Supplier Relationship Management

Apr 10, 2015

Post Award Contract Management with $40 Oil: Insights from Big Oil

I had the opportunity to host a good colleague of mine in my supply chain relationships class this week. We worked together years ago to help define the a baseline framework…

Mar 18, 2015

Is Procurement Being Too Aggressive in Negotiations?

A recent post by my colleage Kate Vitasek (author of the “Vest Outsourcing” model) in Forbes magazine argues that procurement is taking too aggressive a stance in negotiations with major logistics…

Feb 25, 2015

Biogen Idec designs the innovation supply chain

Joydeep Ganguly from Biogen Idec spoke in my Supply Chain Relationships class last week, and shared his insights on how Biogen’s supply chain evolved. Since graduating from the NC State…

Feb 9, 2015

Post Award Contract Management: Soft Skills Differentiate Success

I recently spoke with an oil and gas executive, who shared with me his thoughts on post-award contract management. He noted that “Demand management and specification management are some of…

Jan 14, 2015

What is the return on ERP implementation? Results from our research

As organizations seek to drive supply chain integration across global business units and markets, billions of dollars have been invested in massive systems known as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. ERP…

Jan 13, 2015

What's New in 2015 for the supply chain world? See 2014's predictions..

Last year around this time I made a lot of predictions about what 2014 would hold in store…Let’s revisit some of these, and see what has happened (or what hasn’t!)…

Dec 2, 2014

The Impact of Suppliers on Capital Projects

A supply manager in the Canadian oil patch wrote me recently about their experience on a major capital project, after reading my blog on capital equipment uptime. He was quick…

Nov 20, 2014

Apple's Sapphire Supplier: A Textbook Example of Supplier Relationships Gone Bad

Today’s breaking Wall Street Journal article provides a great case study on the impacts of not properly managing contractual supplier relationships. First consider the type of supply arrangement this represented.…

Nov 12, 2014

Changing SRM Behaviors in a Period of $70/bbl Oil

I was in Houston yesterday evening, speaking to a large group of procurement executives at a roundtable held by KPMG’s Procurement Advisory Group, at the fabulous Brennan’s restaurant on Smith…

Oct 31, 2014

"The Procurement Value Proposition": Guest Post by Gerard Chick Part 1

I was recently interviewed by Jon Hansen on Blog Talk Radio, discussing my new book “The Procurement Value Proposition” co-authored with Gerard Chick. In the interview, I discuss some of…