Many parents might be familiar with Richard Scarry’s book “What do People Do All Day.” It’s a wonderful illustrated children’s book dealing with all of the various roles that people play in a small town. If there were a corporate edition, there'd likely be a procurement person in it, and if you wanted to help those procurement folks, you'd want to know what they do all day so that you could best help them. This is what ISM is asking its membership and the profession at large.
Over the past two days, five members of the Spend Matters team descended on Indianapolis for the 2016 ISM Annual Conference. We (Jason Busch and Pierre Mitchell) are presenting in various sessions throughout the 3-day event and our team is catching the general vibe of the largest procurement event (roughly 2,500 people this year) in North America, and we’ve been impressed with the track design and much of the content in the sessions we’ve sat in on this year.
The ISM and Spend Matters Global Procurement Tech Summit (#ProcureTech2016) is a wrap. Despite the hurdles in marketing an event at the same time as Ariba LIVE (not by design!) and with less than seven months from finalizing the idea through to executing it, nearly 300 people took a chance to attend the first-time event. While the perfectionists in us would have liked to tweak a number of things, the event was, based on the feedback we received from participants, a smashing success. And next year will be even better.
Earlier this morning at #ProcureTech2016, Professor Robert Handfield, of the Poole College of Management, North Carolina State University, gave a must-attend talk on rethinking the future of procurement technology by putting data first — and how to ensure you’ve got the right set of information at the core of sourcing, supply chain and supplier engagement activities.
DuPont’s Craig Reed, a supply chain and procurement executive running direct spend across all of DuPont, gave a nuanced, engaging and insider talk this morning at #ProcureTech2016. Craig also shared an important secret, which I’ll let you in on here. Besides ERP/MRP, supply chain planning, collaborative logistics optimization, P2P, e-sourcing and many other systems of record and systems of stakeholder and supplier engagement, DuPont leverages Microsoft SharePoint as a key piece of technology infrastructure that weaves together knowledge across the organization as well.
Prentis Wilson, who oversees Amazon Business, just took the stage at the ISM and Spend Matters Global Procurement Tech Summit and provided an overview of Amazon’s solution for business. (Follow the event live at #ProcureTech2016!) In framing Amazon Business, Prentis suggested that Amazon Business is “A B2B marketplace — a marketplace of sellers and a whole suite of business friendly technology.”
Aside from the U.S. government and Wal-Mart, we’d be hard pressed to point out another organization with similar massive procurement spend as IBM. At #ProcureTech2016 this morning, IBM’s Vice President of Global Procurement Dan Carrell gave a splendid talk on how IBM is transforming its own operations through cognitive procurement.
The ISM and Spend Matters Global Procurement Tech Summit (#ProcureTech2016) kicked off this morning in Baltimore with Anne Rung taking the stage as the morning’s first keynote. Anne centered much of her talk on federal IT procurement, which within the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) represents over 10% of the overall Federal procurement budget — $51 billion in IT spend, to be precise).
At the ISM and Spend Matters Global Procurement Tech Summit this week in Baltimore, IBM’s Vice President of Global Procurement Dan Carrell will be giving a keynote that will raise some eyebrows. Even if you’re not an IBM customer, supplier or peer — and chances are you’re at least one of the three — his talk is truly can’t miss stuff if you care about the future of procurement and how technology will lead the way to new possibilities, savings and value generation.
The ISM and Spend Matters Global Procurement Tech Summit kicks off tonight in Baltimore. Close to 300 people will be attending this year. You can follow the festivities live on Twitter (#ProcureTech2016) or check back on Spend Matters, as a bunch of us will be blogging live from the event. Tomorrow during lunch, I’ll be giving a talk on five procurement mega trends that will reshape the profession in the coming decade.
Amrish Lobo, director of global logistics, distribution and customer service, global supply chain at Baker Hughes Inc., was recently named among the 30 Under 30 Rising Supply Chain Stars Recognition Program, a program set up by the Institute for Supply Management and ThomasNet to recognize leading millennials in the the supply chain management and procurement fields. Lobo, 29, has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Anna University’s College of Engineering, Guindy, in Chennai, India, and a master’s in industrial engineering from Purdue University. This multicultural exposure, he said, gave him the foundation for working in global supply chain management.
I’m getting more excited for next week (March 14–16) as the first annual ISM and Spend Matters Global Procurement Tech Summit kicks off in Baltimore. One of the keynotes that is critically important for attendees to internalize and take back to their organization will be Prentis Wilson’s session, Amazon Business: This is the Future of Procurement. I’ll be asking Prentis a number of questions on stage after his talk — topics I know our readers want to probe on.