Tag Archives: contract & supplier management
Spend Matters and Zycus Webinar – Putting the Supplier at the Heart of Procurement
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 [...]
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Supplier Management – David Atkinson asks what you might be giving away to suppliers
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 [...]
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David Atkinson on supplier management and tax avoidance
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 [...]
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Reginald D Hunter and verbal contracts
Reginald D Hunter, the American stand-up comedian, spoke at the UK Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) awards dinner the other night. It didn’t go down too well with certain people unfortunately. Hunter, who is black, made various jokes that covered racial issues. Perhaps he wasn’t aware of the sensitivities in football right now, ranging from individual players who have been accused of racist comments, to endemic problems in some countries with supporters racist chanting or worse. So a bit of a furore has blown up. But our interest was sparked when the PFA announced that they were trying to recover the [...]
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What does the Bangladesh tragedy tell us about supplier management?
At the CIPS Surrey session last week, I talked about supplier information in the broadest sense. We got onto the topic of how much responsibility buyers could, and shoul,d take for driving social responsibility and sustainability in the supply chain. Just how much can you feasibly do? Is it only first tier suppliers where you have some responsibility, or should you be looking at second and third tiers? Or even more? And what can you do if your suppliers simply lie to you, or have all the right certificates (but obtained locally through bribery, perhaps)? Of course this was hugely [...]
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Greater focus on supply chain helps Achilles – our Adrian Chamberlain interview
Adrian Chamberlain has been in place at Achilles over 18 months now, a time of much change at what is almost certainly the world’s biggest supplier information management (SIM) firm, so it seemed like a good time to meet him and take a look at their progress. He took over from Colin Maund, perhaps the key driving factor behind Achilles’ growth for many years, and well known in the industry. That situation is always a challenge for a new CEO, but Chamberlain has moved quickly to assert his own approach, bringing in a number of new senior people and leading [...]
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ProcureCon Indirect – a successful event, a confused procurement profession
As it clashed with my Real World Sourcing session, I could only make day 2 of the ProcureCon Indirect event last week. I’ll give you some general impressions today, then come back with a couple of more detailed articles later based on the presentations I saw. The Millennium Mayfair in London was a good venue, with a pleasant ambience, and a good conference room. Organisation and administration were good (during my visit anyway) as you’d expect form an organisation of ProcureCon’s experience. They had “200 registrations” but on the Thursday morning, there were about 100 people in the conference room. [...]
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BravoSolution Real World Sourcing – slides available from contract management session
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 [...]
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Fit for Life – and creating contract incentives in a public sector context
The death of Baroness Thatcher has drawn attention to one of the changes she drove – the greater involvement of the private sector in the business of government, including delivery of services to the citizen that had previously been the preserve of public sector employees. That trend continues today. We’ve written about private prisons, about the Work Programme with private and third sector firms helping get people into jobs, and the potential quasi-privatisation of military procurement and logistics. Another interesting example was being discussed in the media last week, and it makes a good case study, illustrating why many of [...]
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BravoSolution Real World Sourcing – Generating real value from your contracts
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 [...]
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Dubai – the land that has outsourced itself (part 2) – and how to be an intelligent client
So we made the radical statement yesterday that Dubai is perhaps the world’s most dramatic example of outsourcing – a whole country (well, an Emirate technically) that has outsourced itself to the expatriates (and their employers) who make up almost 95% of its population. The role of the ruling Emiratee families, right up to the monarchy, is then to act as the “intelligent client” in an outsourcing sense. Consciously or accidentally, they have fulfilled this role very successfully. Dubai is peaceful, stable, and although it doesn’t have the oil reserves of some other neighbouring countries, it has generally been economically [...]
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Seal Software seminar – risk management through the contract lifecycle
We featured Seal Software a few months back, and indeed wrote a research paper for them at that stage titled “Getting to grips with Contract Management”. Their “contract discovery” software is truly remarkable, in that it enables you to find and capture key points from contracts stored anywhere in your organisation’s computer files and folders – contracts you may not even know existed. It greatly reduces the time taken to get to grips with the contract population, automating to a large extent work that was historically highly labour intensive. So on May 7th, from 3 pm till 5 pm, I [...]
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Laura Ashley ask suppliers to cut prices – sensible or ill-judged?
The latest in what seems to be a continuous line of retailers demanding concessions from suppliers (not only retailers, but they seem to be the worst offenders) is Laura Ashley. Yes, those lovely purveyors of the quintessentially English dream of country house living and pretty girls in long floaty dresses (sighs wistfully) have demanded a 10% price cut from all their suppliers, as the Telegraph reports, which will “save us a process of reviewing our supplier database.” I love that line actually – the not-too-carefully implied threat behind the casual suggestion that this is just about saving us both a [...]
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CapGemini SRM report – a curate’s egg
There’s a steady flow of research papers and thought leadership that emerges from the consulting firms, outsourcers and software providers in our industry. One that caught my eye for two reasons was the recent Cap Gemini Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) report. The title itself may be misleading to some readers. We tend to think that SRM relates to the specific activity of managing the organisation’s most critical suppliers, with a focus on value once contracts are running. That’s the way, for instance, that State of Flux with their excellent SRM report define it. But Cap Gemini use SRM here to [...]
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The Burghers of Calais and becoming a preferred customer
(I’m delighted to introduce the first of what we hope will be regular guest posts from Dr Gordon Murray, procurement practitioner, adviser, academic and now excellent blogger with his own Dr Gordy website - well written, ranging across a wide range of topics of interest to the profession and always worth reading). I wonder how many of you have heard of the Burghers of Calais? No, this doesn’t have any connection whatsoever with the horse meat scandal. The Burghers of Calais are to me one of the most fascinating examples from history of how people should behave. So, recognising that [...]
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State of Flux – supplier relationship management software (part 2)
In part one of this short series we looked at the State of Flux Supplier Relationship Management System – a software product the firm has developed to help organisations implement and manage their Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) programmes. We featured some of the specific capability areas of the product in part one – they are extensive and cover pretty much anything you can think of that you would want to do as part of an SRM programme. You can see that this tool has been designed by real experts in the field, and is both user-friendly but feature-rich. The product [...]
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- Francis Maude speaks – is the Minister for Procurement an enemy of procurement ? : Paul Wright said: The good news is that he has recognised Procurement is important, even though he doesn't r... more
- Francis Maude speaks – is the Minister for Procurement an enemy of procurement ? : dan2 said: Slap in the face for the profession - yes. However, probably worth just noting that in... more
- Francis Maude speaks – is the Minister for Procurement an enemy of procurement ? : Doug forbes said: You have to ask why he thinks that? it is consistent with the Civil Service Reform plan wh... more
- Francis Maude speaks – is the Minister for Procurement an enemy of procurement ? : Sam Unkim said: I always thought it was odd, how heavily, the NHS "Call for Evidence" targetted commission... more
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