Breaking Down Silos with — Who? SAP? Seriously?
Yes, I am serious. Of course, as everything else – it is all in context. Hear me out… I was in Mexico last week for SAP Forum (a well attended event where over 5,000 people went to discuss the current and future state of SAP and Enterprise Software in Latin America). As in Madrid for [...]
The End of Global Sourcing as We Know It? The MIT/Sloan View (Part 2)
Please click here for the first post in this series. In an article in MIT Sloan Management Review, supply chain academics and experts David Simchi-Levi, James Paul Peruvankal, Narendra Mulani and Bill Read offer up a number of hypotheses examining how global sourcing is changing. On Spend Matters, we have explored the authors’ second argument [...]
China Sourcing: Be VERY Careful How You Measure Savings
Even after all these years of the global sourcing evolution and rising China prices, I still can’t believe what I read from some consultants when it comes to on-the-ground savings numbers in the manufacturing area. Take a recent p…
Immigration policy and the future of work
It is tough to ignore immigration talk given all the noise coming out of Arizona and Washington. But I have been thinking even more about it, with a recent trip to Ireland and the GigaOm event last week on the “future of work”. I wrote earlier about my observations about how internationally mobile my wife’s [...]
China, Mexico and Beyond — The Latest Trends and Savings Percentages in Global Sourcing (Part 2)
In the first part of this series of columns looking at the latest in global sourcing trends for 2010, I examined the latest from Mexico and China by sharing a recent Industry Week write-up that captured the highlights of a recent Grant Thornton study. In Part 2, I’ll continue this analysis, sharing some other findings [...]
China, Mexico and Beyond — The Latest Trends and Savings Percentages in Global Sourcing (Part 1)
The past decade has seen a massive boom and bust on the global sourcing front. Scores of companies moved as much spend offshore as possible only to find that the total costs of doing business with suppliers halfway around the world was only worth it if they were serving local markets. Granted, in certain industries [...]
Who Wins in the Near-Shoring Game?
I had a call with an industry colleague a few days ago who is headed over to China to give a presentation on trade and sourcing issues to a group of Chinese nationals and government officials (as opposed to US multinationals or Chinese/US JVs operati…
