supply management Content

As part of a new partnership, the Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply (CIPS) and Spend Matters launched a video podcast this week called “Spend Friends” to discuss all things spend management, supply chain, risk and everything else under the procurement umbrella.

The podcast is hosted by Bill Michels, the VP of Operations — Americas at CIPS USA, and Pierre Mitchell, Spend Matters’ Chief Research Officer. With their years of experience, they plan to impart key wisdom and ideas for procurement practitioners of all ages and skills in each monthly video podcast.

In the first episode, Michels and Mitchell shared their insights into what they think will be the top supply chain trends of 2021.

Managing enterprise performance is a critical skill for any company, and the concept of Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) has been around for many years. It is basically a process that plans, monitors, and adjusts the performance KPIs and targets (and capabilities needed to hit them) needed to achieve the enterprise mission. It's basically the process of using balanced scorecards to create alignment – from the boardroom down to the activity level. For procurement organizations, this comes down to "supply performance management" (not suppliER performance management!) Read on to learn the difference and why it matters...

Lesson Four here is that project participants must understand improvement objectives and how to handle trade-offs. So let’s assume you’ve seized a nice prize, and per the WSJ article, let’s say the prize for P&G is $2B in cash. The prize could be taken as freed cash (or to a supplier, an increase in cash held captive!) But it could also be taken as a cost reduction in the form of an early discount. So, we have the classic cash vs. cost trade-off (we’ll ignore the service aspect of on-time payments that AP is measured on). So, which is more important? In this case, it’s cash.

In this ten-part series of procurement lessons from P&G, the first thing to keep in mind is that there is "no rest for the best." I have yet to meet a single “award winning” procurement organization that does everything well and has run out of opportunities to pursue. I always roll my eyes when companies want to find the ultimate world-class procurement organization to learn from. That’s impossible – it’s a search for a purple squirrel.

It’s always a pleasure to connect with former Purchasing Editor Paul Teague, who is now the North America Editor for Procurement Leaders. I had the […]

When it comes to supply management, it’s important to have both carrots and sticks. Sometimes sticks are more effective, especially in emerging markets where naming, […]

Last week, Spend Matters featured a recap of metals-focused commodity management strategies for 2012 (here and here), including offering a forward look into what companies […]

Earlier this week, I caught up with an industry insider who knows a thing or two about building an organization and recruiting and keeping the […]