According to Eyeforprocurement, Emptoris assembled six experts with backgrounds in finance, operations, procurement and technology and tasked them with developing five actions CPOs could take immediately to gain greater control over spending and cut costs without reducing operational effectiveness.

At the summary level, the points were:

• Strategy #1 – Get Quick Visibility into Spending
• Strategy #2 – Take Steps to Mitigate Inflation
• Strategy #3 – Renegotiate and Enforce Compliance to Contracts
• Strategy #4 – Mitigate Risks When Pursuing Cost Reductions
• Strategy #5 – Do More with Less

You can read the details behind each strategy in the newsletter. These are all solid ideas and certainly ones that have been covered extensively in our repository – eSourcingWiki. When times are good, you can be sloppy and still look smart. However, when it gets a little rough, organizations better have everything battened down with good process, visibility and control.

This post first appeared on ESF on June 12th, 2008