A recent Hackett Group study claims that Fortune 500 companies could save more than $10 million annually by off-shoring procurement to far-away lands like India.
According to the report, advances in technology now offer the transparency and controls to allow enterprises to monitor spend and transactional activities managed by a third-party outsourcer. Much of Hackett’s business [...]

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I’m excited to welcome an old cohort, Elizabeth Baatz to Supply Excellence. A true economist, Elizabeth was a regular contributor of pricing and supply indices and intelligence to Purchasing Magazine. Today, she and her husband, economic-whiz-kid Victor Malair, have created a proprietary forecasting model that uses multiple indicators to predict price and supply trends for [...]

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News yesterday that Ford Motor Company reported its largest annual loss ever increased doubts about the future of Detroit. (General Motor’s decision today to delay earnings and restate past results only fueled greater concern.)
The bad news overshadows the tremendous progress both automakers have made on the supply management front. It also raises a serious question about the discipline: [...]

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When investigating global sourcing strategies, I was surprised by the admission of a handful of supply management executives that their initiatives to source more from emerging markets was not driven by a strategic plan or analysis. Instead, these execs confessed, “This whole thing got started because our CEO heard about it from another CEO on [...]

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Those of you doubting my prediction that 2007 would go down as The Year of Sustainable Supply Strategies, can’t deny it now. The past weeks have witnessed big and highly publicized commitments from the White House and top corporations to adopt more environmentally and socially sound business practices.
Last night in his State of the Union address, President Bush proposed cutting [...]

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