Last Wednesday, Purchasing magazine hosted a web forum on measuring the effectiveness of the procurement department. The panel, which was moderated by Purchasing Chief Editor Paul Teague, consisted of the VPs of Procurement from Exide Technologies and Harland Clarke as well as purchasing directors from Bell Inc. and Polaris. The replay is available here and [more]

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For every procurement department success story (you know, the one about rising up out of the company basement to a level of respectability and influence) there are many, MANY more still struggling to gain traction, attention and results. Jim Polak, General Purchasing Director at PPG Industries, is responsible for steering his department from the latter [more]

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A reader left a great Comment last week on my WSJ Pushes Spend Management as a Recession Remedy post. He was looking for an effective way to make the case for Spend Management initiatives - with ROI projections - at a time when it’s difficult to free up budget for new programs. Rather than give [more]

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A recent article on WSJ.com profiled how some companies have increased their spend management efforts in order to weather the economic downturn. For example, PPG trimmed their number of suppliers, negotiated better contracts and wound up saving 15%. GlaxoSmithKline cut T&E expenses by rolling out new online tools that show employees their various options for [more]

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In his seemingly tireless quest to unite the supply management blogging community, Sourcing Innovation blogmaster Michael Lamoureax has encouraged the usual suspects to post our thoughts on the subject in the “What I Learned from Conference Season” series. Being that I spent most of this year’s season developing and hosting events, rather than attending them, [more]

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