Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Cross Border Shipping

Every business needs to send packages. It’s just the natural order of business. But with such a dizzying array of options: Fedex, UPS, Purolator, DHL, who do you choose?

Well, I do not know if they are better suited to your needs or not, but after this advertisement (I apologize for the low quality, but I do not have access to a color scanner at the moment), Purolator had my vote [in 2006]!

ad

For the curious, the missing text is the following:

From anywhere in Canada to every zip code in the U.S., trust the experience of Canada’s largest courier. Just visit purolator.com to ship all your documents in one easy step. Our enhanced technology ensures better U.S. tracking. And one courier means one invoice. For more information, visit purolator.com or call 1 888 529 9777 to order your U.S. shipping kit.

Well, based on this add, and the fact they ship to Moose Jaw express (1 888 JAW XPRS), I had to give them my vote [in 2006], eh?

The Unique Challenges of Travel Procurement

Travel procurement is challenging because it is services-oriented procurement. Services-oriented procurement is challenging because it:

  • is Calendar-based
  • is Time-critical
  • requires Confirmations and updates
  • revolves around Real-time inventory
  • is Dynamically Priced
  • is often Group-Oriented

Travel procurement is even more of a challenge because:

  • Travelers have limited flexibility and the need for frequent changes
  • Employee expectations are continually rising
  • Low adoption of current solutions
  • Maverick spend runs rampant
  • Forced usage of sub-standard tools meets with employee resistance
  • Training costs and burden associated with current tools
  • Increasing fragmentation of the marketplace
  • Current solutions take a silo-approach
  • Agencies, first-generation travel tools, and on-line consumer booking tools all have their limitations

So what can you do? Check back this afternoon!

Purchasing – Procurement – Sourcing – Supply – Spend – Management – Smorgasboard

Earlier in the year, Tim and Jason had the great supply management vs spend management debate (on e-Sourcing Forum [WayBackMachine]) where they tried to promote the value of the relative terms and why one should win out over the other. This prompted a number of bloggers to try and determine the best term for our space based on public recognition. Many of us tried using Google to count the number of pages or Google trends to gauge the search history, but the net result was that depending on how you approached it, one term appeared to be slightly better than the other, but both significantly trailed sourcing, procurement, and purchasing in common acceptance and usage. (In fact, if you try to plot supply management and spend management simultaneously in Google trends, you get a message that “the terms do not have enough search volume for Google to display graphs“. Ouch!)

Then, last month, Doug Hudgeon of Vendor Management (renamed Contract Capital Management, [WayBackMachine]) pointed out Technorati and the new Blog Value Calculator based on Technorati’s API that computes and displays your blog’s worth using the same link to dollar ratio as the AOL-Weblogs Inc deal. The Technorati angle, which lets you search blog entries for terms, gives us yet another point of reference to test supply management vs spend management popularity in terms of blog posts and the relative blog value of Tim and Jason’s blogs. However, the results are again inconclusive as even though there are more “supply management” blog entries, SpendMatters is valued higher than Supply Excellence [WayBackMachine].

The results for sourcing vs procurement are not much better. Although roughly twenty to thirty times as popular as supply management or spend management, whereas one term is more popular in Google, another is more popular in Technorati. The only clear winner across the board is purchasing, which is roughly five times more popular than sourcing or procurement, or one hundred to one hundred and fifty times as popular as supply management or spend management.

Which begs the question, should we take a nomenclative step back and just use purchasing, continue to fight the hard fight and push for broader use of these better, more descriptive terms of today’s purchasing/procurement/sourcing organization, or develop a whole new term entirely, one that will catch on like wildfire. Something in line with the next craze. For example, if the wild, wild west became cool again, maybe we could call it Wrangling. Or maybe we could just co-opt a more popular term, like politics (which is roughly two to four times as popular as purchasing). At least then your sourcing blogs would be valued at what they’re worth. (A recent Technorati valuation of seven sourcerors put our combined blog value at under 90K. On the flipside, political and media centric blogs such as BuzzMachine have valuations over $1M. Commentary might make great reading, but does it help you do your job? Hmmm.)

A Day in the Life of a Buyer

Matthew Grant of Purchase Realm had a great idea yesterday on how to take the talent series even further – by asking former and current buyers to write guest blog entries on “A Day in the Life of a Buyer”, which he is willing to guest post (anonymously if you prefer) on his blog!

I strongly encourage all you current and former buyers out there to check it out and share your thoughts, even if all you want to do is leave a few (anonymous) comments. After all, this is a great way to attract talent to you and your organization … future buyers want to learn from the pros – and what better way to identify a pro then when they search for information in Google and instead of being directed to some lifeless definition page, they stumble onto your comments!

Supply Chain Finance

Earlier this month, Jason Busch wrote a blog entry about “Hackett, Working Capital, and a Massive, Untapped Opportunity”* where he commented on a recent Wall Street Journal article that captured the essence of a recent Hackett Group study that noted the 1,000 largest US Companies were able to free up approximately $72 Billion last year by reducing working capital requirements through improvements in collecting bills, turning over inventory and stretching out the amount of time they take to pay their own suppliers.

Later in the blog entry he alludes that perhaps the largest, low-risk untapped working capital reduction opportunity is a nascent area that Aberdeen and a handful of vendors refer to as supply chain finance, which helps companies treat their payables as an asset. This reminded me of a recent Research Brief from Aberdeen entitled “Get Ahead with Supply Chain Finance: How to Leverage New Solutions for End-to-End Financial Improvement” where they noted that enterprise benefits from Supply Chain Finance include lower end-to-end supply chain costs, working capital optimization, and shorter cash-to-cash cycles. The research brief notes the financial productivity of enterprises is being undercut by a widespread lack of global supply chain visibility and automation and that SCF solutions can eliminate paper documentation, minimize data errors, provide faster dispute management and easier detection of duplicate payments, and enable increased transparency of purchase-to-pay and order-to-cash processes which drive additional hard-dollar cost savings on top of the SCF benefits of cash flow and cost of capital improvements.

Furthermore, SCF includes not only the technology to automate settlement processes (e.g. EIPP), but also provides a path for accessing financing services throughout an entire transaction lifecycle, including related raw material, asset, and inventory financing. The financing arrangements can be done using a company’s own cash reserves or via third-party financial institution partners.

In other words, a Supply Chain Finance Solution is a combination of trade financing provided by a financial institution, a third-party vendor, or an enterprise itself, and a technology platform that unites the trading partners and the financial institution electronically and provides the financing triggers based on the occurrence of one or several supply chain events.

Makes sense to me … I’m excited to see new innovative ideas on how to maximize use of your capital in this four party arrangement. I’m going to keep a watchful eye on Aberdeen and Hackett Group research as well as Spend Matters in the coming weeks, because I think there is great value to be had in maximizing use of capital and I’m sure Jason is going to dig until he finds it. In the meantime, I’ll probably offer a few more entries on risk management and visibility, which actually bear many similarities to network risk management and visibility at a sufficiently abstract level, but that’s something for the fringe academics to debate.

* All posts prior to 2012 were removed in the Spend Matters site refresh in June, 2023.