Monthly Archives: November 2010
The Pitfalls of A Career In Government Procurement
When Looking To Your Norther Neighbor …
… don’t forget to look to the east as well!
A recent blog on ocean freight over on the Logistics Management site noted that, while the long term viability of U.S. West Coast ports is being called into question lately, Canada’s two leading Pacific Rim ocean cargo gateways are thriving. To date, the Port of Vancouver in British Columbia had an overall tonnage increase mid-year of 20% and the neighbouring port of Prince Rupert has sailed safely through the receding global economic storm, reaching its highest volume throughput since 1997.
What disappointed me is that the article completely neglected our major eastern port, Halifax, where container throughput climbed 41.4% this year. Specifically, container throughput in first quarter climbed 41.4% to 99,450 TEUs from the same quarter last year. While this doesn’t yet put Halifax on par with Prince Rupert (as one TEU is about 12 register tons), Halifax is gearing up for growth. The Port Authority and the Federal Government are investing 73 Million to improve the port’s infrastructure to handle the world’s biggest ships. Plus, with the second largest natural harbour in the world, there’s lots of room for expansion!
Where is the Knowledge Network?
Supply Network. Invoicing Network. Payment Network. Risk Network. It’s network frenzy out there. But where’s the knowledge network to make sense of it all?
It’s not the internet. It may be the information highway, but with all the marketing billboards, the best you can get is an obstructed view of the signage intended to give you directions.
It’s not the supply management organizations. While they collect a lot of data points from their members, they don’t necessarily distill down to the underlying wisdom, and when they do, it’s usually specific to the membership base they serve — which is typically restricted to a single country or geographic region.
It’s not the for-profit training organizations. They may do a good (and sometimes great) job of training you to be effective at a set of supply management tasks, but don’t expect any wisdom beyond what they promise in the fine print. The purpose of their existence is to take your money, so they’re not about to enable the market at large.
It’s not the new vendor wikis, forums, or knowledge exchanges. These exist to serve their members first and you second, as clearly evidenced by the restrictive nature of many of these network. And even though a few of these have opened the doors to anyone who wants to join, they exist first and foremost to deliver the education most relevant to the vendor. If the vendor is focussed on selling e-Sourcing, they don’t really care about certain aspects of e-Payment or the 3rd party logistic’s you’ll need to deliver your products. And forget about these networks playing nice with the competition.
It’s certainly not the analysts. We all know that the greatest influences on an analyst firm are the vendors who get the most face time, which, in turn, are the vendors who pay the most to get that face time. As a result, most vendor reports are simply repackaged vendor marketing. A few go deeper, but even then, the vendors that get the most focus are the ones that pay for it.
And we don’t even have our own supply-o-pedia! And even though, back in 2007, it looked like the independent blogs would be plentiful and collectively serve as our guideposts when we wandered off the path, at this point in time, we’re a dying breed. There might be dozens (and dozens) of blogs currently active in the space, but almost all of them are authored by vendors or analyst firms, who are using them as part of a core marketing strategy. And while a few of these do a great job of education, the education is focussed on the processes and practices you need to know to make the best use of the platforms and services offered by the company or firm.
And with all of these vendor blogs augmenting the traditional publications, supply management organization reports, and analyst briefs that are now focussed on online distribution, we’re drowing in a sea of infomation without a life vest. We need a knowledge management network to keep track of it all, but given that we don’t even have a common language for supply management information interchange, it’s probably a long way off. So what’s an aspiring supply management professional to do?
There Are No Hard Choices in Software Spending, Just Hard Heads
A recent Industry Week article on “hard choices for software spending”, quotes John Lovelock of Gartner who says that, if you’re an organization, either you’re viewing IT as a way of making money, saving money or increasing your profitability; or you’re viewing it as an expense to be trimmed. The implication, both of the analyst and the author, is that you fall into two camps, the spenders or the savers, and you have to make a hard choice as to what camp you fall in.
Well, I disagree. There are no hard choices when it comes to software spending, only hard heads. Like Procurement, properly approached and managed, IT investments always increases profits (by lowering costs and/or increasing revenue) — especially in the supply chain. Pick an area. Any area. The right systems will always increase efficiency, transparency, and productivity. And if they impact spending, they will help to contain costs and optimize spending, resulting in savings the first time they are used. And anyone who can’t see beyond the up-front costs to the long term savings has a hard head, especially after all of the successful case studies that have been published by the analysts, research firms, and publications over the last ten years.
Unfortunately, it looks like it’s going to be a while before IT spending reaches the level it should be at and companies replace their antiquated systems and/or acquire systems that they should have had years ago, as Gartner is only projecting total worldwide IT spend in the manufacturing sector to grow by 2.6% this year. That means that while one third of CIOs may go forward with software and hardware upgrades that were deferred due to the recession, as per a study conducted by Robert Half Technology earlier this year, it will likely be a while before the other two thirds of CIOs do the same.
As a result, manufacturers will continue to struggle with increasing complexity, global competition, rapidly changing business environments, and volatile raw material prices for no good reason. And the pressure to reduce costs, improve productivity, and deliver greater customer satisfaction while continue unabated. All because they have a hard head.