Archive for April, 2006

Are your vendors the Spice Girls or Arcadia? on April 30, 2006

Efficient RFT process v. contract management: Part 2 on April 29, 2006

Quick and dirty financial model: Efficient RFT processes v. contract management: Part 1 on April 21, 2006

Inflexible contracts and wobbly cafe tables on April 21, 2006

Outsourcing contracts: Not all fairness is equal on April 17, 2006

Linking payment to the creation-of-value rather than the following-of-process on April 15, 2006

Using corrective plans to lift a relationship back onto the rails on April 15, 2006

Tying some vendor management threads together on April 8, 2006

Flexible vendor management on April 8, 2006

Dave Stephens on supplier strategy on April 8, 2006

Common themes

Over the past 10+ years working in sourcing, procurement, supplier relationship management, accounts payable and reconciliations, both on the finance and the IT side, a number of themes have begun to emerge in my thinking.

1. The role of procurement should be to facilitate rather than manage. HR serves as a good model. The HR department (typically) doesn't want to manage your staff: their role is to facilitate your management of your staff. They do this by providing the systems for recruiting, on-boarding, payment, development and termination of staff. Likewise, procurement should do the same and leave supplier management to the key users of that supplier.

2. Flexibility is more important than size: In most categories, the age of volume buying and long term contracts with set specifications and requirements is over. The role of the procurement professional should be to assist their organisation in increasing their speed of response to new opportunities rather than locking their organisation into massive deals at cheap unit costs.

3. More to come

If you are interested in this content and want to contact me, please do so via Doug Hudgeon on Linked In

Archive for April, 2006

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