How to make friends and influence people (Part 1): Guy Allen and the iPhone

October 17, 2010

Guy is a good friend of mine and a great procurement leader; Abbey National / Santander, now Fujitsu CPO.  He is also one of those excellent individuals who is never afraid of being the contrarian in the room.  So when he was asked to write a blog for CPO Agenda, he immediately thought, like all [...]

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More top suppliers reach agreement with UK Government

October 16, 2010

It’s getting hard to keep up with them; another bunch of providers have agreed MOUs with Government as part of the “negotiating immediate cost savings with major suppliers” initiative.

BT holds onto Government deal, says the Telegraph.
“The telecoms group’s shares rose almost 3pc to 147.4p, having fallen earlier this week in anticipation of [...]

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Chilean miners – the playlist

October 15, 2010

To celebrate the amazing, lump in the throat miners’ rescue in Chile, I’m sure I could come up with some insightful supply chain piece today about the copper market or managing complex projects in emergency situation.  (My emotion may have been amplified because my maternal Grandfather worked as a miner, underground, for 51 years in [...]

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Judge Mihayo, supplier risk management and the CIO of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs

October 15, 2010

In our latest post where we take three seemingly unconnected items and weave a rich strand of comment between them… we start with retired high court Judge, Honourable Justice Thomas Mihayo, of Tanzania.   We reported his comment here, at the East Africa Procurement Forum, when he said “Salaries are paid after a payee renders a [...]

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Bonfire of the Quangos – shock news, not many burnt

October 14, 2010

The bonfire of the quangos has turned out to be more of a slight toasting of the quangos.  No definite savings identified for a start; not to my surprise, and I’m not criticising.  We’ve said it before: most ‘quangos’ do pretty essential stuff that someone has to do – the Legal Services Commission (LSC) being [...]

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The dangers of single source outsourcing deals – Horses for Sources comment

October 14, 2010

I was talking  to a friend recently about an old colleague of ours from many years ago who has gone on to be one of the best known and successful CEOs in the FTSE 30.  He turned around a real struggling household name company, not by any super–complex strategies, but by getting the basics right; [...]

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Sir Philip Green wants a uniform approach* to Police procurement

October 14, 2010

Look, one more day on the Sir Philip Green report then I promise I’ll shut up.  Unless I do an FOI request to try and get the evidence behind the £73 box of paper…  I’d also point you towards several very pertinent comments we had on an earlier piece on this topic – see the [...]

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Introducing the Procurement Intelligence Unit *

October 13, 2010

I was about to write a post which was referring to a piece on the Procurement Intelligence Unit (PIU) website, when I realised I haven’t ever mentioned the PIU previously.  So I’ll put that right now and come back later to the other issue.
The PIU was formed around 18 months ago by Mark Perera, one [...]

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Our anniversary! And more on Spend Matters UK & Europe – how it will work?

October 13, 2010

I was thinking that it must be about a year since I started this blog, but hadn”t got round to checking the date.  So, at 7 am this morning I looked back to my first post and…. it is  today!  The blog is a year old.   So we’ll wish ourselves happy [...]

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Shock, horror – closing Government organisations costs money

October 13, 2010

You read it here first.  When the first quango closing announcement was made shortly after the UK election, on May 25th, we said this :
“And in the case of Becta  I struggle to see how this will save money in 2010/11; I would be amazed if closure costs (redundancy, leases, contractual exits) do [...]

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