Sourcing reinvented: cloud supply chain and spend management
If the future is a networked world, then we may well find that the future belongs to sourcing vendors. No other category of vendors has had its landscape transformed so fundamentally by the advent of the Web, to the extent that leading vendors such as Concur and Ariba took early decisions to wholly rearchitect their [...]
HPthe other transformation
With all the negative news swirling around HP, it is easy to lose focus on the complex operations that continue to drive the $120 billion behemoth. Every global supply chain was rocked by the Japanese tsunami and the Iceland volcano explosion impact on European air travel. HP’s mammoth supply chain which produces 2 printers a [...]
The SAP Business Suite and HANA
Most folks using procurement technology would rather not get into the underlying bits and bytes of technology architecture, let alone the nuances of database technology. For the most part this makes sense, though we’d argue that for systems integration, a lot of incremental business value in the P2P and services procurement areas can be derived [...]
Cost Management Failures: 10 Reasons SMBs Stink at Procurement
Last week, we began a blog series exploring the state of procurement in the small and middle market sectors. See 2013: The Year of Source-To-Pay Adoption for SMB Procurement and 3 Essential Procurement Services For Small and Middle Market Businesses. As we continue our analysis of SMB procurement practices, it makes sense to do a [...]
Some Secrets of the Industry Analyst Briefing
Over on Spend Matters PRO, my colleague Peter Smith recently penned a must-read column for software providers, BPOs and consultants in the procurement and supply chain ecosystem: Providers Take Note: A Look Inside the Brain of a CPO (subscription content – try before you buy here). His post got me thinking about writing a similar [...]
KPMG to Acquire BrainNet — Initial Reporting, Analysis and Recommendations
On Friday, KPMG announced it was acquiring European-based procurement and supply chain consultancy, BrainNet. While terms of the deal were not disclosed, Spend Matters estimates the value of the transaction at between $50-100MM. This range is based on estimated BrainNet revenue slightly above $50MM — which may have been even higher — and relative 1-2X [...]
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 [...]
Supply Risk: HP and Hardware — Yet Another Reason to Focus on Sub-Tier Suppliers
Most of our attention around supply risk in the past few years has been diverted to deploying preemptive strategies and programs to identify, manage and mitigate supplier financial risk and to minimize the fallout from Black Swan event…
Friday Rant: How Much Does Your Sourcing and Supply Chain Consultant Make?
Over on our sister site Healthcare Matters, my partner in crime Tom Finn recently published a post titled: How Much Does Your Doctor Make?. Tom begins by quoting “an old joke about a housewife who complains about the $175 she just paid…
Will E-Invoicing (in Certain Cases) Remain Free?
Over on Purchasing Insight, Pete Loughlin recently waxed eloquent on the topic of whether or not E-Invoicing should remain free (Pete also slyly hinted at how he wastes time when not consulting on or writing about P2P systems on Farmvi…
