Kids Birthday Parties, Six Sigma, and Analytics Don’t Mix…(or do they?)
We did a combined birthday party for our oldest kids this past weekend. One of the other fathers in the group, who served as a chaperone for the party, has a similar finance, procurement and operations background to many of the re…
Is Middle Market Procurement Really Any Different? (Part 1) — Summary
I had the chance this week to connect with a fascinating gentleman that I hope to collaborate with in some capacity. This gentleman is pursuing a new type of organization to enable middle market companies to identify, learn and ex…
Gartners IT Debt Scare
Gartner made a name starting in the mid-90s forecasting the estimated cumulative cost of Y2K remediation. I was there – and the big numbers it bandied about helped focus enterprises on the core problem. But it also led to hype, panic buying (and …
Mama Weer All Crazee-Social Now!
Indeed, a Quiet Riot is percolating in the heretofore boring ERP sector. I spotted Josh Greenbaum‘s post on “Enterprise Relationship Planning” this afternoon. In the Council, we have dredged up a 90s label– The Extended Enterprise– to categorize discussions about how our members are architecting their socio-collaborative initiatives to span partners in their supplier, distributor, [...]
The Dangers of Lean — Ignore at Your Peril
Even though I’m married to a Six Sigma black belt who wants to run Kaizen events to improve my personal organization and process efficiency both in the office and out, I’ll be the first to suggest that lean principals can introduce material risk into the supply chain — especially in volatile and risky economic markets. [...]
Modeling the Procurement BPO of the Future (Part 1)
The offshore BPO industry is in the midst of a gradual (some might argue more rapid) transformation from delivering low-to-moderate value services and results for commensurate costs and returns to serving as the process equivalent (or better) for in-house functions in Global 2000 companies. A recent column in India’s Financial Express highlights this emerging evolution [...]
An invigorating day with Talent Management executives
Readers know I like small, specialized services firms like appirio and Corefino. I have also been a fan of Knowledge Infusion and its work around talent management for a while, and yesterday that respect jumped multiple fold. Oh, they gave me a cha…
Genpact: Procurement BPO Brains and Brawn (Part 1)
I had the chance to attend Genpact’s industry analyst day last week in Boston. During the meeting, which didn’t focus on procurement or supply chain exclusively but rather broader BPO, I was stricken by the frequency with which the management team continued to refer back to Spend Management, supply management topics and procurement case examples [...]
Building a Lean Six Sigma and Process Excellence Culture
Not surprisingly, this conference is as much or more about the cultural aspects of LSS as the techniques and tools, and Jason Schulist of DTE Energy (a US utility company) gave a presentation on their continuous improvement journey. They’ve been at LSS for more than 10 years, starting with Kaizen in 1998, moving into Six [...]
Lean Six Sigma & Process Improvement: David Brown of Motorola
I missed the first morning of the IQPC Lean Six Sigma & Process Improvement conference in Toronto today, but with my usual impeccable timing, showed up just in time for lunch (where we had to explain the rules of curling to the American attendees). The first session this afternoon is with David Brown, a black [...]
