Welcome to the unofficial launch of Sourcing Innovation (on June 9, 2006), a new blog about … sourcing innovation. This blog is designed to complement other leading supply chain blogs on the internet, including Spend Matters (http://www.spendmatters.com/) by Jason Busch, E-Sourcing Forum (http://www.esourcingforum.com/) by David Bush, and Procurement Central (https://procurement.wordpress.com/) 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 last six years working on supply chain and sourcing applications and most of the last ten years 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 is your leading source for breaking supply chain news, E Sourcing Forum is your leading source for best practices and interesting tidbits you won’t find anywhere else, and Procurement Central is your leading source for insightful technology management principles and insights from the mind of a former sourcing project manager, my goal is for this blog 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.) Also check www.sourcinginnovation.com, where I plan to build a guide to the wealth of online resources available and add thought papers on a regular basis.
Feel free to comment or email me at: thedoctor<at>sourcinginnovation<dot>com. Live the evolution!