Innovation in the Supply Chain

Jun 27, 2017

Assessing the True Return of Procurement Transformation on Total Shareholder Return: A Tough Proposition

In my earlier book with Gerard Chick on “The Procurement Value Proposition“, we advance the notion that buildoing a business case for investing in people, process, and technology improvement in… 

Jun 5, 2017

Insights from Counterfeiting Roundtable Part 1

A roundtable of executives was held at North Carolina State University on May 31, 2017, focused on exploring insights into the following questions related to counterfeiting in the supply chain.… 

May 9, 2017

Learning to Work with Machines That Learn What the Experts Know

It is no secret that future generations of managers are being asked to learn all about the different processes in the end-to-end supply chain, and be able to come together… 

Apr 22, 2017

Bayer, Deere, and ARC Provide Feedback on Student Capabilities that Drive Innovation

On April 19th and 20th the Supply Chain Resource Cooperative held its bi-annual Board Advisory meeting and Partner Meeting in the Talley Student Center at North Carolina State University.  The… 

Mar 16, 2017

Procurement Leaders '17: Supplier enabled innovation is a foundation for procurement's strategic repositioning

I had the opportunity to sit in on a number of sessions at Procurement Leaders American Congress 2017 in Miami this week.  Despite the snowstorms that prevented many from making… 

Feb 12, 2017

Best Practice: Creating a Governance Mechanism for Analytical Learning in Organizations

I recently interviewed a large semiconductor company that developed a cross-enterprise initiative to drive analytical learning across its entire supply chain. The company established a supply chain IT organization that reports… 

Dec 14, 2016

Day 3: Lenovo Goes About Creating the End to End Transparent Supply Chain

On the third day the team visited the Lenovo “Green Data Center”, and learned of how Lenovo is working to create their “converged” network servers that are on the leading… 

Dec 1, 2016

Reflections on the LIVING Supply Chain SCRC Meeting

The SCRC meeting was a huge success yesterday. I led off the discussion and took this opportunity to share some of the highlights of my new book, The LIVING Supply… 

Nov 30, 2016

Exploring the Era of Global Transparency in the LIVING Supply Chain

We are at the beginning of a completely different era in the history of global trade: the era of the digitized  real-time supply chain. In the 25 years I have… 

Nov 5, 2016

Data is the Real Gold At the End of the Rainbow for Contract and Spend Management Systems

Contract management analytics are critical for tracking transactional compliance with contract pricing, terms and conditions, but also as a vehicle for workflow management around negotiation of contract renewals, and aggregation of…