Category Archives: Metal Miner
Category Management: 2013 Direct Materials Price Forecast and Trends
For many procurement organizations focused on manufacturing category management efforts, 2012 proved a challenging year. Demand and price volatility and an uncertain economic picture across North America, Europe, and China often complicated sourcing efforts. And only a minority of organizations we know and work with outside of the CPG world ended up taking risk off the table through a formal hedge strategy. Last week, I spent a few minutes talking to my colleague (and my better half) Lisa Reisman to ask about how MetalMiner is reading the commodity tea leaves heading into 2013. According to Lisa, “Metals are down across [...]
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MetalMiner Turns Five!
Our sister-site, MetalMiner, has been celebrating a birthday. A fifth birthday, to be exact. You can track all of the festivities, including a number of award giveaways, on the MetalMiner site. In five years since launch (when it was just an advertising vehicle for a consultancy), MetalMiner has become the largest online metals trade publication site by a significant margin. It’s also become part of the Spend Matters family of sites (we acquired it back in 2010). MetalMiner is also our largest site in the Azul Partners portfolio, although there is a friendly competition underway for Spend Matters to catch [...]
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Dodd-Frank Conflict Minerals Law: Headaches for Metal Supply Chains
Spend Matters PRO is the only source of analyst research and opinion that consistently provides the level of insight procurement practitioners, providers and consultants need to make decisions. Sign up today for a free trial. Contact Sheena Moore (smoore (at) spendmatters (dot) com). Today on Spend Matters, we feature an excerpt from a recent PRO analysis authored by metals sourcing expert, Lisa Reisman: Dodd-Frank Conflict Minerals Law: Headaches for Metal Supply Chains. As the old adage goes, “the devil lies in the details” – and that aptly describes the challenge many diversified US manufacturers find in meeting the new conflict-free [...]
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Friday Fun: Happy (Almost) 5th Birthday, MetalMiner!
As MetalMiner’s 5th birthday approaches, we’d like to introduce you to the team behind the largest US metals trade publication. Just try to keep up, will you? A trim figure isn’t free — but this month, a few subscriptions to our metal pricing service, MetalMiner IndX, will be! Sign up to win a free subscription here. Check back on MetalMiner.com for an entire month of celebration, including more amazing videos like the one above as well as a ton of giveaways and prizes. Happy (upcoming) Birthday, MetalMiner! - Sheena Moore
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Welcoming D&B as An Affiliate Sponsor and Supply Markets Intelligence Partner
We’re excited to announce that D&B recently joined Spend Matters’ sister-site MetalMiner, as a lead sponsor, and opted to maintain a presence on this site by becoming an affiliate sponsor. D&B is well known among procurement and supply chain practitioners, but actually not that well understood. Part of the challenge is that they’re both an applications and data provider. Increasingly, D&B is making their supply risk, diversity, basic enrichment and related content more easily available through a range of third-parties including Ariba based on their new D&B Direct offering. Earlier this year, we noted that D&B’s Direct offering provides: “…new [...]
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Rare Earth Metals — Will China Lose Pricing Power?
Over on our sister site, MetalMiner, my colleague Stuart Burns recently explored declining prices for certain classes of light rare earth metals (read his full commentary here and here). Not too long ago, we were all reading headlines about China erecting export restrictions to prop up prices. What’s changed? According to Stuart, “the greatest movement has been in the lighter rare earths, which are also the most plentiful. Most observers believe they have the furthest to fall, as heavier rare earths will be supported by still-constrained supply.” Stuart observes in summary that “the benefit for rare earth consumers will be [...]
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SEC’s Conflict Minerals Rules: MetalMiner Interviews BravoSolution’s Mickey North Rizza
Yesterday, the SEC promulgated rules associated with section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Act, or the Conflict Minerals Law as we informally call it. We intimated in a post yesterday that this rule would have a profound impact on manufacturing organizations. Many organizations “are already doing it,” according to Mickey North Rizza, now vice president of Strategic Services at BravoSolution, and formerly of AMR Research and Gartner. “This is all about risk management.” Readers can review the rules in their entirety. We asked Rizza to describe what she sees as the steps manufacturing organizations will need to take to comply with [...]
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BREAKING: SEC Votes in Favor of Strict Conflict Minerals Audit Rule
The folks over at our sister site, MetalMiner, have been eagerly awaiting the verdict of the SEC’s conflict mineral ruling this morning. See initial coverage below, and check back on both MetalMiner and Spend Matters for further analysis and details. “The SEC in a 3-2 vote this morning passed comprehensive rules requiring companies and their supply chains purchasing the group of metals called “Conflict Minerals” (this group of metals includes: tantalum and columbite-tantalite or coltan, tin and cassiterite, tungsten and wolframite, gold and their derivatives) to file annual audited statements by May 1 of each year. Large companies will have [...]
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Procurement and Supply Chain: Tips and Tricks to Prepare for Commodity Volatility (Part 1)
If there is an “Ariba” of commodity management, it’s Triple Point Technologies. While there are many specialist commodity management software providers with expertise in given markets (e.g., Brady for metals), Triple Point has the widest cross-industry footprint. It also has invested more than its rivals in trying to expand the commodity management pie by educating procurement audiences across CPG, food and now, industrial manufacturing, in addition to continuing to sell into trading functions. As part of this education effort, Triple Point’s blog is one place to turn to for insight into how commodity risk management approaches can play just as [...]
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Understanding How to Use Price Indexes in Sourcing: Running Predictive Forecast and Models
Yesterday, I presented with Lisa Reisman on a MetalMiner/Spend Matters webinar looking at new sourcing strategies for organizations that purchase material quantities of commodities or raw materials (or in cases where their suppliers do it on their behalf). The central theme of the webinar was how to leverage price index information at the core of five new sourcing strategies. During the discussion, we talked about how underlying third-party datasets (including price indexes) can serve as a foundation for advanced sourcing strategies. The sourcing approaches that leverage underlying price index information focus on leveraging data to: Form the basis to run [...]
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A MetalMiner Index (MMI) Introduction and Analyzing the June Commodity Drop Off (Part 3)
In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, we provided backgrounder on MetalMiner’s ten different MMIs highlighting metal price trends by specific industry (the Auto MMI®, Construction MMI, Renewables MMI) and by vertical metal sector (the Raw Steels MMI, Stainless MMI, Aluminum MMI, Copper MMI, Rare Earths MMI, Global Precious Metals MMI and the world’s first GOES MMI). We also began to examine the June MMI numbers. Spend Matters readers can download a detailed report on the June MMI numbers over on MetalMiner. In today’s post, we feature the continuation of our discussion with MetalMiner’s Lisa Reisman on what [...]
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A MetalMiner IndX(sm) (MMI) Introduction and Analyzing the June Commodity Drop Off (Part 2)
In Part 1 in this series, we provided some background on MetalMiner’s ten different MMIs highlighting metal price trends by specific industry (the Auto MMI®, Construction MMI, Renewables MMI) and by vertical metal sector (the Raw Steels MMI, Stainless MMI, Aluminum MMI, Copper MMI, Rare Earths MMI, Global Precious Metals MMI and the world’s first GOES MMI). Spend Matters readers can download a detailed report on the June MMI numbers over on MetalMiner. In today’s post, we feature the first part of an interview with MetalMiner’s Lisa Reisman on what the June MMI numbers suggest. Spend Matters: What stands out [...]
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A MetalMiner IndX(SM) (MMI) Introduction and Analyzing the June Commodity Drop-Off (Part 1)
Earlier in June, Spend Matters covered the launched of MetalMiner’s new aggregate pricing indexes, better known as the MMIs. As we noted at the time, “the monthly MMI reports — 10 in all, powered by MetalMiner IndX data — focus on MetalMiner’s exclusive composite indexes, highlighting metal price trends by specific industry (the Auto MMI®, Construction MMI, Renewables MMI) and by vertical metal sector (the Raw Steels MMI, Stainless MMI, Aluminum MMI, Copper MMI, Rare Earths MMI, Global Precious Metals MMI and the world’s first GOES MMI). The MMIs are useful and clever for a variety of reasons — which [...]
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ISM, BLS Data Insufficient for Commodity Forecasting? MetalMiner Launches 10 Monthly Price Indexes
Spend Matters’ sister site, MetalMiner, recently announced the launch of 10 new metals pricing indexes designed to help companies better monitor and forecast commodity pricing trends. According to the announcement, “MetalMiner will publish a new series of metal price indexes featuring key metal economic indicators, specifically designed to be more compelling than the existing government and third-party analysis available to manufacturers… The monthly MMI reports will provide sourcing teams with fresh insight into metal price trends, which in turn will allow savvy companies to improve their internal forecasting and predictive capabilities. Banks, investment firms and hedge funds will gain additional [...]
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Intersecting Lean, CSR & Procurement: Nike’s New Supplier Sustainability Index and Program (Part 7)
Please click here, here, here, here, here, and here for the earlier posts in this series. Thanks to the research of our parent firm (Azul Partners), AMR Research, and IHS, we’ve been able to identify what we believe are the top compliance related areas (on the bill of material level) that companies are most interested in monitoring and proactively managing with tier one and even lower tier suppliers. On a product compliance level, we’ve observed that conflict minerals (Dodd-Frank) management has generated the highest level of interest recently within the manufacturing community. You can check out MetalMiner’s research compendium on [...]
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The End of Global Sourcing as We Know It? The MIT/Sloan View (Part 2)
Please click here for the first post in this series. In an article in MIT Sloan Management Review, supply chain academics and experts David Simchi-Levi, James Paul Peruvankal, Narendra Mulani and Bill Read offer up a number of hypotheses examining how global sourcing is changing. On Spend Matters, we have explored the authors’ second argument for a long time. As they word it, “Sourcing and production may need to move closer to demand.” Specifically, “as cheaper manufacturing costs are offset by higher transportation costs, it may be necessary to move more manufacturing and sourcing activities onshore. The merits of doing [...]
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- US and Chinese Comparative PVC Price : Jake said: I can also see this trend continuing, and i also think the west as a whole will struggle t... more
- SAP Sapphire: Moving to Frictionless AND Sticky Commerce : Jason Busch said: Pierre, Great stuff ... I personally think the proprietary network / apps approach t... more
- Three Lessons from LeBron James for Procurement Organizations : bitter and twisted said: I despise these sporting analogies.... more
- Procurement Inertia: When Did You Last Run Through the Seven Steps? : US Army M1A2 SEP - Voyager PE35557 US Army said: [...] Procurement Inertia: When Did You Last Run Through the Seven Steps? (spendmatters.co... more
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