Strategic Sourcing

May 17, 2012

The Paperless Office: Pipe Dream, Procurement Mandate, or Sustainability Boondoggle?

In today’s cost-cutting environment, many procurement and category management teams are sharpening their pencils and looking at ways to reduce indirect spend in areas such as printing, document management, and…

May 8, 2012

Socialization: An Important Dimension of Supply Chain Relationships

The ability to capture value from your business relationships is increasingly seen as critical differentiator in firm success (Cousins et al., 2006). Much of the strategic purchasing literature addresses the…

Apr 4, 2012

Random Thoughts on the Impact of Frugal Innovation on the Supply Chain

In this week’s Economist, an article by Schumpeter provides some interesting views on the emerging concept of “frugal innovation”. He cites the example of the Tata Nano, a $2,000 car…

Apr 3, 2012

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

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…

Mar 10, 2012

More Thoughts on New Contracting Models for Government Acquisition

The significant challenges associated with federal acquisition policies are well documented. Many problems with government acquisition are related to contract management, often mentioned as a core competence for federal contract…

Mar 9, 2012

Applying Strategic Sourcing in Government Acquisition

The problems with the federal procurement process are well documented in the literature. Bloggers have also suggested that new approaches be adopted by federal acquisition contract officers to apply the practice…

Feb 29, 2012

Category management begins and ends with stakeholders

While not always the case, companies often use category teams to develop supply management strategies. Supply management strategies often apply to categories—general families of purchased products or services. Examples of…

Aug 3, 2011

Who's Next After the Lawyers are Reverse Auctioned?

Yesterday’s WSJ shared an interesting story about the application of reverse auctions to the legal profession. For those of you who don’t know what these are, we have a long…