Across the Pond: Spend Matters UK/Europe Round-Up

A tragic death and contingent fee procurement consultants... -- I had one of those gulps of recognition the other day, as I saw a procurement and personal connection to a story on the front pages, more so because I'd already started drafting a series of posts on this topic. You may have heard of the very sad death at Glastonbury Festival of Christopher Shale, chairman of the Tory party in David Cameron's Oxfordshire constituency. In reading about him, I discovered that he founded and made his fortune from a firm called Oxford Resources, a cost reduction and procurement consulting firm.

CombineNet – advanced sourcing pushes ahead -- We welcomed CombineNet as a sponsor recently, so I caught up with two of their senior team, Greg Holt and Jennifer Sikora, recently for a chat. The timing was good, because they've just released the results of an interesting survey into how organisations are using advanced sourcing platforms. We'll come back to those survey results over the next couple of days.

What should procurement do about economic sustainability? -- Yesterday we discussed the economic aspects of sustainable procurement, and today we're getting into the ideas and actions that can fulfil two purposes; they help customer organisations while promoting wider economic sustainability and market dynamicism. For instance, encouraging innovation in supply markets, another aspect of sustainable procurement, is an increasingly hot topic for public and private sector procurement, and one that has obvious benefits at both individual customer organisation level and in terms of the health of wider economies.

How to score in the United Nations procurement net -- I recently attended a 2 day training workshop in New York about how to deal with UN procurement from a supplier perspective. This was organised as part of something called the European Union Procurement Forum, a group of people each representing a member state country trying to help the businesses of Europe sell to the United Nations.

June Music Review – Bon Iver, Arctic Monkeys, Puressence, Pete and the Pirates (I've been waiting for Peter's Bon Iver review for weeks!) -- An excellent month, with two contenders for "album of the year", and two other unexpectedly strong albums emerging.

- Sheena Moore