The Final Stage on the Spend Visibility Curve: Predictive and Proactive
I’ve given entire talks on how procurement organizations are turning to new types of technologies and initiatives to become more predictive and proactive in their overall efforts. Yet this argument also forms the basis of the final stage, or Level 4, in the spend and supply visibility maturity curve that I presented on the Spend […]
Continuous Improvement: Level 3 on the Spend Visibility Curve
It’s fairly easy to discern overall procurement maturity within a particular organization based on spend and supply visibility maturity. To this end, I recently started to explore some arguments about spend visibility, based on a Spend HQ webinar that I co-presented, The Spend Visibility Curve: Where Do You Stand. The centerpiece of my argument in […]
Push for Open Architectures and Networks in Indirect Spend
Finally, we come to our last recommendation in this series of how to make indirect spend more effective: providing an open architecture that will allow procurement and business users to access multiple communities and networks including supplier-led models, GPOs, BPOs, MSPs and related intermediaries. Ironically, Ariba is the poster child for “closed models” in this […]
SAP and Ariba: How Much Has the Business Case for Acquisition Changed Over the Years?
The Spend Matters team is furiously writing and research stories on the SAP and Ariba transaction for publication tomorrow and later in the week (you can read our initial coverage here, here and here). In the process of looking at what…
Spend Analysis: The Definitive Book on Next Level Performance
Even though Michael Lamoureux (Sourcing Innovation) and I love to quibble (and as some folks know, escalate our rhetoric from time to time) I have to lavish unrestricted praise on a new book he just co-authored:
Spend Visibility: An I…
What is Supply Chain Risk Management, Exactly? Stepping Back to Address the Challenge
As usual, Paul Teague recently penned an insightful column on his weekly blog Procurement Leaders, this time covering supplier/supply chain risk management. In it, he tosses out what might seem like a soft question, but is not: “W…
Tips to Support Supply Chain Risk Management Platform Success + Building the Business Case
Over the past couple of weeks, you’ve most likely noticed a number of posts from my presentation with Sherry Gordon at ISM, focusing on the risk track. In it, we shared what we believe is some of the most important and condensed a…
Spend Analysis Learnings From Oil and Gas — No Surprises, Some Good Lessons
A few years back, I spoke at an OFS Portal event about the evolution of the procurement function. OFS Portal is a type of procurement user group/community within the oil and gas sector that also provides additional services in the…
Sievo: The Missing Finance/Sourcing Link? Implementing/Measuring Savings to Ensure Results (Part 2)
If you couldn’t tell from the first post in this series, Sievo enables savings tracking and measurement across direct materials categories by taking a highly category specific and granular approach that incorporates both system an…
New Compass Research: The Future of Spend Visibility and Analytics — Three Scenarios For Adoption
In my first real job out of graduate school, I spent much of my day analyzing structured and unstructured information to come up with potential scenarios for companies, industries and markets. The firm I worked for specialized in …
