Strategic Sourcing
Consumer Pressure Is Key to Fixing Dire Labor Conditions in the Clothing Supply Chain
Originally published on November 02, 2022, in the Harvard Business Review – Operations And Supply Chain Management by Robert Handfield, Tim Kraft, and Marguerite Moore SUMMARY The plethora of different audit systems and standards for assessing labor practices in factories […]
Supply Chain Resiliency and the Role of Public-Private Collaboration: Results from an FDA Panel
I recently facilitated an FDA panel that focused on creating a resilient supply chain for the medical devices industry. The virtual panel, Building Medical Device Supply Chain Resilience: A Healthcare and Public Health Ecosystem-Wide Collaboration, featured a number of speakers […]
Procurement and supply chain executives are struggling in the current environment of high inflation and missed deliveries.
A new study that the SCRC published with GEP examines the increasing pressure that supply chain executives are getting when it comes to responding to supply chain disruptions. The report was published in the last month, and reflects some of […]
Rising Interest Rates: Maybe It’s Time to Bring Back the Forgotten Art of Price Analysis
Price analysis is a subject that is often overlooked in supply chain education, (although it is certainly a big part of our chapter on Strategic Cost Management in Purchasing and Supply Chain Management). This is perhaps a “forgotten art” that […]
The SCRC’s Contribution to the WSJ’s Best Managed Companies
Once again, the Drucker Institute has put together a list of the “Top 250 Best Managed Companies”, which was highlighted in the Wall Street Journal. And like last year, the ratings put forth by the Supply Chain Resource Cooperative remain […]
Procurement’s Role in Managing the Tariff War
The news is in – in the form of more Tweets, of course. In a series of tweets on Thursday, Trump announced another round of tariffs on the roughly $300 billion of Chinese goods that had not already been targeted by American levies. The […]
The Risks and Benefits of Socializing with Suppliers
I had a chance to meet with a group of supply chain executives at the University of Calgary this week, which included a discussion by Ken Rawson. Ken has over 30 years of experience working in supply management, first with […]
Get Ready for the Electronification of Everything …and More Global Component Shortages!
I had an opportunity to speak with some executives this week that are frequently in Asia, negotiating with suppliers of everything from memory, semiconductors, and multiple other types of electronic components. Anyone who is working in this industry knows that […]
Predictive analytics in procurement means using whatever data is available
Predictive analytics is still relatively new in procurement, but it’s increasingly important, particularly in organizations that have already been through the cycle of spend analytics, supplier leveraging, segmentation, and consolidation. Prediction requires a deep understanding of the technical and commercial […]
Is the FAR getting in the way of Early Supplier Involvement in defense projects?
Product development within the U.S. defense industry tends to follow a waterfall-phased lifecycle development approach beginning at the concept level and concluding at the subsystem/component level. The concept level design phase is typically summarized in a system concept document. This […]