a personal standpoint, I was very happy to meet some of our clients that I have never met and then some of the newer ones, as well. It is also nice to visit our UK office near Bath, England, which is an unbelievably cool city. Merge old Europe, Roman history and a college town atmosphere, and that’s Bath. The actual office is a spectacular location in a historic mansion on grounds where the likes of Eric Clapton hunt pheasant.

It was a jam packed day of dual track sessions which covered both basic and advanced concepts in auction lotting strategies, supplier communication, management reporting, eRFx, contract management, optimization and eSourcing best practices. There was significant note taking and interaction, two good barometers that indicated well designed content. I also got the feeling that there was a genuine desire for these users to get into more areas of the functionality, where the opportunity exists. The attendees also did a great job of networking and talking to each other about how they utilize eSourcing. Many had made plans to meet other teams in the future.

These types of events are a tremendous amount of work to prepare the day, work out the logistics and pull it off. Our leadership in Europe did a fantastic job with coordination and details. I leave being less worried about jet lag on return and more worried about detoxifying my blood and language skills after spending so much time with the Irish and Scots (especially the Scots!).

This will now be a yearly event, just like reSource US, and I am looking forward to twice as many people and cultures participating next year. I started my lunch time keynote by telling the audience that it was amazing to me to think back at our first office in Indy with Todd, Jason and I crammed into about 500 square feet and now I was standing in England addressing users of our software that run entire strategic processes through SmartSource. Brilliant.

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