For the buyers and category managers out there, especially those of you deep in the weeds of buying and managing commodities, here’s a quick rundown of news and thoughts from particular commodity markets. MetalMiner, a sister site of ours, scours the landscape for what matters. This week:
Spend Matters welcomes this guest post from Matt Kunkel, the CEO of LogicGate, a provider of risk management solutions.
A recent study revealed more than 60% of organizations in the U.S. that have encountered a data breach were compromised because of a third-party vendor. Organizations use vendors as a means to efficiently complete tasks, but they can create vulnerabilities for which the organization is ultimately responsible. Vendor decisions and operations are frequently out of a chief information security officer’s control, but they still carry serious risks to the organization’s business and reputation.
Severe weather poses one of the greatest threats and the least predictable risks to global supply chains within our modern globalized economy. The summer hurricane season is a particularly problematic time because nearly half the planet, and a majority of the production capacity for many industries, are located in areas routinely struck by catastrophic weather — East Asia, the Northern Indian Ocean, and the Southeast and Gulf coasts of the United States.
DHL Resilience360 recently released Stormy Weather Ahead: A Global Outlook on the 2019 Season to compile information about the impacts that even small storms can have and discuss the short- and long-term implications of these systems on existing supply chains. And learn ways to mitigate that risk.
The supply chain risk environment is continuously evolving, DHL Resilience360 executives Tobias Larsson and Shehrina Kamal state in Resilience360’s first Annual Risk Report that looks at last year’s big issues and problems to come in 2019. “Risks are increasingly being called out in companies’ publicly filed financial statements, and as supply chains become more strategic, disruptions are turning into board-level issues,” the executives stated. “Each year brings new challenges for companies, with different threats, unexpected events and unpredictable consequences.”
As the digital transformation of procurement matures, relationships with suppliers are changing — in good ways and in challenging ways. To give us a close-up view of developments in supplier relationship management, we did a Q&A with Daryl Hammett, the general manager of ConnXus, a provider whose SRM solution helps buyers and suppliers work together to be efficient, responsible and sustainable.
In this first installment of this Spend Matters PRO series (see Part 1A and Part 1B), we noted that a number of pressing issues are shaping procurement from the outside in, yet chief procurement officers (CPOs) are primarily still concerned with issues set by an inside-out agenda — that is, cost cutting and supply assurance targets mandated by upper management. Our PESTLE analysis of factors shaping the modern CPO agenda identified broad trends like economic instability, globalization, changing digital business strategies and the need to address corporate social responsibility (CSR) as areas that procurement organizations need to consider if they want to truly tap and manage the opportunities (and risks) offered by external supply markets.
Perhaps nowhere is this more readily apparent than with the topic of sustainability and environmental stewardship, the focus of today’s brief. The environment is an inseparable component of any business. It forms the platform layer off which all goods and services are produced, and, more fundamentally, the resulting ecosystem services from which humans benefit create the foundations for our species’ survival and quality of life. Due to multiple ongoing trends, however, the environment is changing, as are the ways that consumers, investors and governments think about our relationship to the environment.
Accordingly, Part 2 of this series on the CPO’s Conundrum examines the outside-in drivers pushing sustainability and environmental stewardship higher on the procurement agenda. It also explores recent examples of how businesses are integrating these issues into their supply management strategies, while simultaneously addressing them in balance with traditional procurement objectives, such as category management, supply base alignment and demand shaping.
EcoVadis, a provider that rates businesses on sustainability and corporate social responsibility (CSR), announced Tuesday that it is expanding its capabilities with the new Sustainability Intelligence Suite, which will include "predictive risk mapping, performance signals and audit management."
EcoVadis, which provides vendor ratings and scorecarding for sustainability and broader CSR metrics as a component of an integrated “many-to-many” supplier network and platform, has an aggressive product roadmap to expand how users interact with and leverage the supplier intelligence, which is at the very core of its value proposition.
Today, in this final installment in this Spend Matters’ PRO series based on our analysis from the EcoVadis Sustain 2019 customer event, we turn our attention to the future direction of where EcoVadis is expanding its capabilities. We also include customer/prospect recommendations.
In previous Spend Matters PRO coverage on EcoVadis, we offered a recap and update on the provider’s most recent capabilities and solution footprint — and an analysis of where EcoVadis fits in the broader supplier management and supply chain risk management landscape.
Last week, I represented the Spend Matters analyst team at EcoVadis’ Sustain 2019 customer event in Paris. In between lessons on sustainable supply chains, vendor CSR ratings and French labor unions I never knew existed — thank goodness for British Airways when the Eurostar shuts down because a handful of customs workers at Gare du Nord decided to protest Brexit by striking — I had the chance to learn about the latest enhancements to the EcoVadis platform.
In Part 1 of this Spend Matters PRO research series, we shared some of the most recent capabilities that EcoVadis has embedded in its sustainability and ratings supplier management platform. Today, we turn our attention to explaining how EcoVadis fits in the broader supplier management and risk solutions landscape. (Hint: It is a complement to other solutions, but not a replacement for them, at least not yet.)
We will conclude our series with a look at the EcoVadis solutions roadmap and landscape in the coming weeks with specific recommendations on what it means for current and future customers who are likely to also make investments in adjacent solution areas and need to think about the architectural “fit” of all these components together. But to answer that question, we first need to explore where EcoVadis sits today in the broader supplier management and supply/supply chain risk management technology and solutions universe?
This Spend Matters PRO research brief provides insight into all of the components that comprise the supplier management and supplier/supply chain risk management sectors. It then attempts to place EcoVadis, a sustainability and CSR specialist in vendor ratings and management, in the context of these two highly complex solutions markets. Our analysis includes detailed functional and requirements for each of these solution types.
With deadline questions looming about Brexit and high levels of uncertainty about U.S.-China trade negotiations still hanging over global markets, risks to supply chains may already seem well above average. As reported by Resilinc’s EventWatch 2018 annual report, however, some of the greatest risks to supply chain operation may be something that stakeholders don’t realize.
Now more than ever, better choices exist at the top end of the market for source-to-pay technology suites. When it comes to overall suite functional performance in the Q4 2018 SolutionMap, a handful of suite vendors tend to stand out from the overall pack, often for very different reasons. Four of the top performing S2P suite vendors in the Q4 SolutionMap functional benchmark are Coupa, Ivalua, Jaggaer and SAP Ariba. But how do they compare to the overall SolutionMap source-to-pay benchmark dataset? You can find out here in our coverage, which will include Determine, SynerTrade and Zycus.
Spend Matters welcomes this guest post from Jason Middleton, Ray Products vice president of sales and development.
Our trade deficit with China surpassed $301 billion in 2018 — and it’s no mystery why. Thanks to cheap labor and fewer regulations there, it tends to be more cost-effective to have “Made in China” stamped on your product than it is to have “Made in America.”
In the last year, however, the trade war has prompted many companies to re-evaluate their outsourcing practices and consider a “maker-to-user” model of sourcing locally. With the U.S. imposing approximately $250 billion in tariffs on Chinese imports, it’s simply no longer cost-effective to source products and materials from China.