This week, the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) released their manufacturing and services numbers for December. The non-manufacturing (services) number came in at 50.1%, which was right around expectations. While it did move slightly into the “growth” region (above 50), it certainly did not blow away the street and indicate that all is on the [...]

[Read more →]

The Sunday New York Times reported on a surge in temp labor hiring. Indeed, the November temporary labor hiring numbers were relatively strong. To quote the Times:
“Last month 52,000 temps were added, greater than the number of new workers in any other category. Not even health care and government, stalwarts through the long recession, did [...]

[Read more →]

Earlier this week, Dan Ashton hosted a webinar (replay here) with speakers from Travelers Insurance and Kelly Services to discuss the current opportunity for driving value in contingent labor procurement. Here he shares some of the key take-aways.

Justin Fogarty is Managing Editor of Supply Excellence. For any questions or feedback on the blog or its [...]

[Read more →]

In Part 1 of this series, Shawn Penrice did a great job defining what we mean by “supplier nominated savings” and helped walk you through identifying categories to target (the replay of our recent presentation on this topic for a SIG webinar is available here). Interestingly, Pierre Mitchell, from the Hackett Group, weighed in and [...]

[Read more →]

Although the jury is still out as to whether or not the recession has ended, recent raw material price increases seem to indicate that commodity markets have indeed hit bottom and started heading back up. Naturally, that’s leading to category/commodity managers asking (or being asked) a few questions, including…
“Are we too late to [...]

[Read more →]