Daily Archives: September 26, 2009

Six Keiths for Vinnie!

Vinnie Mirchandani’s Technology and My Hobby series now has enough enough entries to enumerate the uniform polyhedron (as long as edges are not allowed to coincide). That’s quite an achievement. As it has now achieved the highest Keith number status under 100, I suggest we raise six Keiths to Vinnie on Keith’s upcoming 214th birthday on October 5th. (Keith’s brewery has been in operation since 1820, opening a mere 34 years after the opening of the Molson brewery in 1786, which makes it not only one of Canada’s oldest breweries, but one of the world’s oldest breweries.)

Here is an updated index of the posts in alphabetical order by category for you hobbyists.

Category Author Company
Archaeology (Armchair)

  More Essays

Michael Lamoureux (of Sourcing Innovation)
Asian Fusion Cooking Sameer Patel (of Span Strategies)
Baseball (Little League) Mike O’Brien (of Appirio)
Basketball Coaching Dan Dal Degan (of Salesforce)
BBQ Floyd Teter (of Jet Propulsion Labs)
Beagles Peanuts
Blood Donation Tom Foydel (of SightLines)
Brewmastering (Home) Dennis Howlett (of ZDNet)
Bridge David Dobrin (of B2B Analysts)
Cars (Tinkering) Brian Sommer (of TechVentive)
Cars (Restoration) Oliver Marks (of Oliver Marks & Associates)
Cartoons (Tech Toons) Alvaro “Blag” Tejada Galindo (of SAP)
Cats Rusty Weston (of Third Set Media)
Chess Rita Mirchandani
Community Service (Long Distance) Will Scott (of Waer Systems)
Cricket Thomas Otter (of Gartner)
Cruises Edgar Moore (of San Jacinto College)
Cycling Paul Wiest (of Siemens Enterprise Communications)
Disney World Jim Holincheck (of Gartner)
Fishing Mike Prosceno (of SAP)
Friends Naomi Bloom (of Bloom & Wallace)
Flying Ameed Taylor (of Applation)
Gardening Erik Keller (of Wapiti LLC)
Gastronomy William Mougayar (of Eqentia)
Golf Jim Rafferty (of Market Shapers)
Grandparenting Frank Scavo (of Computer Economics)
Green Living Timothy Chou (of Cloudbook.Net)
Harmonica Leonardo Kenji Shikida (of Vetta Labs LTDA)
Home Design Josh Snowhorn (of Terremark)
Home Improvement (Global) Helmuth Guembel (of Strategy Partners)
Home Movies Tom Wailgum (of CIO Magazine)
Horses (Hi-Tech) Dave Morrison (of Shop.com)
Horses (Low-Tech) Mark Galloway (of oppSource)
Jazz (Big Band) Joe Thornton (of Lawson Software)
Jazz Radio DJ Jim Berkowitz (of CRM Mastery)
Martial Arts Harald Reiter (of SSIP)
Model Planes Anil Wats (of DP World)
Music (as a Second Career) Richard Hunter (of Gartner)
Musical Discoveries Mike Laven (of Traiana)
Nutrigenomics (Functional Medicine) Jeff Ventura (of MiPro Consulting)
Opera Guenther Tolkmit (of Lawson Software)
Organ Playing Gerlinde Gniewosz (of Zuztertu.com)
Parenting David Axson (of Sonax Group)
Photography Michael Krigsman (of Asuret)
Rafting Richard Hirsch (of Siemens SIS)
Reading Francine McKenna (an Author)
Restoring Antiquarian Books Jason Busch (of Spend Matters)
Rifles (Target) Tom Ryan (of Gartner)
Rock (Guitar) Devan Sabaratnam (of Business on Software fame)
RVs Tom Chimera (of Overpayment Recovery Services)
Running Eric Dirst (of DeVry)
Sailing Curtis Beebe (of PwC)
Scrapbooking Debbie Brown (of ADP)
Side-Tripping Kimberly McDonald Baker (of Project Partners)
Photography Michael Krigsman (of Asuret)
Sailboat Racing Bill Kutik (of Human Resource Executive)
Singing (Soprano) Gretchen Lindquist (of SAP Security)
Skiing Sig Rinde (of Thigamy fame)
Snorkeling Louis Columbus (of Cincom)
Soccer Coaching Christian Schuh (of Siemens Enterprise Communications)
Squash Nick Dembla (of Capsilon)
Super Momming Joy Wald (of ADT)
Surfing Karen Watts (of Corefino)
Technology Impact Bob Warfield (of SmoothSpan)
Technology Luddism Josh Greenbaum (of Enterprise Application Consulting)
Tennis Karen Beaman (of Jeitosa)
Theatre Marilyn Pratt (of SAP Labs)
Travel (International) Harish Malani
Vinyl DJs Ray Wang (of Forrester)
Wine John Dean (of ex-Steelcase fame)
Woodworking Jeff Nolan (of Venture Chronicles (.com))
Working Out Larry Dignan (of ZDNet)
Writing Charlotte Otter (of Charlotte’s Web)
Writing (Adventure) Rein Krevald (an Author)
Youth Science Mentoring Charlie Bess (of EDS)

Duh! Supply Chain Headlines of the Week

Earlier this week I stumbled upon three headlines in particular that conveyed messages that were completely obvious to me and, hopefully, completely obvious to anyone in the supply management space. They were so obvious that the only way you wouldn’t already be aware of these no-brainers is if you didn’t have a brain! Since I literally found all three in a short time-span of about five minutes, I felt the need to share the cluster to find out if anyone else has had one of these anti-climactic realizations that sometimes the art of short headlines leaves much to be desired.

These are the headlines (which were attached to articles which were better than the headlines, by the way) that made me go Duh!

  • Bad Metrics Can Doom Your CRM Project
    Bad Metrics can doom ANY project — sourcing, procurement, ERP — not just CRM!

    It does have a good point on how weekly indicators that sound meaningful usually aren’t — over measuring can be even worse than under-measuring.

  • Supply chain innovation is important

    That’s why this blog is here!
    You have to get leaner and meaner and there are limits to how much you can reduce cost through negotiation, spend analysis and decision optimization if you can’t find fundamentally new ways to take cost out of the supply chain.

  • Investment in Procurement Technology Continues
    Given that properly applied procurement technology always increases efficiency, decreases (transactional) cost, and makes it easier to stop maverick spending in it’s tracks (which can often eat up 30% of savings, as Bernard Gunther pointed out earlier this week in his post), investment in this technology is going to continue to increase until the market is saturated — especially now that there are a number of low-cost options on the market.

Anyone want to share their favourite Duh! headlines of the week? Maybe we can start our own weekly mini-FARK dedicated to sourcing and procurement! It might even coerce the satirical sourcerer out of his slumber! (It’s been a long time since our last weekly Supply Chain Humor post!)