Monthly Archives: June 2012

Great Advice on Career ROI Can Be Found on the E-Side

Yes, on the E-Side. ISM’s eSide Supply Management to be precise. Earlier this year, it published “Career ROI: Advice From the C-Suite” which offered 10 great suggestions to get, and keep, your career on a successful career path. These were offered by a career procurement professional with over two decades of experience and were right on the money. These five in particular were on the money.

  • Own Your Career Plan
    Actively take charge of your career growth and the opportunities that come your way. This includes educational opportunities, professional opportunities, and networking opportunities — whatever and wherever they may be. And be sure to check out the talent management resources popping up from the leading consultancies (Greybeard Advisors, The MPower Group, etc.) and professional organizations (ISM, Next Level Purchasing, etc.). Start with the presentations from the recent ISM conference which had a track on talent management.
  • Develop a Personal Brand
    Figure out who you are, how you are different from everyone else, and what it is that you bring to the table. Then work the brand online and offline. Start by establishing a great electronic image, that has clout (with or without Klout), and advertises who you are, and then live it when you network and interact with people. And be sure to constantly maintain and build your networks as this will help demonstrate the success of your personal brand.
  • Work Hard on Your Soft Skills
    If you look at a top 10 skills list for Supply Management today, you are just as likely to find team management, change management, negotiation management, supplier (relationship) management, CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) management, leadership, communication, cultural sensitivity, and professional development as key requirements as you are e-Sourcing/e-Procurement technology experience, data analysis, risk management, financial management, innovation management, or working capital management.
  • Be a Strategic Thinker
    Supply Management is about the long term. It’s not about reducing costs today just to inflate them tomorrow (by cutting too deep into a supplier’s cost margins, selecting components of inferior quality, or hanging on to last generation technology too long and avoiding investment in next generation technology that can greatly reduce costs and increase sustainability in the long term). It’s about finding ways to increase the pace of innovation, assist the organization in NPD (new product development), and assist the organization in new market entry. It’s about finding new opportunities for value generation, and not chasing the same cost reductions year over year. At some point, 2% just doesn’t make a difference.
  • Don’t Be Afraid to Take Risks, or Fail
    If you aren’t willing to take risks, you’ll never push the envelope and see what you are, and are not, capable of. If you don’t figure this out, you won’t make much progress in developing your personal brand, and won’t really stand out form the crowd. So take a few risks, fail once or twice, learn from your mistakes, and exceed expectations the next go around.

For five more great tips, see the original article on Career ROI: Advice From the C-Suite.

Bravo to CPO Agenda for Pointing Out That Charging Suppliers to Bid is a Really Bad Idea!

As I’ve told everyone who has ever asked, charging suppliers to bid is a really bad idea. Not only does it generate ill-will, but as this recent article over on the CPO Agenda that gave “tips for understanding why charging suppliers to tender is a bad idea” noted, it could even be illegal. But let’s take the tips one-by-one because it seems that this practice, which started rearing its ugly head at the start of the recession, is still trying to push through.

  • It is Counter-Productive
    It reduces the expressions of interest from time-wasters and quality suppliers alike. This is what goes through the head of a serious bidder with a quality product: “I know my product is quality, and so do my happy customers, so why should I pay $1,000 just for the opportunity to submit a bid? I’m not even guaranteed my product will be evaluated. I’m going to bid on these four other RFxs instead.” So, what you’ll end up with is a set of suppliers who are desparate for your business. But why are they desperate? Maybe their sales team can’t sell worth a damn, or, maybe (and the doctor leans this way) their products just aren’t as good as their competitors, or if they are, they are not able to produce them as cost effectively. Do you really want inferior products or unnecessary premiums for quality?
  • Suppliers with No-Pay-To-Play Policies are Out
    Not only will you likely knock out most of the quality suppliers in your potential supply base who, while quite willing to bear the costs of providing you with product samples, etc, are not willing to pay just to bid, but you will definitely knock out any supplier with a no-pay-to-play policy that prohibits them from bidding on any contract that requires a bid fee. These could be the best suppliers in the world.
  • There’s no Rationale for it
    The logic is that it takes time to collect, verify, and analyze a bid, and while this is true, with modern e-RFx / e-Auction software, you can collect, verify the completeness of, and compare a bid to a benchmark in less than a second. You will likely only need to analyze the Top 5, accoring to your weighted metric, in detail at the end of the day. And, since you can now buy unlimited use of these systems for less than what a single project used to cost, it doesn’t cost any more to collect fifteen bids than five bids.
  • It is Unethical
    There is way too much opportunity for corruption or the perception of favouritism. (In simple terms, you are sending this message: We value suppliers who bribe us for our business.) Plus, there is always a chance that this restriction could be illegal, in breach of fair competitive practices, or public procurement law. Oops! Can you say “class action lawsuit”?
  • It Says Your Company Is An Ass
    Okay, so the original article said it sends a strong message to the supply base you need to connect with that you are actually uncooperative and uninterested in building a relationship that will benefit both parties, but this sums it up nicely. Unless your organization has a monopoly, and can get away with being a self-centered smug corporate ass, just don’t do it.

Are the Traffic Ranking Websites The New SEO Scams?

As regular readers of this blog will know, back in 2009, SI briefly claimed the top spot on the traffic ranking engines during the summer (see this post). Before then, it was in the number two position for quite some time, and, according to these traffic ranking sites, remained strong in the number two position until about last summer. Then, about the same time that most of the major ranking engines starting introducing premium accounts and services, it started falling — rapidly — even though traffic has been holding steady, and often increasing 2% to 3% month over month, for the past year.

According to these respected traffic ranking sites, which used to at least be directionally accurate, it now gets between 1,000 and 6,000 visits per month. Are you fracking kidding me? On average, SI gets between 4,300 and 5,000 visits per day, which averages out to between 30,000 and 35,000 visits per week, and between 125,000 and 150,000 visits per month (which translates to somewhere between 1.5 and 1.8 Million visits per year). Not Perez Hilton traffic by any stretch of the imagination, but still quite respectable in this space!

Here’s a snapshot of traffic that I took a few days ago using the built in statistics tool in the GoDaddy QuickBlog hosting service. Between May 22, 2012 and May 29, 2012, SI received between 3,500 and 5,500 visits each day and over 36,000 visits in that week.

SI Traffic for May 22 to May 29, 2012

However, if I pay for premium membership, most of the traffic ranking sites will allow me to install (updated / more accurate) traffic monitoring capabilities (which translates into custom javascript / image loads) that will allow the sites to track my traffic more accurately (and do what GoDaddy and Google do for free). I don’t know about you, but if this isn’t an SEO scam legitimized, I don’t know what is. (Short story, I’m miffed, not giving them a dime and they can all go to heck!)

Has anyone had similar experiences with these sites over the past year?

Your Tax Dollars Hard At Work

While I’m all for preserving endangered foliage, six weeks after first reading about it, I still can’t believe it cost $205,000 to transplant a single shrub as part of a highway project in California.

Check out this article over on Left Lane News (“california spends 205000 to transplant single shrub for highway project”) on how San Francisco used funds from several state and federal sources to transplant a single Arctostaphylos franciscana shrub from the median of a strip of roadway adjacent to the Golden Gate Bridge to another location where it could thrive in the wild.

I’m sorry, but just like it doesn’t cost 100,000 to dig up a shrub, it doesn’t cost $205,075 to load, transport, and replant one either. This is yet another example of how Government Procurement gives Procurement a bad name.

What is Visibility?

Supply Chain Visibility is a hot-topic, and, as reported in this article in Logistics Management on Defining Visibility late last summer, was the hottest project in 2011 according to a Capgemini Consulting study. Fast forward to 2012, and visibility is a term I’m hearing from at least every other vendor as a selling point of their supply chain services and solutions.

Thus, at this point, I have to ask — what, pray tell, is visibility? When we look up visibility, the first definition returned from dictionary(.com) is the state or fact of being visible, which isn’t very useful since visible is defined as that [which] can be seen. So what do we have to see?

Well, if you talk to a software-based solutions vendor, we have to see the data. Specifically, data on where your order is in terms of production, shipment, or delivery. And this is good, but it’s not enough. While this will tell you that production on an order is three (3) days behind, it won’t tell you why. Is the plant recovering from a backlog, and about to put your order into overtime production tomorrow? Are they suffering from a worker shortage, or strike, and your order is delayed another week? Or have the components and/or raw materials not yet arrived? And if it’s the latter situation, why? Is it a transportation delay? A production delay? Or a raw material shortage that may take months to correct? So you need visibility into the status of your order and all of your supplier’s orders that impact your orders. But this isn’t always enough.

While it would be great to know as soon as a delay occurs that could potentially impact your supply chain, and give you more time to respond and potentially create and/or implement mitigations and counter-measures (such as finding an alternate source of supply or stepping in to help the supplier solve the problem), this still doesn’t give you any indication of problems that could be brewing. That’s why other vendors try to sell you risk-focussed data solutions such as financial viability reports (from credit-based data) and activity reports (from import/export data). But these solutions only allow you to judge supplier viability, they don’t allow you to determine if an external event in the supplier’s locale (such as war breaking out or a likely natural disaster) could take the supplier out even if they are financially viable and low-risk from a business perspective. So other solutions try to sell you country-based risk assessment solutions with data on each of the locales you are doing business with. And this is a type of visibility. As are sustainability tracking solutions which track sustainability data (with regards to environmental, legislative, and other types of compliance data) to try and predict current and future supplier health based upon a sustainability score that goes beyond pure financial data. And this is another type of visibility.

And if you had all these solutions, you could certainly argue that you had supply chain visibility, but the question is, how complete is it? How much do you need to see to be confident that the chances of an unpredicted event are sufficiently low and/or the chances of you not knowing about an unpredictable event soon enough to implement mitigations are sufficiently low? It’s hard to say. It probably depends upon your operation, your risk exposure, and the strength of your supply chain and supplier relationships.

Regardless, visibility is a concept that is hard to narrow down and no one approach completely solves the problem. Keep that in mind when evaluating solutions on the strength of their visibility.