Category Archives: Miscellaneous

It’s Your Turn To Join The Great Strategic Sourcing Debate!

Over the past few weeks, ever since Dalip Raheja of The Mpower Group decided to stir the supply chain hornet’s nest with his posts on how Strategic Sourcing is Dead and how The Sourcing Emperor Has No Clothes, we’ve seen a flurry of activity from the blogging heavyweights who were quick to weigh in with their opinions, including:

  • Tim Cummins’ (of the IACCM) with his post on The Death Of Procurement: Nightmare or Nirvana?
  • Robert A. Rudzki (of Greybeard Advisors) who tackled “Returning the “Strategic” to Strategic Sourcing”, “Returning the “Strategic” to Strategic Sourcing (Part 2)”, and asked “Where Does Strategic Sourcing Fit In?”
  • Steve Hall (of the Procurement Leaders Blog) who addressed the “Rumours of the Death of Strategic Sourcing”, gave us “A CPO’s Story of Strategic Sourcing”, and told us that “Best in Class is an Indulgence”
  • Dave Henshall (of “Purchasing Practice“) who addressed Procurement 2.0 – and Other Labels
  • Steve Hall (of the Procurement Leaders Blog) who also gave us “A CPO’s Story of Strategic Sourcing“
  • Josh Dials (of Iasta) who said it’s time to “Put “Strategic” Back into your Strategic Sourcing” on e-Sourcing Forum
  • Jason Busch (of Spend Matters) who insisted that “Strategic Sourcing Ain’t Dead, Regardless of What the Naysayers Suggest”
  • Joe Payne (of Source One Management Services) who echoed his cry and shouted that “Strategic Sourcing Lives On!”
  • William Dorn (of Source One Management Services) who ranted that “Strategic Sourcing is Alive and Kicking”
  • Ron Southard (of SafeSourcing) who couldn’t help but ask if Strategic Sourcing is Alive or Dead (Part I and Part II) and
  • Sudy Bharadwaj who summarized his research in My 2 Cents.

This flurry of activity was followed by Dalip’s insistence this morning that Yup, Strategic Sourcing is Still Dead, as it would seem that, in his view, we collectively did not do enough to revive the patient.

So now it’s your turn! I’m opening up the forum to anyone who wants to throw their 2 cents into the money pot. Simply send a well worded, well argued, piece to the doctor and I will post it here on Sourcing Innovation. Contributions will be posted in the order they are received, so get yours in soon for a speedy posting. (Just be sure to follow the posting rules and keep the marketing out of the material.)

A Quiet Summer for the Oompa-Loompas

Ever since I started following the plight of the Oompa-Loompas over three years ago, times have been tough. They’ve suffered layoffs at Hershey, Cadbury, and Kraft. They’ve had to deal with the repercussions of E. Coli, melamine contamination, chocolate covered crickets in the Ferrero Rocher, stowaways, seizures, chemical accidents that ended a few careers, fire, and price-fixing lawsuits. For the past three years, not a quarter went by without more bad news. However, ever since Hershey announced it was to trim 5% of its workforce in June, things have been rather quiet despite the flurry of chocolate related news articles over the last three months. Let’s hope things stay this way.

So what did the summer bring?

  • an attempt to corner the Coca market According to reports, Hedge Fund Manager Anthony Ward bought 240,000 tonnes of cocoa beans, enough to make more than 5 Billion small chocolate bars.
  • a new initiative to combat child labourbetween the US Department of Labor and the ILO (International Labor Organization)
  • a top spot in a national award programawarded to Cargill for its free farmer field school program that teaches cocoa farmers how to properly use pesticides and fertilizers, maintain their fields, and conduct sanitary harvests
  • customized chocolatecourtesy of Chocomize
  • vitamin chocolatecourtesy of CVS/pharmacy and Whole Foods
  • the world’s largest chocolate barfrom the Grand Candy Company
  • another study promoting the health benefits of dark chocolatewhich lowers the risk of heart failure
  • a golden ticket in the cacao genomefrom a preliminary gene sequence for cacao that was revealed by Mars Inc. and research partners which they plan to use to engineer disease resistant trees that will produce bigger and better cocoa bean yields
  • the end of the biggest advocate in the comic stripsas Cathy says goodbye

Other than metal pieces in the chocolate chunk cookies, a look into the benefits of FairTrade cocoa, an expansion of the luxury chocolate factor in Cambridgeshire, news of Hershey’s domination of the U.S. Market (and its lag behind its competitors in avoiding forced labor, human trafficking, and abusive child labor — profits come at a price), and a report from Packaged Facts on The Chocolate Market in the U.S., it’s been a quiet summer for the oompa-loompas. No more massive layoffs, and no new major scandals. Let’s hope it stays that way.

However, Cracked.com ran a great story on the 5 bitter truths about chocolate that you might want to check out. While we’d like to continue to believe that chocolate comes from a purple garbed man in a whimsical factory, the real chocolate world is far darker and far harder than we ever would have thought.

Catch the doctor on the West Coast

While I don’t advertise my whereabouts often, because it’s usually the case that I barely have enough extra time to even see everyone who’s put a request in since the last time I was in a certain geographic area, I’m purposely spending a couple of extra days on the West Coast next month to give anyone who’d like to talk to the doctor in person a chance to do so, as I don’t make it over there as much as I’d like.

Specifically, I’ll be in the San Francisco Valley area from October 4th through October 10th and still have some free time on half of those days. If you’d like to meet, e-mail me, let me know where you are (and who you represent if it’s not clear from your e-mail address), and I’ll let you know when I’ll be close(st) to you and what times I have available.

See you soon!

What Is a Smarter Supply Chain?

Late this summer, while most of you were on vacation, the Supply Chain Digest asked a good question — What Is a Smarter Supply Chain?. They attempted to answer this question using the 2009 IBM Report which said that the supply chain of the future needs to be instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent, which is right, but instrumentation and interconnection alone, even enabled by AI workflow management, does not make an intelligent supply chain.

Only one thing makes an intelligent supply chain: smarter people. I’m probably the biggest fan of supply chain technology that there is — focussing primarily on the technical capabilities of the products and platforms when I cover a vendor — but even I recognize that even if you spend millions implementing end-to-end best-of-breed solutions throughout your supply chain, it will all be for nought if your people don’t have the education, experience, and EQ to use it!

Let’s face it. To take full advantage of a spend analysis tool, your sourcing analysts need to understand how to cube, slice, dice, and identify meaningful trends in PO, invoice, and T&E data to identify true savings opportunities. To take full advantage of an e-Negotiation suite, the sourcing professional needs to know when to use RFX, when to use e-Auction, and when to do a fact-based negotiation with the incumbent supplier(s). To take full advantage of optimization, you have to know how to break the cost structures down, what constraints are necessary, and what constraints are unnecessarily imposed by the business. And contract management is more than electronically filing a contract in an electronic vault, it’s ensuring the terms of the contract are adhered to — especially the pricing. I could go on through each stage of the procurement cycle and each stage of the global trade cycle and so on, but the simple fact remains that if you don’t hire smarter people, you won’t have a smarter supply chain. The days of high-school drop-outs pushing paper in the back office are long gone. Time to modernize!

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