Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Has the Blogging Thunder From Down Under Returned?

And is he going to guide us into a new age of “Contract Capital Management”?

Those of you who have been following the blogs since their dawn in Supply Management will remember the Vendor Management blog, which was maintained by Doug Hudgeon, the blogging thunder from down under, who used to be a regular participant in the great Supply Management blogsphere debates and who even guest posted on SI a few times. Then, a mere 18 months after accepting a position as Head of Procurement and Operations at Macquarie Bank, where he was crazy busy from day one, he was promoted to Macquarie Group Head of Operations for Macquarie Services because he did such an awesome job. At this point he want from crazy busy to insanely busy, and though he still managed to maintain a regular voice in the blogsphere, his contributions quickly trailed off from a couple a week to a couple a month. They stabilized at this point until the big guns realized that he was still kicking so much @ss that he had to be promoted again, at which point they promoted him again to Head of Client Engagement & P2P, where he was essentially responsible for all services and P2P across the entire global organization (which has over 14,000 employees in 70 locations in 28 countries who managed assets of over 300 Billion US). At this point he went from insanely busy to unimaginably busy and disappeared from the blogsphere for weeks at a time, though he was still locatable if you had the time to search. But then the Macquarie Group decided that it was time that they too opened a financial shared services center in India to support their global operations and that it would be up to Doug to make it so. So last summer he penned a goodbye to the blogsphere and boarded his plane to Delhi, en-route to Gurgaon, and we all wondered if we’d ever hear from him again.

But then, a few weeks ago, without any announcement or fanfare, a new post appeared on a new site dedicated to “Contract Capital Management”. It didn’t say much except that Doug was still alive and still toiling away in the bowels of India, and that he had discovered that HR is the best model for a P2P function to use when describing their role within an organization … and now we’re on the edge waiting to see what else he has learned from the daughters of darkness.

For those of you who don’t remember Doug, or need their memory refreshed, he authored these classic thought-pieces over on Vendor Management (which are now archived on Contract Capital Management):

  • Are your vendors the Spice Girls or Arcadia?
  • Blue Ocean Strategy and The Tawny Scrawny Lion
  • Buzzword Lifecycle Management (BLM) and Procurement
  • Prisoner’s dilemma in long term supplier relationships
  • Is Your Spouse Too Hot?
  • Seven Deadly Challenges
  • Measuring procurement performance: Does it need to be complex?

As well as these guest posts on Sourcing Innovation:

  • Rogers and Hammerstein: The Future of Sourcing
  • The Top Three: Dale Earnhardt

Welcome back Doug!

Want that new Supply Chain System? Avoid These Hot Buttons

A recent article over on the Harvard Business Review that chronicled “eight things executives hate about IT” just handed you a checklist that you can use to make sure your request for that new IT system isn’t immediately denied. All you have to do is find a system that doesn’t have any of these issues.

  1. IT Red TapeIf your organization has an IT bureaucratic process that rivals the tax code in complexity, and approval depends on IT’s okay, you’re probably already sunk.
  2. Heavy Internal Support RequirementsIn most organizations, high level people in IT are never available and the low level tech support is overworked. Although this won’t be a show stopper, if enterprise history is that most platforms with heavy internal support requirements end up becoming shelf-ware, you’ll be fighting an up-hill battle.
  3. Fixed Process RequirementsYour business, and the process that run it, are always changing. If it’s hard to change the workflow, that software essentially comes with an expiry date that’s not much further out than a litre of milk.
  4. Flashy Bells and WhistlesYou’re in business to make money. Flash doesn’t add to the bottom line, features do. And paying for functionality you’ll never use is one of the reasons Gartner says that eight out of ten IT dollars is “dead money”.
  5. Extensive Implementation/Integration Requirements Chances are there are already too many never-ending IT projects in the organization. The last thing the C-suite wants is another one.
  6. Not Forward LookingOrganizations want to be strategic and proactive, not tactical and reactive.
  7. No Innovation SupportEven if they don’t actually do it, everyone wants to say they’re innovative. So the platform better support innovation!
  8. High Likelihood of Bad NewsExecutives know that even a successful launch is always accompanied with the inevitable onslaught of bugs, crashes, and change requests. If it looks like the number of these will be higher than usual, you’ll have a lot of eye rolling to deal with, at best.

I’m not saying finding such a solution will be easy, but if you can do it, you’ll probably get your system (provided it doesn’t cost more than the GDP of some smaller countries).

Share This on Linked In

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story

If you share the doctor‘s strange sense of humour and sensibility, then you probably agree that “Weird Al” Yankovic is a genius and that many of his classic parodies — such as Gump, Amish Paradise, and It’s All About the Pentiums (as well as new classics such as CNR and Craigslist) — are so much better than the original songs they are based on that there’s just no comparison.

And you’ll probably love this new spoof trailer for “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story” on FunnyOrDie.com, which is hilarious.

Share This on Linked In

Proof that United, and Other, Airlines Break More Than Guitars

As regular readers will have observed, I’m a big fan of Dave Carroll‘s work on the United Breaks Guitars trilogy (despite not being a fan of country or bluegrass because the trilogy was very well done).

But, as we all know, they don’t just break guitars, and as proof, Gadling recently collected six YouTube videos showing careless baggage handlers in action that would be funny if they weren’t so scary!

See how many you can get through!

  1. Airport Cameras Film Naught Luggage Handlers
  2. US Air Baggage Handler
  3. Continental Baggage Handler Abuses Bags
  4. Iberia/BA Heathrow Baggage Handlers
  5. easyJet Careful Baggage Handling
  6. Ryanair Flight – Baggage Handlers

And if you made it through those, here’s more!

  1. Baggage Handlers Gone Wild
  2. Baggage Handler at JFK Airport, Jet Blue Terminal tossing luggage at Jet Blue
  3. United Baggage Handler Tosses Your Fragile Shipment!

If Twitter’s CEO Really Wants You To Get Stuff Done …

He’d shut down Twitter. Period.

At the very least, he’d make permanent account termination a single click for people who are tired of contentless tweets that make them dumber than a pothead and cause them to fail basic English competency tests. After all, it’s not like anyone hears when a twit speaks in the twittersphere. And 10 Billion Tweets is just too much.

Twitter is NOT an information network. Information, by definition, must convey meaning. Billions of random thoughts, tiny URLS that disappear almost as fast as they are generated, and content-free marketing messages do not contain meaning. And you can’t increase the signal-to-noise ratio without a signal! Zero is zero is zero. It doesn’t matter how you look at it: upside down, right-side up, inverted … it’s still zero! Sounds to me like the CEO has been spending a little too much time on his own “network”! And if you don’t believe me, check out this article on techradar, where he’s quoted.