Category Archives: Best Of

Best of Spend Matters: Oracle

Brianna Tonner - December 28, 2011 7:12 AM | Categories: Best Of, Commentary

Oracle OpenWorld Dispatch 1: Overload, Openness, Fragmentation, Glimpses of Some Solid Applications — I spent two completely scheduled days at Oracle OpenWorld this week (apologies to everyone else I know in the area who I did not have a chance to visit, but I can’t recall packing so many things into 48 hours before). Even though I’ll be sorting through my notes and sharing the highlights around Oracle Fusion Procurement, Oracle Supplier Lifecycle Management/Supplier Hub, Oracle Spend Classification, Oracle PeopleSoft’s new faceted SRM navigation and more, I thought I’d first sum up some general procurement-focused impressions from the show. Oracle’s [...]

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Best of Spend Matters: Supplier CSR/Labor Practices

Brianna Tonner - December 27, 2011 7:12 AM | Categories: Best Of, Commentary

Friday Rant: Do We Need a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for Supply Chain CSR Practices? — Even though I don’t necessarily believe we can extrapolate from UK consumer data whether US consumers will pay more for products and brands that showcase corporate social responsibility (e.g., products with lower carbon footprints than comparable items), I do find the results of a UK study quite interesting. The Guardian highlights some of the findings from a Carbon Trust research study showing “consumer demand for lower-carbon products and services is growing, despite the tough economic climate.” In addition, the “research also reveals that consumers [...]

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Best of Spend Matters: Sourcing

Brianna Tonner - December 23, 2011 7:12 AM | Categories: Best Of, Commentary

A company’s sourcing strategy can be a make it or break it element of success or failure. This year, Spend Matters (and sister site MetalMiner) have put a lot more focus into smart sourcing and the tactics behind it. (Shameless plug: we’re even throwing a conference on it!) New Research — Market-Informed Sourcing: A Game-Changer for Procurement — Peter Smith (my UK colleague) doesn’t give himself enough credit for his deep knowledge of how procurement technology works. He also fully understands the importance of approaching technology from a pragmatic business perspective first rather than through the geeky lenses that we’re [...]

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Best of Spend Matters: SAP

Brianna Tonner - December 22, 2011 7:12 AM | Categories: Best Of, Commentary

Supplier Enablement and P2P Roadblocks — Catalog and Content Management (Part 1) — One of the areas where companies often fail when it comes to bringing as much indirect spend under management as possible is catalog and content management. These tools enable the P2P experience by focusing on supplier self-service, multi-catalog search, configuration, and what we’ll term “virtual punch-out,” which includes distributed content search, aggregation and presentation of information (not to mention the application of specific rules to this distributed data). Providers in these areas can enable technically savvy business users (not IT) to administer the overall content and catalog [...]

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Best of Spend Matters: Supplier Management

Brianna Tonner - December 21, 2011 7:12 AM | Categories: Best Of, Commentary

For the next week and a half, the Spend Matters team is taking a much-needed holiday break (we have a lot of eggnog and 10%+ holiday beer to source). We’ll be running a lead post every day (so you can still get your analysis on if the mood strikes), and will be featuring a daily “Best of” through January 2. Happy Holidays, and be sure to check in on the 26th for our Santa vs. Hanukkah Harry smack down! SciQuest: A First Step to Integrating Sourcing and Supplier Management with P2P (Part 1) — SciQuest made the rather smart — [...]

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