Supply Chain View from the Field

Category Archives: Contract Management

1. Random thoughts on “close-to-home-shoring” based on my travels last week…

   April 27, 2013
   by: handfield
   categories: BRIC Supply Chain, Contract Management, Global Supply Chain, Supplier Relationship Management, Supply Chain Management, Supply chain Relationships

   Last week I had the opportunity to travel first to New York and then Monterrey, Mexico, and speak with a number of people to explore perspectives on the current economic situation we find ourselves in. Early in the week I sat in on a lecture given by Clay Christenson (from Harvard Business School) to a [...]

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2. Patrick Hopkins at Coupa: Coca Cola’s four truths of procurement to pay in action

   April 10, 2013
   by: handfield
   categories: Contract Management, Procure to Pay, Strategic Sourcing, Supply chain analytics, Supply Chain Innovation

   At the Coupa INSPIRE procurement conference in San Francisco this week, the Chief Procurement Officer of Coca Cola Consolidated, Patrick Hopkins, shared his views on the “4 Truths of Procurement”, and how he has operationalized his views through the deployment of Coupa procure to pay software. Coke has an incredible history dating back to 1886, [...]

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3. Do We Need More Lawyers in Procurement? Or Do Lawyers Need More Procurement Managers?

   March 29, 2013
   by: handfield
   categories: Contract Management, MBA Supply Chain Programs, Supply chain Relationships, Supply Chain Risk, Supply Chain Talent

   As I’ve continued with my research on the future faces of procurement, a consistent theme that has come up again and again is the need for increased interaction between the legal and procurement groups in organizations.  Today, this interaction is often poorly handled, with clumsy templates being exchanged between the two groups, and in some [...]

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4. Procurement: Getting Back to the Basics

   February 22, 2013
   by: handfield
   categories: Category Management, Contract Management, Strategic Sourcing, Supply Chain Management

   I’ve been speaking to a number of procurement executives lately, leading to some interesting discussions around risk, category management, shared services, and a lot of other high level concepts that are no doubt important.  There are also a lot of websites and presentations at conferences around the “next big thing” in procurement.  One of these [...]

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5. The Father of Collaborative Relationship Management Passes Away

   September 25, 2012
   by: handfield
   categories: Contract Management, Customer Relationship Management, Supply Chain Management, Supply Chain Risk

   Unless you happened to be reading the NY Times obituary columns this week, you wouldn’t have noticed that one of the great supply chain innovators of the 20th century, Gerard I. Nierenberg, passed away this week.  Nierenberg, a lawyer whose frustration with the adversarial nature of legal disputes led him to develop methods of negotiating [...]

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6. What Will the Role of the CIO Look Like In the Next Five Years?

   April 3, 2012
   by: handfield
   categories: Category Management, Contract Management, Strategic Sourcing, Supplier Relationship Management, Supply chain Relationships, Supply Chain Systems

   I recently spoke with Todd Taylor from Apptivo, who is writing a book on IT technology management.  Apptivo provides IT business technology management, and is focused on transparency of IT application usage.  Todd is also affiliated with the CIO Technology Council, and is writing  book on current trends in IT.  He notes that CIO’s are [...]

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7. Lean Aerospace Supply Management Developments

   April 2, 2012
   by: handfield
   categories: Aerospace Supply Chain, Business Process Outsourcing, Contract Management, Forecasting, Global Supply Chain, Inventory Management, Logistics, Supplier Relationship Management, Supply Chain Management, Supply Chain Strategy

   In a recent set of interviews, I had an opportunity to learn about some of the recent developments in the aerospace industry, that is happening in both commercial and defense sectors.  As organizations seek to drive inventory out of the supply chain and improve working capital, while simultaneously reducing leadtimes and customer responsiveness, they are [...]

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8. Reacting to Disruptions: The real test for belonging to the “world class supply chain” club?

   January 20, 2012
   by: handfield
   categories: Commodities forecasting, Contract Management, Global Supply Chain, Supply Chain Risk, Supply Market Intelligence

   Many people are quick to point to the AMR Top 25 supply chains as the benchmark for supply chain excellence. In my mind, the real test of how “world-class” a supply chain is, is how they react under duress and severe supply chain disruptions. There is no doubt that as we go into 2012, there [...]

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9. Are you really a customer’s of choice?

   January 15, 2012
   by: handfield
   categories: Category Management, Contract Management, Customer Relationship Management, Supplier Relationship Management, Supply chain analytics, Supply Chain Management, Supply chain Relationships, Supply Market Intelligence

   Within the context of the current financial crisis, the importance of sustaining critical supply chain relationships has received more attention than ever. Despite the return to a “buyer’s market” in some sectors, the need to build and sustain supplier relationships is not obviated. Indeed, in an environment of heightened supply chain financial risks, supplier performance [...]

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10. Planning for Uncertainty in 2012

    December 14, 2011
    by: handfield
    categories: Category Management, Commodities forecasting, Contract Management, Supply Chain Management, Supply chain Relationships, Supply Chain Risk, Supply Market Intelligence

    As I look back on 2011, I’m reminded of the success stories and disruptions that occurred, but am also thinking about who is going to win in the year ahead. On the economic front, 2011 was really about another year of uncertainty. A global economic recovery remains underway, although it is alarmingly long and slower [...]

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11. Gaps In Relationships and Contracts in Eastern and Western Cultures

    December 5, 2011
    by: handfield
    categories: Contract Management, Global Supply Chain, Supply Chain Management, Supply chain Relationships, Supply Chain Risk

    In this second post, I summarize additional insights that several of our speakers put forward at our recent SCRC meeting on Dec 1-2, 2011. We were lucky to have Tim Cummins, CEO of IACCM, speak on the subject of relational contracts in a complex global environment. Tim made a very good point that Western companies [...]

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12. Darwinism, Ignatius of Loyala, and SAP in Mongolia: Insights from the SCRC Meeting on Supply Chain Agility

    
    by: handfield
    categories: Contract Management, Global Supply Chain, Supply Chain Management, Supply chain Relationships, Supply Chain Risk

    The SCRC meeting on “Creating Agility in a Globally Volatile Environment” provided a broad variety of speakers who shared a number of different perspectives on the approaches that supply chain executives need to consider when building strategies for navigating difficult economic and disruptive minefields. I began with a brief overview of the multiple forms of [...]

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13. $30B of Waste in Iraq….We’re not in TCE Anymore Oliver…

    September 1, 2011
    by: handfield
    categories: Contract Management, Supply chain analytics, Supply Chain Management, Supply chain Relationships, Supply Chain Risk, Supply Market Intelligence

    The Wartime Contracting Report came out today and announced $30B in waste in Iraq, and focused on the fact that there was a lot of graft and corruption taking place. Is this a surprise? A chat with Tim Cummins at IACCM leads me to think not….In military contracting environments, there is often a lot of [...]

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