The Industry News Category

In Part 1 of our interview chat with Graham Wright, IBM’s vice president of global procurement and IBM procurement services, we had just gotten down to brass tacks on what he considers to be the hallmarks of procurement transformation for organizations today. (ICYMI, catch up on Part 1 here.) Wright was also — for once — back at home in the U.K., which is not a regular occurrence lately. However, upon a minor run-in with a hotel room doorway, he’s had to take it a bit easy. Luckily we caught up with him post-recovery. Here’s the second part of our conversation.

When the term “global” is in your title, chances are you’re going to be a jet-setter. That’s indeed the case for IBM’s Vice President of Global Procurement and IBM Procurement Services Graham Wright, who is based in the U.K. and has been ping-ponging around the planet on behalf of the Global 100 giant for the last several years. Between meeting with clients and presenting at conferences, Wright made some time to catch up with Spend Matters about how he and IBM see the state of procurement technology within our increasingly digitalized business ecosystem.

Hurricanes Harvey and Irma have come and gone, leaving devastation in their wake and — what’s that? More hurricanes on the way? At the time of writing, tropical storm Jose is expected to become a hurricane and make its way towards the northeastern U.S. Instead of looking at Irma specifically like we did for Harvey, we decided to take a broader look at supply chain risk. To that end, we talked to Gary Lynch, who, according to our chief research officer Pierre Mitchell, is “the best supply risk guru in the world.”

If you’re a small or medium-sized construction company, congratulations. Chances are you’re doing pretty well in your supply chain corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. Likewise if you’re a large company in the financial, legal, consulting and advertising markets. On Tuesday, EcoVadis released its first annual Global CSR Risk and Performance Index, which evaluated 20,400 companies according to 21 criteria related to the environment, labor practices and human rights, fair business ethics and sustainable procurement.

Terrorist attacks on supply chains are on the upswing, according to a recent report from BSI, a provider of supply chain intelligence. The number of such attacks have increased 8.5% from last year, and the year-over-year increase in the proportion of terrorist attacks on supply chains versus all attacks has also risen, by 19%.

Note: This is Part 2 in a two-part Q&A. Missed Part 1? Read it here.

Spend Matters recently chatted with the new chief marketing officer at Coupa, Chandar Pattabhiram, who was named by LinkedIn as one of five CMOs to follow this year. The first half of the Q&A had covered Pattabhiram’s thoughts on Coupa’s company culture and what he finds exciting about the procurement and spend management fields. In today’s Part 2, Pattabhiram discusses what he sees as the four biggest trends in marketing, as well as what drew him to Coupa (unhelpful hint: it has something to do with E = mc²).

It’s been a pretty good year for Chandar Pattabhiram, who recently joined Coupa as the new chief marketing officer (CMO). In June, he was named by LinkedIn as one of five CMOs to follow this year, while he was still CMO at Marketo, a provider of marketing automation software. At Marketo, Pattabhiram espoused a storytelling approach to marketing that emphasized emotional, human-to-human connections. In fact, if there’s an article on Pattabhiram that doesn’t mention storytelling, I haven’t come across it yet. So who are we to buck the trend? Last week, the brand-new CMO of Coupa gave Spend Matters what he called a “seven-day perspective” on the company culture and what excites him about the procurement and spend management field.

Procurement professionals have their work cut out for them as rains from Hurricane Harvey finally recede. While the personal and human costs of the disaster are only beginning to be tallied, supply chain and logistics pictures appear even murkier. Here are the top supply chain areas Harvey has disrupted, as well as the near- and long-term consequences procurement organizations will face responding to the storm.

It’s a simple yet excruciating irony that in a natural disaster that dumps more than 50 inches of rain on a single region, water becomes widely unavailable for consumption — for either people to drink or factories to function — even as it floods scores of neighborhoods. So it’s no surprise that water, and the havoc it continues to wreak in Houston and other areas, is central to the issue of supply chain risk management in the wake of Hurricane Harvey. Spend Matters has been covering the hurricane (see related stories below), which had been downgraded to a tropical storm soon after, and the disaster spurred a recent webinar presented by Resilinc, a supply chain resiliency solutions provider.

In this disastrous aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, emerging details about supply chain repercussions both locally and nationally have finally begun to paint a fuller picture. With Houston and its greater regional area comprising such a significant industrial hub, trucking, freight and petrochemical supply have all been frozen to varying degrees. But perhaps the biggest hit is the massive uncertainty over the full extent of the medium and long-term impact. We caught up with riskmethods' Bill DeMartino, general manager of North American operations, and Heiko Schwarz, the firm's founder and managing director, for a quick Q&A about what procurement professionals have been — and what they should be — thinking about in the wake of the disaster's fallout.

Hurricane Harvey, now a tropical storm, continues to make headlines as it slowly moved from southeast Texas into southwest Louisiana. The New York Times reports that the storm has dumped a record 51.88 inches of rain on Cedar Bayou, Texas, and that the state’s flood-related death toll has reached 31. In addition to the non-quantifiable losses to the affected residents, the storm is estimated to carry an economic cost of tens of billions of dollars.

Google recently announced a partnership with Wal-Mart to feature the retailer’s items within the voice-activated Google Assistant. Both firms obviously face a shared enemy with Amazon, and they are looking to emulate the Alexa-based voice ordering of Amazon products.

Wal-Mart already participates within the Google Express marketplace, which is Google’s simplistic version of Amazon.com. But this partnership gives consumers a new way to connect to the marketplace.

So, what’s the big deal here? Not much on the surface. But it signals that Google is going to have to get serious in e-commerce. And it’s about time, because Google actually has huge potential in e-commerce. Unfortunately, Google’s performance in that sector, in terms of its ability to monetize its search in new ways (especially in B2B), has been underwhelming, to put it mildly. To understand why, let's explore the good, the bad and the ugly of Google's move in a broader context.