Category Archives: Miscellaneous

One Hundred and Sixty Five Years Ago Today …

The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, the very first World’s Fair, opened in Hyde Park in London (England).

Organized by Henry Cole and Prince Albert, it was attended by numerous notable world figures of the time and contained exhibits from Britain, its ‘colonies and dependencies’, and 44 ‘foreign states’ in Europe and the Americas. With over 13,000 exhibits, it was a tremendous undertaking for the time and inspired a series of world fairs that followed (which still continue to this day, with the next world fair being Expo 2017, taking place in Astana, Kazakhstan [as sanctioned by the Bureau International des Expositions, which has served as the international sanctioning body for world’s fairs of the universal, international, and specialized variety since 1928]).

A special building, The Crystal Palace, designed by Joseph Paxton and which took the form of a massive glass house 1851 feet long and 454 feet high, was built specifically to house the show. After the exhibition, the building was rebuilt in an enlarged form on Penge Common, and stood until its destruction by fire in 1936. However, its legacy lived on as the site was used as the Crystal Palace motor racing circuit between 1927 and 1974 and inspired the Crystal Palace Garden Parties between 1971 and 1980.

And over six million people attended the fair. One has to remember that in 1851, the population of Great Britain and Ireland combined was only 29M-ish (and Britain itself only 19M-ish) and the world population was only slightly over 1 Billion. This contributed to a profit of £186,000 (£18,370,000 in 2015), and that surplus funded the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Science Museum, and the National History Museum as well as an educational trust for scholarships and industrial research which still provides funds today.

LOLCat is Anxiously Awaiting Your Garden

While LOLCat appreciates the indoor lawn, now that spring has been with us for a month, LOLCat really wants to enjoy the outdoor garden again.

Also, LOLCat would like to remind you that some of the most famous people in history, ever since Nebuchadnezzar II commissioned the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, have commissioned famous gardens (including Thomas Jefferson, 19th American President), some of the most brilliant scientists have been gardeners (including Ralph Gardener, a famous research chemist), and many of your most beloved celebrities (including Oprah) are avid gardeners. It is said that the founding fathers love of gardening shaped their vision for America, and the British have always been enthralled by gardens (just count the number of famous public and private gardens in the greater London area alone).

Not only does gardening bring a number of expected, and unexpected (mental) health benefits, but it gives you a strong appreciation of the work that goes into raw material (food) production and, in turn, a greater appreciation for the complexity of the supply chain you manage a portion of on a daily basis. Remember, LOLCats are always smarter then they look. 🙂

Per Angusta: Purchasing CRM

Per Angusta is an interesting SaaS company in the Procurement space. While most Procurement companies focus on the Sourcing or Procurement process, or supplier management, Per Angusta focuses on the workflow that ties it all together — a workflow that is typically managed in Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet Hell.

In particular, Per Angusta is a SaaS platform built to manage sourcing pipelines, track savings for organizational validation, and make Procurement’s impact visible to the organization — which, as per Sigi Osagie (the master of Procurement Mojo), is the key to building your Procurement Brand.

One of the unique things about the Solution is that the Sourcing Project Management Tool is not only designed to manage the sourcing workflow, but to integrate with your best-of-breed sourcing and procurement tool either out of the box (and, out of the box, integrates with Rosslyn Analytics, HICX, Market Dojo, and other Per Angusta partners) or through the API that is being released shortly.

The solution contains all of the basic project management capabilities you would expect, as well as a few unexpected ones including, but not limited to, deep configuration capability, a supplier data repository, and even Slack integration. Moreover, the strengths of the solution are exactly what you need — flexible project definition and the ability to track deep negotiation details. The platform can track projects of different expense types, document proposed negotiation strategies, and document the requirements of each stage: need definition, sourcing, negotiation, and signature. This is a very powerful capability as it allows the Procurement team to demonstrate that over 80% of the costs are locked in during the design and sourcing phases, and that very little savings can be obtained if the stakeholder waits until the (end) of negotiations and the contract phase to engage Procurement.

The Per Angusta platform is one that is worth exploring in detail, and for a very in-depth review, you can check out the recent piece over on Spend Matters Pro co-authored by the doctor and the prophet.