Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Nicolas Hummer on The Next Practices Xchange

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.

Thanks, Nick.

Compliance and Security are Top IT Concerns

A recent article over on Supply & Demand Chain Executive that summarized a survey by the Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA) that found that the top three concerns of IT professionals were:

  1. regulatory compliance
  2. enterprise-based IT management and governance
  3. information security management

It’s kind of surprising that information security management is third and not first on the list given the headlines that come from breaches in security, such as the recent Sony PlayStation Network breach. Regulatory compliance is important, as it can result in fines for failures, but breaches are more costly, once the damage to the brand and the lawsuits are factored in.

I was a little surprised to see enterprise based IT management so high on the list. It’s an important topic, but given recent disasters, I would have expected diaster recovery and business continuity, #4, to take its spot, as IT management is a never ending issue and rarely overlooked by CIOs and CTOs, even though they might no always find the time to get it where they want it.

You Know Your Procurement Rules Are Onerous When

Even your public sector organizations are saying the rules are inflexible, complex, and onerous! Seems that the NHS, who need to find 50% more savings and make up to twenty billion pounds of efficiency savings by 2015, are heeding my advice that they need to stop buying like a government agency and have made a submission to the European Commision’s consultation stating that EU public procurement law should be amended to allow for greater negotiation with bidders during the selection and award process.

According to a recent article over on SupplyManagement.com, the NHS Confederation has called for a significant increase of the threshold at which organisations are obliged to follow EU rules. The current level applies to many relatively small contracts, putting them through the same onerous tendering processes as ones worth many millions which, as I pointed out in my post on how the NHS can find 50% more savings, is moronic. When the bid is too low, you get organizations bidding that have mastered the art of the “change order”. They agree to do “X” where “X” sounds like it is what you want, but really isn’t, and then to get what you really want, because of the tight contract, you’ll have to pay a ridiculous amount in change order fees, and the result is that the net cost will be more than the highest bid, and significantly more than the lowest bid from a competent, honest, vendor.

Hopefully when the EU revises the regulations this summer, they’ll listen to the NHS request. Otherwise, there’s no way the NHS is going to find the savings it needs to continually reinvest in patient care, wait times are going to continue to go up, and quality of service is going to continue to go down.

Headline from the Land of D’Oh: Foxconn Employees Asked to Sign ‘No Suicide’ Pledge

This cracks me up. It’s a shame that there are “appalling” working conditions at the Foxconn factory that include excessive overtime and public humiliation, but this isn’t the answer. After all, how do you enforce a no suicide pledge (TUAW.com)? What can you do to someone who’s already dead?

Sounds like management has to smarten up and start acting like it’s the 21st century where we treat employees fairly.