Here are some nuggets that Andrew Bartolini, Aberdeen Group shared earlier this week on a webcast - ‘Assessing the CFO’s View of Procurement’ - on how you can start building bridges between Finance and Procurement. This is a key focus area for companies enjoying best in class performance - those that are noted for superior performance and ability to manage enterprise spend more efficiently and effectively.

Andrew divides organizations into three groups and prescribes actionable advice for each: [Read more →]

In the recent webinar, Correcting Your Spend Vision with Visibility, Mickey North Rizza, research director with AMR Research, discussed implementing spend visibility tools to bring more spend under management, gaining competitive advantage through analytics.

During the webinar, we received three really great questions from our audience, and wanted to share Mickey’s responses covering maverick spend, data cleansing, and influencing C-level executives regarding ERP-based spend solutions.

Q: Can you further explain how spend visibility reduces maverick spend?

A: Once you have identified the spend with the analytics solution and drill into it, maverick spend will show up within each category and by supplier. Once this is identified you can review the [Read more →]

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Nearly 4 years ago, Tim Minahan launched Supply Excellence with this post, which spoke of addressing key issues that spend management pros were facing on best practices, metrics, strategy, and technology.

Now that all of those issues are resolved, we’re asking “what’s next?”

Ok, that’s not entirely correct. Those questions will never be completely answered since it’s an evolving landscape of risks, opportunities and solutions. Tim’s original premise - that we can all be more successful if we share our thoughts, questions and insights with one another - hasn’t changed. But, how we as professionals use social media and what platforms/tools are available to do so has grown significantly in the past 4 years. And while I won’t go as far as many social media experts and say that “blogs are dead”, I think it’s important to ask if a stand alone blog is still the best way to harness the collective knowledge of a group.

To put this post and the feedback we’re requesting into some further context, we recently launched an online community called Ariba Exchange. As the community manager, I can truly say that the goals - facilitating communication and collaboration - overlap with the original objectives of Supply Excellence. However, from an engagement standpoint, we believe the tools, scale and egalitarian playing field of Ariba Exchange better leverages the collective expertise of our customers and subject matter experts.

So, we have some questions for you - the Supply Excellence reader - to figure out where we go from here. The big questions are …

• Is a blog still an effective platform for addressing spend management questions? Or is it too “top down” to truly harness the collective IQ of the readers?
• Would addressing the same best practices and category/commodity questions on a more robust platform (blogs, social bookmarks, discussion threads, “ideas”, etc) be more valuable to you as a practitioner … and hopefully … participant?

As always, your input is valued here. We’re very proud of the community spirit and content that we’ve built on Supply Excellence, from the early days when Tim was flying solo, to the inclusion of our global category management team as active participants. So it’s with that collective spirit in mind that we want to gauge how we (and I mean “we” to include all of us) best learn from and help one another.

So, what do you think?

Justin Fogarty is Managing Editor of Supply Excellence. For any questions or feedback on the blog or its contributors, Justin can be reached at jfogarty[at]ariba.com.

Cash is king, credit is scarce, and stubborn clouds of uncertainty refuse to dissipate. In this time, maintaining a strong balance sheet and an eye on cash flows is a prerequisite for business leaders seeking to master the twin near-term imperatives of viability and maneuverability.

Scrutiny on money flows outside the four walls of a company, and in particular, within the supply chain, is increasing. A new breed of solutions and processes involving working capital management, and new providers that deliver it, are seeing greater demand.

Companies building the future of commercial payments are starting by getting the basics right. A strong foundation for payment optimization demands that paper-laden payment processes be upgraded with more agile, more robust and more scalable XML-based equivalents. Equipped with a more streamlined corporate fuselage, electronically enabled companies and their supply chain partners may then take advantage of far more dramatic working capital and cash flow efficiencies - to their mutual benefit.

To drive these changes, companies are increasingly making investments in technology-based solutions across the following areas: [Read more →]

On a recent call to discuss top trends in 2010, Chris Sawchuk of the Hackett Group said that procurement departments in many companies are looking to beef up their talent this year. It seems that the value of strategic-minded, savvy procurement pros became more clear during this brutal recession, where extracting value for every penny spent was key. Naturally, top organizations want to continue improving the level of expertise in an effort to prepare for the new normal.

So, if that’s the case (and given Chris’ insights into the market and the fact that his comments echo similar sentiments I heard many times last year, we should assume this focus on talent is for real), why are so many smart, capable, experienced people having so much trouble finding work? What is the bottleneck between the talent seeking companies and the talented?

We’ll be addressing this question on the March conference call for the LinkedIn Strategic Sourcing & Procurement group. Details for the call will go out shortly (so if you haven’t already, you’ll need to join the Group to get the info).

In the mean time, I’m putting together the panelists that I’d like to have leading this discussion and would LOVE some volunteers. I think it would be best to have these roles represented: [Read more →]