Another year is nearly behind us. As we’re counting the minutes before holiday parties, vacations and ski trips, I thought it would be good to reflect on 2010 and look forward to 2011. And since I know everyone is busy scrambling to meet business and personal deadlines, let’s do this short and sweet. In the [...]

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Kate Vitasek, who literally wrote the book on Vested Outsourcing and spoke on that topic on a Strategic Sourcing & Procurement LinkedIn Group member call earlier this year, has volunteered to lead our Nov/Dec Group member call to discuss…
“Unpacking Oliver - 10 Lessons to Improve Collaborative Outsourcing “
The paper (which you’ll want to download here [...]

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Tomorrow I’m moderating the October LinkedIn Strategic Sourcing & Procurement group member call. This month’s topic is ‘Nuisance Spend’ - that low volume, high SKU count spend that can be the most difficult to bring under management.
As always, we’ll be encouraging participation - questions, insights and discussion - from the audience. These calls are [...]

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Today in the US, it’s National Drink Coffee Day. Now I don’t know if that’s an official holiday of any kind or just another internet meme, similar to Talk Like a Pirate Day (September 19th). But the ‘holiday’ reminded me of a recent discussion thread on Ariba Exchange about sourcing coffee, which dug into strategy [...]

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A week ago the Huffington Post featured a slide-show look at Trader Joe’s - The Semi-Secret World of Trader Joe’s: The Tasty Bits. As a long time TJ’s shopper and arguably decent cook (well, if you ask my 6 year old son anyway - he swears by my grilled pizzas), I like getting a glimpse [...]

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