How Do Suppliers Develop Capacity?
When it comes to winning RFPs, small and medium-sized businesses are caught in a Catch-22. Let’s assume that our scrappy company happens to figure out that a buyer is in the marketplace for a solution that we offer. Let’s assume that our crack sales team gets a hold of the RFP, either by getting onto […]
What Can Procurement Learn from Financial Markets?
When I talk to people with experience in financial markets about the RFP process, they shake their heads at the primitive nature of it all. They are accustomed to speed, transparency, and efficiency. The New York Stock Exchange alone traded $169 billion daily in 2013. Global equity markets trade trillions in dollar value annually. […]
Crowdsourcing Procurement Beats Outsourcing It
It is not uncommon for companies to outsource procurement to third parties. For management teams who see procurement as a clerical function of repetitive tasks, the prima facie appeal of outsourcing is obvious: ostensibly lower transactional costs, lower capital expenditure on procurement systems, greater economies of scale, better procurement process expertise, and greater vertical category […]
How Do Buyers Get Procurement Synergies?
Synergies. They are used to justify all kinds of activity, but no more so than in corporate mergers and acquisitions. Quantify the amount of this value to be created in terms of incremental revenue or cash flow (depending on the method investors prefer to use in valuing the acquiring company) and you have a pie […]
Would Procurement Transparency Lead to Better Outcomes?
Would Procurement Transparency Lead to Better Outcomes?
How to Get More Data for Procurement AI
There is a lot of talk about AI in the enterprise. But you can’t train models without a tremendous amount of data. The good news is that corporations and other organizations generate a ton of it. The bad news is that most of it is so-called “Dark Data.”
What Is the Optimal Number of Suppliers?
There are two competing theories when it comes to the number of suppliers a purchasing organization should have in its vendor database.
What Are Some Common Errors in Sourcing?
What Is Social Value for Money?
There is a notion in procurement called “value for money.” Here is the definition from the website of the Northern Ireland Department of Finance in the United Kingdom, approved by their Procurement Board in 2010:
Why Is Business Process More Important than UX?
“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.” — Bill Gates The promise and the challenge of enterprise software, and increasingly cloud-based software-as-a-service solutions, is to […]