Today’s guest post is from Nicolas Hummer, Director of Client Relations for The MPower Group, who told us last year that Strategic Sourcing is Dead.

It’s spring time, and that means the (good) doctor is out on tour shaking hands, kissing babies and keeping his finger on the pulse of our dynamic community. Recently he was at The Hackett Group’s Best Practices Conference. As the doctor continues his summer tour, it’s only fitting that the next stop on his junket is the Next Practices Xchange, facilitated by The Mpower Group in Oak Brook, IL on June 9th.

The Next Practices Xchange is a member driven group focused on the advancement of ‘Next Practices‘. Membership is limited to Director level and above sourcing and supply chain executives and members choose the themes, dates and location for these events. These full day events are designed to facilitate intimate networking opportunities and truly strategic thinking away from the demands of daily executive life. The Next Practices Xchange is unique in that members participate in a number of facilitated workshops that augment keynote presentations. These workshops are designed to facilitate knowledge exchange between participants and provide take-aways and Next Practices that are applicable in an executive’s every-day life.

The upcoming meeting’s theme, From Cost To Value, was inspired by the immense interest that was generated on this topic on SourcingInnovation.com last summer (see Yup, It’s still dead, for example.). Since then we’ve observed the entire dialogue in our community as it has shifted to a fuller value-based conceptualization of Supply Chain Management in which TCO and Cost are only smaller components of a bigger picture. This event is designed to start taking those concepts away from the blogsphere and into the boardrooms, warehouses and supplier/client contracts of attendees’ organizations. Attendees this year are a mix of Sourcing and Supply Chain executives from top companies including BP, CNA Insurance, Diversey (an S.C. Johnson Company), Kraft, FMC Technologies, SunTrust Bank, Sears, Ventura Foods, and many others.

If you are a Director-level or above executive in a Sourcing or Supply Chain related function and would like more information on this advent please feel free to reach out to me at nicoh <at> thempowergroup <dot> com or 630.268.8963.

Thanks, Nick.