I hope that you have enjoyed the article “A 20-Point Proposal Evaluation Checklist.” Thanks to a wonderfully positive reaction to the last PurchTips article, “A 21-Point Negotiation Checklist,” I thought that I’d do another checklist. And the purpose of a checklist is to simplify the process of going through a large number of steps. There’s no shame in using a…
Earlier this week, international package shipping giant DHL announced that it was going to begin offering outsourced procurement services. This is a bit of a surprise given that DHL’s core competency is driving trucks and flying planes, but it is as equally intriguing. Does it actually make sense that a company involved in moving materials should also be involved in…
Welcome back to another installment of Whitepaper Wednesday here on the Purchasing Certification Blog. This week, I’ll be reviewing a whitepaper entitled “Vendor Capability Assessment & Development” from the Corporate Executive Board and Toolbox For Finance. This whitepaper revolves around a case study of a manufacturer – Cummins – which solved a problem of failing to select the right vendors…
It’s time for another installment in this series of little oversights that get your cover letter email sent directly to the trash folder. By the way, though some of these mistakes seem obvious, I have seen all of them as I continue to recruit for our open Director of Education position. That means that there is a true need for…
Earlier this month, I posted a blurb entitled “Should You Share Your Selection Criteria & Weightings With Suppliers?” This post generated some interesting debate both here and on LinkedIn. One common bit of feedback came from government buyers. These are people who are very constrained by the laws that apply to their work. A few asked, incredulously, “Why wouldn’t you…
I came across a fascinating article on cfo.com entitled “How To Get Beer Across The Border.” This article features an interview with Dan Sullivan, the CFO/COO of Heineken USA. The interview probes a recent “crisis” in Heineken’s beer supply chain. This crisis came about due to the ever increasing popularity of the Mexican Cinco de Mayo holiday in the USA.…
Welcome back to another installment of Whitepaper Wednesday here on the Purchasing Certification Blog. This week, I’ll be reviewing a whitepaper entitled “Beyond the Basics: Using Spend Visibility to Drive More Than Category Sourcing Strategies and Spend Reporting” from Spend Matters. The #1 question on my mind after reading this title was “OK – what else will we be doing…
I hope that you have enjoyed the article “A 21-Point Negotiation Checklist.” Thanks to the input of an SPSM, we realized how there was a true void for such a tool. In fact, when we googled “negotiation checklist,” we found some real poor quality checklists on the first page of search results such as one dedicated to mapping out all…
Last week, I had the pleasure of presenting a three-hour workshop on purchasing best practices at Corporate United’s SYNERGY conference. One of the best practices that I dissected was the use of commodity teams. A very common method that commodity teams use for supplier selection is the use of weighted average supplier scoring. This is where you determine the various…
Over the past few years, I’ve observed that companies are recognizing the need for more advanced procurement activities. That’s great, obviously. But what’s interesting is the difference in how various companies assign these responsibilities to their employees. Some companies require their procurement employees to raise their competency levels to handle these new activities. Other companies have subdivisions of their procurement…