It’s no secret: in the past nine months or so, humongous numbers of companies have been freezing or reducing the pay of their employees. But despite the freeze on pay, we’ve noticed that some companies are taking an interesting approach to retention and morale building for their procurement employees. What is that approach? Training. Yep, we’ve seen senior management use…
As you may know, I am an experimenter with Twitter and try to help purchasing professionals who are equally Twitter-curious to try to get value out of it. As of yesterday, we’ve started using Twitter to get the word out about new job postings on our “Jobs For SPSM’s” page. So if you want to get up-to-the-minute updates on new…
Welcome back to this week’s installment of Whitepaper Wednesday here on the Purchasing Certification Blog. Today, I’ll be reviewing a whitepaper entitled “The Supply Chain: Your Recession Survival Kit?” from IBM, Oracle, and Supply Chain Management Review. Now, I’m not reviewing this whitepaper for its great tips for supply chain success. Really, there aren’t any to find here. However, what…
Sometimes, I can’t turn my procurement brain off. Such was the case a few weeks back when waiting to pay for my family’s meal at Denny’s. At that time, I saw this solicitation for donations to MDA… And I started to think…”Hmmm. I’ve seen flu shots for a lot less expensive than $25. And one minute of research for $85?…
Last month, Jon Hansen of Procurement Insights conducted a panel interview on Blog Talk Radio. This interview was on the topic of whether the traditional purchasing membership association model was dead. The discussion was so lively, Jon brought us back to continue the discussion yesterday! Typically, I’ve found that some people are quiet in their criticism of professional associations. Their…
This July, our email newsletter, PurchTips, will celebrate its seventh anniversary. By then, we’ll be past our 180th edition. The earliest editions of PurchTips were not archived on our Web site. We didn’t start linking the articles from our site until the 51st edition. Well, by popular demand, we have finally added the first 50 editions to our site, giving…
Welcome to this week’s installment of Whitepaper Wednesday here on the Purchasing Certification Blog. In this post, I’ll be reviewing the whitepaper entitled “Moving Beyond Reverse Auctions for Scalable, Sustainable Value” from Emptoris. Though this whitepaper is about four years old, I still think that its content has value today. The whitepaper pays a little homage to the reverse auction,…
Becoming a CPO is a lofty goal. Our research suggests that it takes around 10 years of experience to reach that level. And experience alone won’t get you there… So what will? That question was the basis of the new PurchTips article “Are You Chief Procurement Officer Material?” and the accompanying podcast of the same name. In the article and…
Tony Poshek, known in the blogosphere as the Satirical Sourceror, alerted me to a rather amusing story on toledoblade.com reporting that the City of Toledo’s purchasing hotline had been hacked. Instead of hearing the usual “Thank you for calling Toledo, the most liveable city” greeting, callers to the purchasing hotline heard “Carty Finkbeiner is a complete moron.” Finkbeiner is the…
In yesterday’s Whitepaper Wednesday post, I expressed puzzlement over some recent Aberdeen research that suggested that the more spend there is under Procurement’s control, the lower the savings as a percentage of that managed spend. I was puzzled because the Aberdeen research indicated that: “Best-in-class” procurement teams manage 88% of corporate spend and their savings is 8.5% of total spend,…