Daily Archives: June 9, 2006

Welcome

Welcome to the unofficial launch of Sourcing Innovation (on June 9, 2006), a new blog about … sourcing innovation.  On launch, this blog was designed to complement other leading supply chain blogs on the internet, including Spend Matters (http://www.spendmatters.com/) by Jason Busch, E-Sourcing Forum (defunct, see the archives on the WayBackMachine) by David Bush, and Procurement Central (defunct) by Dave Stephens by focusing on innovation from the perspective of a former developer and architect of sourcing and supply chain software.

My name is Michael G. Lamoureux, and I am a CS PhD who spent most of the first part of the noughts working on supply chain and sourcing applications and most of the late nineties working in the more general e-commerce space.  (Before that, I was in the academic realm, which included some teaching and research post-graduate degrees.)  I have deep expertise in data structures, computational geometry, optimization, and modeling (mathematical and data), but I have heard the call of Strategic Sourcing and now believe that Procurement will be the center of the next phase of organizational transformation.  Hence this blog and my newfound focus on SCM (Supply Chain Management) and SCM consulting.

Whereas, in my view, Spend Matters was your leading source for breaking supply chain news, E Sourcing Forum was your leading source for best practices and interesting tidbits you won’t find anywhere else, and Procurement Central was your leading source for insightful technology management principles and insights from the mind of a former sourcing project manager, the goal is for this blog was to focus more on innovative processes and technologies that you can use to evolutionize your sourcing organization.  This doesn’t mean that there won’t be a strong overlap of topics between this blog and the ones herein mentioned, and I sincerely hope there is not only an overlap but regular debates so that you get the full story, but that my topics and viewpoints will be approaching sourcing from a problem solving and innovation angle first and a more traditional sourcing angle second.  I also intend to broach more side issues to give you an overview of the larger business space in which sourcing exists and the technology that exists, or will soon exist, to help you solve your problems.

Check back regularly for postings and, of course, for the official launch.  Also check Spend Matters and E Sourcing Forum where I have been known, and hopefully will continue, to make comments and maybe, just maybe, the occasional guest post (if I get lucky).  (And I truly hope that if this blog takes off, Jason, David, Dave, and other leading bloggers will accept my forthcoming invitations to guest post as well.)

Feel free to comment or email me at: thedoctor<at>sourcinginnovation<dot>com.

Live the evolution!

About Sourcing Innovation

Sourcing Innovation is a resource for sourcing, procurement, and supply chain professionals who are interested in improving themselves and the overall performance of their organizations. Sourcing Innovation is education about, and in-depth analysis of, technologies and approaches that can have a profound impact on the way you do business. The editor believes that the more you know, the better your chances of success.

That’s why Sourcing Innovation brings you in-depth technology and vendor analyses, reviews and analysis of some of the more important articles and white-papers that pop-up from time to time, as well as best practices and deep dives into specific solution areas. Sourcing Innovation also explores key issues that you need to be aware of as a sourcing professional.

Sourcing Innovation, started in June of 2006, is authored and edited by Michael Lamoureux, aka the doctor, a Computer Science PhD who has been heavily involved in the Sourcing, Procurement and Supply Chain Space since 2000 and the e-Commerce space since 1997. With particular expertise in analytics, modeling, and optimization, the doctor is able to dive much deeper into technology and core issues than the average blogger and analyst (who tends to come from a business background in marketing, management, solutions consulting, or system implementation, and is therefore unable to comment credibly on technology).

A second primary goal of this blog to raise awareness of innovative best practices and technologies that are relatively unknown but that could be used by a large number of organizations to elevate their performance as a whole. When one combines the impending talent crunch with the rapid rise of developing nations like China and India, innovation takes on a whole new importance, since it might be the only way North America, Western Europe, and other developed nations will be able to compete in the coming decades. When this blog was started in 2006, we were seeing rapid rise in energy and raw material prices globally which was followed by the rapid fall of the US dollar in 2007 and the 2007-2008 financial crisis; and while the situation improved, there were still many bumps along the way from 2009 through 2019 and then 2020 saw the world shut down when China shut down during COVID, and just as supply chains started to normalize we saw Panamanian droughts and conflict in the Red Sea, continuing the global sourcing nightmares which have now been ongoing for over 4 years (as of July, 2024). In other words, every time global business resolves a fork in the road, yet another one appears, and only the organizations that continually innovate will be able to find the path that leads to continued success.

Sourcing Innovation also acts as a focal point for the sourcing community. A large number of blogs have come and gone over the last couple of decades, and at any given time it’s hard to know who’s blogging, on what topic, and where the thought leaders have gone.In the past, Sourcing Innovation regularly organized cross-blog posting series that focussed on important, key topics and regularly invited the thought leaders to guest post.  Today, it updates its blog list at least annually and occasionally invites leading experts to contribute.

(To date, Sourcing Innovation has successfully tackled The Future of Sourcing, The Top Three, and Sustainability and has brought together between one dozen and two dozen leading bloggers and thinkers on each topic as well as attracting around 100 of the space’s thought leaders to its virtual pages.)

For more information on Sourcing Innovation, please check out the posts in the About Category. You might also want to check out Where Is My Market Going?.

For more information on the doctor, you might want to check out What Does the doctor Do? and What Does the doctor Do? For Executives.

For more information on becoming a corporate sponsor, and influencing the influencers, you should check out Why I’m Going To Sponsor SI! and The SI Open Pricing Model.

To contact the doctor, e-mail thedoctor <at> sourcinginnovation <dot> com.

P.S.: For those of you who still haven’t figured out how to use Google to do basic research, I am NOT the Senator and member of the Republican Party of Arkansas, I am not the Professor of Mathematics and Geoscience from the University of Calgary (and Halifax, where I currently reside, is about 4,444 km from Vancouver), and I have nothing to do with the Lamoureux Consulting Group.  I’d also like to remind you that I’m faceless, (my)spaceless, and twitter/X-free (and that means I’m not this twit or this twit either) — and thoroughly intend on staying that way. You can find me on Linked-In and Linq, but don’t look for me on the social butterfly sites. I’d rather spend my time productively.

( spam@sourcinginnovation.com)