Meet me in…. Chicago… and San Francisco…
May is shaping up to be a busy month. To start, it is ‘events season’ for many of the solution providers in the supply management space and I will be…
Spend Analysis, Italian Style
We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming…. Two of my favorite things: (1) waking up in Italy and (2) talking about spend analysis. Despite my 90-year old Nonna’s…
Harvesting Supplier Innovation (Part 3)
Today we conclude a series of articles (found here, here, and here) on Supplier Innovation. At the core, competitive advantage is built upon a foundation of enterprise partnerships with customers…
CPOs: Think Globally, Network Locally
The CPOs in the Bay Area have an informal group that gets together from time to time to network and discuss best practices (Sidebar: I dialed into their meeting a…
The “CPO Bump”
While the cost of some marketing programs can be excessive, effective campaigns can pay huge dividends for many years. One of the most challenging aspects in all of marketing is…
Supplier Day, Beautiful Day
I have been tracking the procurement activity at LG Electronics (“LG”) since Tom Linton joined as the first Chief Procurement Officer (CPO) in company history (after a long stint at…
CFO-CPO Relations: A Work in Progress
As someone who has worked for many years in both finance and supply management, I have always found the relationship between the CPO and the CFO (and their departments) to…
Fail-safe
When things don’t go according to plans, the unprepared are often forced to just grin and bear it and hope that no one notices or that the total impact of…
Proof: eAuctions are NOT Evil
Hypothesis: eAuctions (and eSourcing) are not evil. Proof: I. Google’s Code of Conduct states in its Preface: "Don't be evil." Googlers generally apply those words to how we serve our…
Meadwestvaco’s Total P2P Package
Chris Osen, Vice President of Supply Management at Meadwestvaco ("MWV") took the presentation baton from me at the NAPP Conference (after I took it from Bill Dempsey) and delivered a…