IACCM ‘Ask the Expert’ today

September 2, 2010

Just a reminder;  at 4pm UK time today I am taking part in an IACCM  ‘Ask the Expert’ interview / call.
The theme is Contracting For Professional Services: How To Improve Results
You can register here; free to IACCM members, a very small fee otherwise.  Perhaps not surprisingly we will be [...]

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HP’s summer just keep getting better….

September 2, 2010

So, Hewlett-Packard, how was your summer?
Lost your CEO in a didn’t-actually-have-any-sex scandal, share price crashed, now paid $55 million to the US Government – without any admission of liability I should stress – based on payments made to prime contractors in return for them channelling spend to HP as part of those Primes’ large government [...]

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‘New Year’s’ resolutions – No.1: Engage those stakeholders

September 1, 2010

I described the other day how this feels to me like the beginning of the year; so on that theme, here is the first of a series of potential New Year’s Resolutions for procurement people.
Most of us are pretty good (or at least we like to think we are) at managing the external dimension [...]

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Measuring procurement savings – part 3

September 1, 2010

Continuing our series (after a slight delay) on savings measurement, we come on to attributing savings.  This was the issue that generated a question from a reader that set off this whole series- should savings that were clearly discovered and / or driven by business units be credited to ‘procurement’?
I think the answer to that [...]

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Reading Festival review

August 31, 2010

If you’re not a music fan, you may want to look away now…but before we get into the review, let me give a plug for Ticketmaster; far better than See Tickets, who finally delivered Reading tickets two days before the event!  And Viagogo, the authorised re-seller, has a somewhat complex process (to protect buyer and [...]

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Supplier / acquirer due diligence and Blackburn Rovers’ buyer

August 31, 2010

How much due diligence do you do on your new suppliers?  That obviously depends very heavily on how much you are buying from them and how critical it is to your organisation.  But it has surprised me over the years that such analysis is often very limited or even non-existent, including for potentially ’strategic’ suppliers.  [...]

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Back to work / school; is this the REAL New Year?

August 31, 2010

The first week in September always feels more like the ‘new year’ than January 1st to me.  It must be the academic year influence I suppose; obviously I went through that myself, and have a daughter now at university.  But my parents were both teachers, so perhaps growing up that made it feel more strongly [...]

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What’s in a (brand) name? How does ‘Bannatyne’ sound?

August 30, 2010

How much weight does a ‘brand’ carry?  What premium would you pay as a buyer for that brand?  And are there specific dangers where the ‘brand’ is also your personal name?
I started my career at Mars, one of the great branding organisations of all time, and I have no doubt that the focus on protecting [...]

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Introduction to Spend Matters – their top posts

August 29, 2010

If you’ve not caught up with Spend Matters, probably the top procurement blog in the world, this feature of some of their top posts is a good place to start.
Jason Busch, the founder and editor in chief of Spend Matters is on vacation, so although he has been posting from sunny (?) Vermont, the site [...]

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Follow up and comments on Ian Taylor’s new role

August 28, 2010

We had some really good comments on the post around Ian Taylor’s appointment to the NEPO role.  I know they often don’t get spotted once the post drops down the list, so we thought it was worth featuring them as a main post here.
Mr Taylor himself said:
“…part of the plan to transform NEPO that I [...]

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