Category Archives: Category Management

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Category Management: Sourcing Legal Services

Guest Post - December 18, 2012 12:12 PM | Categories: Category Management, Guest Posts

Spend Matters welcomes a guest post from Jason Winmill, partner at Argopoint Consulting LLC. Argopoint has designed award-winning, nationally recognized legal sourcing approaches for leading Fortune 500 companies. Sophisticated supply management professionals are making inroads into legal departments, and in doing so, delivering millions of dollars in savings. The media is gradually beginning to pick up on these successes: a recent article in the Wall Street Journal noted that several companies (including GlaxoSmithKline, Toyota, Sun Microsystems, and eBay) are using competitive bidding and reverse auctions to purchase legal services. As with other important services, effectively sourcing legal is a delicate [...]

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A Services Procurement Smorgasbord: Relocation Category Management

Jason Busch - December 17, 2012 4:12 AM | Categories: Category Management, Jason Busch, Learning / Research, Services Procurement

What do aggregators engaged in relocation services focus on? They aggregate demand for most every area of addressable spend listed below in a cafeteria-style menu of services. This includes a broad range of activities, including: Buying and selling houses Residential moving of goods Assignment Definition/Communications, ?including salary Tax gross up and equalization work Mortgage assistance Managing child education placement Spousal counseling Rental and/or temporary living assistance Property management, including utility activation ?and maintenance services Insurance (including negative equity solutions) Expense Reimbursement? Job search assistance for other family members Language training (for any/all family members) • Cross-cultural training Immigration services Legal [...]

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Category Management Strategies for Relocation Services

Jason Busch - December 13, 2012 7:12 AM | Categories: Category Management, Jason Busch, Learning / Research

The supply management landscape and opportunity for relocation services is changing dramatically. But these shifts have also come with increased questions from both HR and procurement. For example, we all want to strike the correct balance between getting employee mobility services (also known as relocation services) suppliers motivated to provide the most competitive pricing as well as to offer strict and productive service level agreements. But this is easier said than done, especially on an ongoing, sustainable basis while keeping internal employee satisfaction high across a high-stress period in their professional (and personal) lives. One method you can use focuses [...]

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Category Management: Missing Out on Travel Cost Savings

Thomas Kase - December 7, 2012 8:12 AM | Categories: Category Management, Thomas Kase, Travel

Far too many procurement organizations fail to integrate travel procurement with overall sourcing and supply management efforts. Yet travel represents a fascinating category and overall cost management opportunity. In many industries (software, IT, consulting, financial services, etc.), travel can comprise a substantial portion of addressable spend overall. In other firms, it typically makes up a sizable portion of indirect spend. Attempting to manage this spend can be a chore. On the face of it, travel procurement would seem relatively easy. You start by establishing rules around who gets to stay at what kind of hotel, fly which level of service, [...]

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Contract Visibility Matters: Join Us For a Spend Matters Webinar on Contract Management

Jason Busch - September 18, 2012 4:09 AM | Categories: Category Management, Jason Busch, Spend Matters UK/Europe

Join us on Tuesday, September 25, 2012 from 11:30 AM-12:30 PM CDT for a Spend Matters webinar tackling the subject of contract visibility — a key ingredient to building better contract management that is missing in many contract lifecycle management (CLM) implementations today. We’ve titled this virtual talk: Getting to Grips with Contract Management — Managing Contract Visibility, Risk and Opportunity as a CPO. During this webinar, Peter Smith (Spend Matters UK/Europe) and I will be presenting our thoughts on building contract visibility. As part of our talk, we’ll explore three areas that make contract visibility so important today. First, [...]

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Spend Matters Goes to War: Calling For The Drone Strike Against Poorly-Managed Categories

Jason Busch - September 10, 2012 12:09 AM | Categories: Category Management, Jason Busch, Spend Humor

Last week on Spend Matters, I started a new type of column that I hope will become a regular feature. Stepping away from primarily looking at technology and solutions to addressing procurement needs in my regular daily columns — the ones we post during the evening hours for the UK and Europe — I also want to take the time to look, sometimes humorously and always seriously, at other areas of procurement, especially category-centric strategies. Last week, I turned my initial lens in this area to IT spend in the first installment of an essay titled Why CIOs Hate Procurement [...]

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