Tag Archives: Breaking News

Bird Flu 2.0 – Inoculate Your Supply Base Against Supply Chain Risk

Pierre Mitchell - April 15, 2013 9:14 AM | Categories: Commentary

bird-flu Over on Spend Matters PRO today, we feature a how-to guide covering bird flu, a topic that could potentially impact a wide range of Spend Matters readers. Subscribers can access the full research brief, Beyond Bird Flu 2.0 – Inoculate Your Supply Base Against Supply Chain Risk, as well as other related content in our Risk, Performance and Compliance Section of Spend Matters PRO. Given the topic’s importance, we’re providing an excerpt that frames the importance of taking the latest strain of bird flu more seriously – as well as the potential risk that pandemics pose to our supply chain. [...]

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Tragic Accident Claims Life of SciQuest’s Questie

Jason Busch - April 1, 2013 6:09 AM | Categories: Commentary

questie Chicago, Illinois The usually quiet halls of the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) were filled with wailing mourners when campus police informed students, faculty and administration earlier today, April 1st, about a tragic accident that occurred in one of its biochemistry and molecular biology laboratories. Augustus Questie the Fourth, known by his colleagues and friends as “Questie”, was killed instantly during an experiment he was participating in. Known by friends and family for his quick wit and boundless energy, Questie often worked multiple shifts. He was part of a team developing state-of-the-art ultra high throughout chromatin immuno-precipitation assays to [...]

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Spend Matters Netherlands – Interview with Gert van der Heijden

Jason Busch - February 12, 2013 9:21 AM | Categories: Commentary

Gert van der Heijden is the Executive Editor of Spend Matters Netherlands. We plan to feature a significant amount of his commentary more broadly on Spend Matters and the Spend Matters Network, but we first thought we’d introduce you to Gert by sharing some of his thinking on procurement, the Netherlands and why we’re embarking on this new Spend Matters venture together. Jason: Why do you think the Netherlands needs Spend Matters? Gert: The Dutch sourcing and procurement community is always open for new and high quality information. Although the Netherlands are pretty small, we do have six professors of [...]

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Welkom Spend Matters Netherlands!

Jason Busch - February 11, 2013 2:00 PM | Categories: Commentary

Today marks a significant milestone. With the expansion of the Spend Matters Network through the launch of Spend Matters Netherlands, we mark our first foray into delivering a local language website (though we suppose one could describe the sourcing and risk management strategies for effective metals buying as having their own unique dialect as well). But still, Dutch is Dutch. And English is English. And since the team in the US (and the UK) is using Google Translate to grasp many of the nuances of spendmatters.nl, it’s clear that we’re up to something entirely new here. We’ll be telling you [...]

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Enrich and e-Three to Merge: Consolidation in Oracle Procurement Ecosystems

Jason Busch - February 6, 2013 11:01 AM | Categories: Commentary

On February 4,  2013, Oracle systems integration, BPO and consulting partners Enrich (formerly EnrichIT) and e-Three announced their intent to merge. The transaction is expected to close by the end of February. Prior to the merger, Enrich had roughly two hundred employees, of which approximately twenty were dedicated full-time to the procurement area. e-Three also had twenty employees (in total) focused exclusively on procurement. As James Anthony, now President of Enrich and co-founder and former CEO of e-Three told Spend Matters, “The combination brings complementary skills and knowledge. e-Three were procurement guys who knew IT in the Oracle procurement ecosystem. [...]

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Spend Matters Network – Your Gateway to Greater Purchasing and Procurement Wisdom

Jason Busch - January 30, 2013 2:14 AM | Categories: Commentary

The Spend Matters family of sites publishes in excess of 25 articles, columns, research briefs, and papers each weekday, and our current roadmap (including global expansion and deeper commodity coverage) is to double that number in the next twelve months. Yet our research has found that there’s surprisingly little single visit overlap between the readers of our sites. Most of our readers only occasionally (if that) visit another Spend Matters site — and the feedback is that it’s difficult to quickly find new information of interest without resorting to multiple visits or an RSS feed/reader. In other words, jumping around [...]

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Welcome to the New Spend Matters

Jason Busch - January 29, 2013 2:32 AM | Categories: Commentary

Have you noticed a change? Back in 2004, when blogging was still in knee-pants, Spend Matters launched as the first blog in the procurement sector. Off-the-shelf publishing and content management system (CMS) technology as we know it today barely existed. You basically had really simple tools that powered political blogs and extremely complex (and expensive) tools that powered newspapers and media sites – and a diverse set of custom development and untried code tossed in for good measure at all levels and sophistication. Open source technology like WordPress and MySQL was still in its infancy and not yet ready for [...]

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Walmart and Suppliers: New Regulations (and Public Shaming)

Thomas Kase - January 23, 2013 12:01 AM | Categories: Industry News

To any firm with significant brand recognition, preserving the brand name is vital; it can help your your market cap more than lean and efficient operations. Witness one of the greatest brands out there – Disney – and their policy against purchasing any safety-related components from Chinese suppliers for rides in their entertainment parks. Disney’s share price place would plummet as quickly as the roller coaster car that jumps off the tracks. Now Walmart has started to up their game in the Code of Conduct (CoC) area. Not long ago, they made headlines for requiring suppliers to self-assess their sustainability [...]

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Why I Joined Spend Matters: Pierre Mitchell’s Inaugural Post

Pierre Mitchell - January 22, 2013 4:01 AM | Categories: Commentary

Like many people, I often get writer’s block with the first sentence on a blank page (or screen). This first ‘official’ blog post from me as an Azul Partners employee may be the biggest block to date. Why? Because I have mentally written and rewritten this entry hundreds of times, as Jason and I have threatened to do this for years (the delay is due mostly to my cowardice). But, like in Zen Calligraphy, there is no best way, so enough meandering. It’s best to just start laying it down. I have known Jason for over a decade. I knew [...]

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Welcoming Pierre Mitchell, Our New Managing Director and Chief Research Officer

Jason Busch - January 22, 2013 12:01 AM | Categories: Commentary

We’re absolutely thrilled to announce that Pierre Mitchell has joined Azul Partners as Managing Director and will serve as Chief Research Officer for Spend Matters. Pierre will be collaborating with me around procurement research activities and share broader solution development responsibilities for intellectual property creation and firm strategy. This includes efforts to build new types of interactive and social communities, including the evolution of Spend Matters PRO and other digital assets that fall under Azul Partners’ umbrella. In the early 2000′s, Pierre was the first supply chain practitioner to become a procurement “industry analyst” as the VP of supply management [...]

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Scott Slone Joins Azul Partners and Spend Matters as CTO

Jason Busch - January 16, 2013 12:01 AM | Categories: Commentary

We’re thrilled to announce today that Scott Slone has joined Azul Partners (Spend Matters’ parent company) as Chief Technology Officer. I first met Scott when he worked for Ariba back in the highflying B2B and .com days (I actually knew his previous employer, Trading Dynamics, one of the early pioneers in sourcing software). Scott is not really joining Spend Matters, MetalMiner and our other sites as CTO so much as now we are taking nearly all of his waking hours versus just some of them. From day one in 2004, Scott was the brains and brawn behind Spend Matters technology [...]

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Spend Matters Has a New Intern: Welcome Sydney!

Sheena Moore - January 14, 2013 10:01 AM | Categories: Commentary

I’m pleased to introduce Sydney Lazarus, our new editorial intern who joined Spend Matters just this morning. We’re thrilled to have her as part of the team! – Sheena Hi there! This is Sydney, the new intern here at Spend Matters. For a short introduction, I’m a senior undergraduate student at Northwestern, majoring in journalism and Russian. I’m pretty excited to take a dip into the procurement world after stints at Condé Nast Traveler and Modern Luxury and, somewhat less related, a year teaching English and consuming too much cheese bread in the Republic of Georgia. Only look to the [...]

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