Andrea Soltysiak, long-time advisor, public relations, and marketing specialist to supply chain and supply management software companies is hobnobbing with the stars at Aberdeen Group’s CPO Summit in Boston this week. Her first report from the conference gives us a rundown of just how impactful the audience of senior supply management executives in the audience have been. (Although, I’m certain Andrew Bartolini, Aberdeen’s senior supply management analyst, rigged the books when it came to how many attendees were Red Sox fans.)
Welcome to (Rainy) Boston.

The CPO Summit kicked off this morning with welcome remarks from Stephen Gold, president, and Andrew Bartolini, director of global supply research at Aberdeen. To understand the power of those in the room at this year’s event, the combined spend under management is $1.1 trillion. To put this into perspective, this room would make up the 11th largest nation in the world. Pretty impressive for only 200 people (my best guess by counting heads).

This year’s conference will focus on five key themes that the next few posts will cover: leadership, globalization, people management, process management, and category management. Broad yes, but considering all the speakers are practitioners we should hear valuable lessons learned and sound best practices from executives representing MetLife, National City, P&G, Aetna and Smiths Aerospace.

Aberdeen introduced a polling concept to set the stage for this year’s event. Before we dive into the spend management specific topics, it turns out 37% of the attendees are Red Sox fans; 28% enjoy ALL Boston teams; 20% watch the undefeated Patriots on Sundays and 15% are looking forward to the new and improved Celtics this winter.

As all sports magazines and talk radio programs tout – it’s a good time to live in Boston.

Moving on to spend management, the majority of those in the room are responsible for 50-70% of spend under management. The top strategy to improve spend under management is to improve visibility. And, the top priority for this group in the next three years is to increase spend under management. It may seem like I’m writing in circles, but there’s a clear theme here: these folks want to manage it all.

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