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SupplyNow Podcast: The China Factor

December 20th, 2006 · by Tim Minahan · 2 Comments · LCCS and trade, events, sourcing, spend analysis, supply management

Episode two of the monthly SupplyNow podcast is now available. This month, the collaborative series between Supply Excellence and Spend Matters, tackles the highly contentious subjects of China, spend visibility, and the future of Detroit.

Our featured guest, Jessica Mahre, Vice President of Operations at A.T. Kearney, shares insights into the do’s, don’t’s, and the future of China sourcing. Jessica’s unique perspective pulls from her own personal experiences sourcing and managing supply from China (as well as other Far East regions) first as a commodity manager for electronic components and assemblies and now as a leading China sourcing consultant.

Jason fires up the spend visibility debate (a personal favorite subject of his). And I chime in with the surprisingly favorable results of General Motors supply management turnaround plan.

Don’t miss a word. Download the latest edition of SupplyNow today.

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2 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Mark Usher // Dec 20, 2006 at 1:50 pm

    Another great podcast, guys.

    Tim, re:your comment about “spend category management” being missing from most providers’ offerings, several of the major providers with spend analytics products that cover your first two areas of spend data management and spend analysis/reporting also offer consulting-type services such as opportunity assessments that effectively (or mostly) constitute your missing 3rd area. The main issue i see right now with this 3rd area is that many companies’ mindset (certainly best-in-class ones and probably even industry norm ones to use Aberdeen’s terms) is that they can do this themselves, i.e. it’s “their job”. They consider that the solution provider should be delivering them with high quality decision-support spend data and then they can take it from there. In this context - in terms of what they should be looking for from a spend analytics provider - I actually think they’re right. The question of whether a company has the people who can conduct a quality opportunity assessment should be looked at from the broader point of view of “do I have a procurement team with the skills to drive business value”, which would include sub-questions such as “do I have people with good sourcing analytics & opportunity identification skills”. This broader area is certainly one where spend management providers can deliver services that hit your missing 3rd area, but I don’t think bolting it onto the first 2 areas is necessarily the right thing to do. So by corollary the spend analytics vendors may not be the right firms to offer spend category management services unless they truly have sourcing consulting expertise in-house or they use a partner firm. If they do have the expertise in-house (Ariba with the Freemarkets folks would say they do) then spend data management should not be marketed as a spend analytics bolt-on service but as a component of broader spend management business value creation services.

  • 2 Mark Usher // Dec 20, 2006 at 1:56 pm

    Sorry, my last sentence should have read…..then SPEND CATEGORY MANAGEMENT should not be marketed as a spend analytics bolt-on service……(not Spend Data Management).

    I need more coffee….or maybe less…..

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