Author Archives: Kelly Barner- Buyers Meeting Point
With the end of the year quickly approaching, many procurement groups are looking at their performance metrics for the year. For procurement groups that haven’t quite hit their savings targets, December 31st is an unwelcome but inevitable date looming on the horizon. Before you resign yourself to your current savings numbers, there might be some things you can do in the last weeks of the year to improve your position. Although there is not enough time left to run additional … More
The 2012 winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics were recently announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Two U.S. economists, Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley, were given the award for finding practical applications for game theory and market-matching. The primary focus of their work is perfecting the matches between spouses, medical schools and applicants, and kidney donors and recipients. In most cases, their theories are applied in situations where cost is not a factor – sometimes … More
Click here to read Part 1 of this series. Apple makes their suppliers sign Nondisclosure Agreements , and warns employees against disclosing anything beyond what is absolutely necessary, but clearly they have lost much of the control they were previously able to exert over their research & development and manufacturing processes. Their procurement and supply chain groups are clearly facing real challenges if they hope to bring non-publicly available information back inside the fold. While it is necessary to share … More
Few companies have the ‘cool factor’ that can be claimed by Apple. But with a high profile comes high stakes, and their procurement and supply chain operations are not exempt. In order to remain competitive (or dominant in Apple’s case) in the consumer electronics industry, a high level of secrecy is usually required – both in the introduction of new products and the release of next generations of existing products. Historically, Apple has been a highly secretive company, driven in … More
“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” – William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet There is amazing variety in the titles used by professionals in the spend management space. In most cases, those differences are nominal and other than suggesting something about the organization someone works for, or their relative seniority, we know we all do the same thing for a living. One of the advantages of being a process-driven function is that we have the opportunity to … More
David Bush previously wrote a post for eSourcing Forum called ‘Spend Analysis – To UNSPSC or Not UNSPSC.’ In which he made the following statement, “Visibility into your spend is only as good as a desired taxonomy’s ability to accurately reflect the nature of your data.” UNSPSC (the United Nations Standard Products and Services Code) is commonly used as a standard taxonomy in spend analysis implementations because most companies do not have a custom taxonomy for categorizing spend. UNSPSC is … More
The very first sourcing project I ran on my own was for a window washing services contract at a large retailer. Not exactly glamorous, but everyone has to start somewhere. At the time, the annual spend seemed like so much money (do you ever compare category spend to your salary?) but in retrospect it was worth nothing. And yet, for the “smallness” of it, I learned more lessons from that one project than I would from many larger and more … More
The quest for greater visibility drives procurement teams to implement new technologies and revamp existing processes. We look for spend visibility, supply base visibility, and visibility into the inventory planning process. Beyond visibility for its own sake, there are a number of initiatives procurement can’t start without having more information. We can’t plan the waves of a sourcing opportunity assessment or define governance guidelines for setting spend authorization limits. Even once we have gotten visibility into a company’s spend activity, … More
