Spend Matters UK/Europe » Procurement good practice

Spend Matters and Zycus Webinar – Putting the Supplier at the Heart of Procurement

Peter Smith — Thu, 16 May 2013 09:31:16 +0000

We’re pleased to announce a forthcoming Spend Matters webinar, presented in conjunction with the nice people at Zycus. It’s titled “Putting the Supplier at the Heart of Procurement” and it is being held at on June 5th at 5pm UK time (that’s 6pm in continental western Europe, and 12 noon on the East Coast of the US). There’s a Spend Matters Perspectives briefing paper coming out too n the same topic shortly as well. Why Supplier Management? Well, there’s a lot of talk around at the moment about it as a topic, linked to the need for better information and [...]

Second-wave outsourcing – the BBC learns from past experience

Peter Smith — Wed, 15 May 2013 04:33:26 +0000

At the recent ProcureCon Indirect conference, Jim Hemmington, Procurement Director at the BBC, spoke about the organisation’s experience through what is now a considerable history of outsourcing. Hemmington personally and the BBC corporately now go back 10 years or more in terms of outsourcing some pretty strategic and important activities, ranging from much of the transactional finance and HR, to specialist area such as licence fee collection and transmission services. So what’s interesting is how that considerable experience is now informing their latest strategies for what are second or even third time round outsourcing contracts and competitions. Hemmington passed on [...]

Indirect Category Sourcing Savings: Fact or Fiction?

Peter Smith — Thu, 09 May 2013 12:31:46 +0000

We told you the other day about our new research paper available for download here (free on registration). It is titled: Indirect Category Sourcing Savings : Fact or Fiction? Delivering Credible Benefits from Sourcing and Category Management Programmes I’ve co-authored it with Ed Cross, Managing Director of Xchanging Procurement Services, and in our two previous posts on the Paper, available here and here, we looked at the issue of savings credibility, then how procurement and sourcing programmes benefit from a strong focus on what we call programme and delivery management. The final section of the Paper looks at how Xchanging [...]

Supplier Management – David Atkinson asks what you might be giving away to suppliers

Peter Smith — Wed, 08 May 2013 04:40:07 +0000

We looked last week at the general thrust of the excellent article from David Atkinson’s Four Pillars website . Today, let’s look in more detail at his core argument. As we said last time, he started with the example of staff from the large accounting firms working for Government on tax issues. Does this give them an advantage when they return to their firms – and do they have in effect a conflict of interest when they are working for the Government? But he then extends the argument into the private sector environment. If we’re engaged in a suppler relationship [...]

David Atkinson on supplier management and tax avoidance

Peter Smith — Thu, 02 May 2013 04:35:10 +0000

We’ve featured David Atkinson here before, our friend and ex Rolls-Royce procurement executive and now procurement adviser, thinker, and educator. He has that unusual combination of real CPO type experience along with a very enquiring mind and the desire to really think about procurement, and that blend informs his writing very successfully. * He’s just published a really excellent new article on his Four Pillars website – you can read it here. In it, he manages to go from the current debate in the UK around large firms using tax avoidance / evasion methods, to asymmetry in buyer / supplier [...]

Value Procurement – is this the next big thing? Bill Young and the issues with Category Management

Peter Smith — Wed, 01 May 2013 04:21:47 +0000

In our coverage of the recent ProcureCon Indirect event, we commented on the “confusion”, or at very least lack of consistency of approach, shown by different presentations given at the conference. Some fundamental questions suggested themselves. Is category management being superseded by more business-focused procurement strategies? Is the role of procurement purely to support the business or is there more to it that that? Coincidentally, just as these debates were going on, Bill Young wrote an excellent piece for the Procurement Leaders website. It’s very thought provoking and picks up on some of those points exactly. (Young was a senior [...]

Procurement recruitment – detailed experience or fundamental skills?

Peter Smith — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 09:31:13 +0000

We have probably all seen advertisements for procurement roles that say something like this. “Must have at least 5 years experience of working in the Pharma industry (Primary care trusts / aluminium widget industry / whatever) . Must know 7 step category management, six sigma and lean processes. Must be a graduate with MCIPS membership essential”. Now often the salary for this amazing person is then around £25,000, which does raise some questions, but it is not the money that we’re talking about today. And if you talk to recruitment firms, you will find that it is usually the employing [...]

BravoSolution Real World Sourcing – slides available from contract management session

Peter Smith — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 12:31:24 +0000

I’m afraid Guy Allen and I have a sad announcements make – after recent events (see the Telegraph report here – please do click, it is worthwhile!) we may not be able to bring the BravoSolution Real World Sourcing events to Saudi Arabia in 2014. The result might be all too predictable.. However, you can now download the slides from last week’s session – “Generating real value from your contracts” which was, perhaps not surprisingly, all about certain aspects of contract management. We looked at why procurement should take the lead on contract management, and how to start building a [...]

More on our new research paper – Indirect Category Sourcing Savings : Fact or Fiction?

Peter Smith — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 03:59:18 +0000

We told you the other day about our new research paper available for download (free on registration) here. It is titled: Indirect Category Sourcing Savings : Fact or Fiction? Delivering Credible Benefits from Sourcing and Category Management Programmes I’ve co-authored it with Ed Cross, Managing Director of Xchanging Procurement Services, and in it, we look at how procurement and sourcing programmes benefit from a strong focus on what we call programme and delivery management. That in itself has a number of components, and we’ve identified three key areas. One also addresses the issue we discussed last time, that of the [...]

BravoSolution Real World Sourcing – Generating real value from your contracts

Peter Smith — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 04:30:36 +0000

We didn’t pick the best day for our latest BravoSolution Real World Sourcing events. Yesterday, the day of Baroness Thatcher’s funeral, found 40 of us fighting (well, strolling perhaps) our way through the barricades and police presence in London (see photo, after the main event). We were headed to the second of this year’s series, with me talking about “Generating real value from your contracts”. So particular thanks to everyone who came along and made it as usual a stimulating session with plenty of audience involvement. It is of course a huge topic – it’s a bit like saying “today’s [...]