Spend Matters welcomes another guest post from NPI, a spend management consultancy, focused on delivering savings in the areas of IT, telecom, transportation and energy.

With 26 percent market share, EMC is the world's largest storage provider. As the clear leader in a technology market with exponentially growing demand, EMC gets fierce competition from players like IBM, HP and Dell in this crowded space. EMC customers and enterprises looking to make new storage purchases (as well as renew their current support agreements) are poised for big savings in 2012 if they are armed with the right vendor and pricing insight. Here are four ways you can cut EMC costs:

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Some thoughts from Thomas Kase: Bad vendors selections aren't only made by supply chain!
Parents of autistic children feel duped by dog trainer -- [Thomas' commentary] To summarize, Pepsi's charity arm has/had an arrangement with an (apparently shady) organization that accepts donations and sponsorships to fund helping autistic kids get trained companion dogs. Such dogs are not inexpensive – priced at $15,000 on up – and their comforting company can significantly increase the quality of life for both the autistic children and their families. The apparently not-really-nonprofit organization is now failing to deliver - and media has started to write negative stories with Pepsi's name in there. The reach of supplier management and vetting is striking – in addition to the added suffering by the family and their autistic daughter, the poor vendor vetting has now lead to lost Pepsi goodwill. Disclaimer: Pepsi does not appear to be directly at fault, the lack of performance resides solely with the involved vendors.

Good question...
Who Will Pay for Apple Supply Chain Changes? -- The changes Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) is making to its supply chain management practices will cost millions and may even run into billions as Chinese wages skyrocket, but who will foot the final bill? Will Apple successfully pass the extra costs of the initiatives it has introduced recently to its contract manufacturers and suppliers; will the company itself absorb the cost, or will it successfully pass these onto customers? These are critical questions for the high-tech industry as Apple, the de facto bellwether for the consumer electronics market, tries to deflect labor criticisms leveled recently against it by injecting greater clarity into its operations. Recently, Apple announced a list of its top suppliers and followed up with an agreement to let the Fair Labor Association "audit" conditions at its contract manufacturers.

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Click for the first and second posts in this series.

Perhaps the most fundamental opportunity (and challenge) around trade compliance, supply chain risk, and getting to the next level of analysis to avoid unnecessary costs and risk is collaboration. There is obviously "compliance departments are under pressure to accommodate the growing demands that will be put on their resources and personnel," as Childers suggests. But how they "begin to collaborate more closely with both the manufacturing and supply chain/logistics functions in their companies and "even reach even deeper to work with product design and development" is a challenge that only top performing companies have started to consistently and systematically address.

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Any time we hear about procurement and finance collaboration, the topic somehow involves purchase-to-pay (P2P) technology. Granted, budgeting, planning and savings implementation are also common joint procurement/finance collaboration memes that crop up, but in general, the most frequent intersection points that touch both organizations somehow involve demand management, transactional buying, payment approvals, working capital management, discounting/early payment, etc. Yet there are far more potential touch points between the functions. And in a recent Business Finance byline by Emptoris' Craig Doud, we begin to get to the bottom of what some of these additional points of non-P2P collaboration should be.

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Click here for the first part in this series.

Last week, I took part in a Supply Chain Brain webinar with CombineNet exploring a range of predictions for sourcing and procurement in 2012 as well as how organizations can address them directly through strategies, organizational structure and resources, technology, and general market awareness. As one example, even though we've written extensively about the volatile and falling Euro and economic uncertainty within the European union (download a compendium on the topic here), I touched on a number of the most important elements to consider from a sourcing strategy perspective in this area during the webinar.

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Spend Matters welcomes a post from Cyndi Joiner, Managing Director of Alvarez & Marsal Business Consulting.

A study of 200 American law firms revealed that 64% of respondents believe that the legal landscape went through a fundamental shift during the recent recession ¹. The two most notable changes were a decline in hourly billing rate growth and the increasing use of alternative billing structures ². Approximately 85% of clients requested discounts. Companies that spent up to $500,000 with a particular firm paid a blended average rate (all positions) of $255/hour while those that spent $5-10 million who failed to leverage their spend paid nearly twice as much, at $477/hour. All summed up: The legal community is validating for us that Legal is a category that should be "in bounds" vs. "out of bounds" for sourcing organizations. An alternative approach for managing and leveraging enterprise-wide spend is within your reach.

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Danny Ertel of Vantage Partners continues on with fee negotiation advice...
Fee negotiations part 5: the importance of legitimacy -- So we come to part 5 in my continuing rant about fee negotiations. If you've stayed with me so far, you've seen me complain about how badly many law firm partners and their clients handle what should be a relatively minor negotiation between them, compared to how well they handle the much larger negotiations with counterparts in transactions, disputes, or dealings with regulators. I followed this with a discussion of the need to keep relationship issues and pricing issues separate and deal with both, sandwiched between discussions of the importance of preparation and creativity in fee negotiations. Today I want to tackle the seeming arbitrariness of rates, and the value of using standards of legitimacy to help both client and counsel explain the deal to their respective stakeholders.

Cancer drug supply shortage = imports.
To Ease Shortage, F.D.A. Lets 2 Cancer Drugs Be Imported -- Dire shortages of two critical cancer drugs -- shortfalls that have threatened the lives and care of thousands of cancer patients -- should be resolved within weeks, federal drug officials said. The two drugs are doxorubicin and methotrexate, and in both cases supplies in the United States are being bolstered by shipments from abroad. Shortages of scores of other drugs continue.

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Please click here for the first post in this series.

In evaluating supply chain risk and compliance, it's becoming increasingly important for procurement and supply chain practitioners to work closely with trade and compliance team members. While we'll get to the reasons for this around materials traceability, regulations and disclosures in a minute, we'll start with the logistics area, sharing some of CDC Software's Jason Childers views on how metrics for evaluating performance and key indicators are changing and can call attention to the overall performance of a global supply chain within a company -- not to mention which areas to probe for further analysis.

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Please click here for the first, second and third posts in this series.

In earlier posts, we used a recent New York Times article as a jumping off point to explore the concept of big data as applied to procurement and supply chain. Today we'll focus on excerpting a few areas of the piece that we think warrant particular attention. We'll also share some key takeaways to consider. The first highlight is really more of a proof point than anything else: investments in big data tend to pay off. Based on an analysis of three professors, the NYT references a study that "suggests that data-guided management" that is "spreading across corporate America" is "starting to pay off."

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