American Bar Association to Fortune 500: Clean Up Your Supply Chain


Today’s guest post is from Dick Locke, President of Global Supply Training Company, author of the classic book on Global Supply Management, and a seasoned expert with international experience in Supply Management (having run global supply chains from around the globe).

The Minneapolis Star Tribune published an article titled “Bar Association Warns Corporations: Clean up supply chains.” The author says that the president of the American Bar Association will be sending a letter to the CEOs of all the Fortune 500 companies. He goes on to say that the letter will ask the CEOs to “commit to ending human-rights abuses in their supply chains.”

Chris Johnson, who heads the American Bar Association’s (ABA) business section’s supply-chain initiative makes some provocative statements in the article:

  • “Regulation is increasing. Litigation is increasing. It’s astounding to me that companies don’t get out ahead of this. It’s a time bomb.”
  • “Companies remain reactive and not pre-emptive in handling possible human-rights abuses in their supply chains.”
  • “Why would you want to wait to have your products found in the rubble along with 1,100 bodies of dead workers?”
That last statement was about the April 2013 collapse of Rana Plaza in Bangladesh. More than 1100 clothing workers died when the multistory factory building collapsed. Investigators found several European and U.S. companies’ products in the wreckage.

This was a tragedy for the workers, their families, and their communities. It is an ongoing embarrassment to the purchasing profession. Some of the companies involved had no idea their product was being produced in a manifestly unsafe building.

 Collapsed Rana Plaza

I believe it’s also a wakeup call. There are signs that the clothing industry is banding together to change their purchasing practices on an industry-wide basis to improve their supplier selection techniques.

The article focuses on human rights violations going on in company supply chains. Those violations can involve coerced labor of adults and children, any kind of labor by children, safety issues, wage and hour violations and a host of other issues. Here are two issues many of you are facing now:

  • Is your company a retailer or manufacturer? Do you sell more than $100 million per year? Do you do business in California? If so, is your company making a public statement on its web site about what it is doing to remove coerced labor from its supply chain? If it isn’t, it’s violating California law.
  • Do you work for a publicly held US company? Do your company report to the SEC about the origin of any tin, tungsten, tantalum or gold in the products you sell? It needs to or it’s in violation of Federal law. If you have any electronics in your products, you have one or more of those metals. That’s the obvious example. Here’s a list of 22 other products that contain the metals.

However, a good Supply Chain Social Responsibility (S)CSR program needs to go beyond just following the law. I was surprised to find that U.S. law allows children as young as 12 to work on farms. Does your company have a cafeteria or food vending machines? If so, you probably have 12 year olds working in your supply chain. And it’s legal. It’s just not ethical.

Social Responsibility goes beyond labor issues. It includes prevention of giving and receiving bribes. It includes treatment of animals. It includes preserving the environment. The last topic applies to every organization that buys paper, for example. That’s just about everyone. Does your paper supplier use sustainable forestry techniques?

Want to learn more about what’s involved and how to develop and execute an (S)CSR program? While I don’t usually plug my own work quite so blatantly, Next Level Purchasing’s “Exemplary Supply Chain Social Responsibility” is the only training course I have found that goes into this topic in great detail. In eight on line training hours, on your own schedule, you will get a thorough and practical understanding of the issues and the solutions. To build on Chris Johnson’s statements (above), it’s much better to be preemptive when there’s a threat of time bombs.

Thanks, Dick!

Best Practice Technology Vendor Selection for True Multi-Nationals

2012

  1. RFX: You’re Asking for the Wrong Information
  2. RFX: You’re Not Asking for the Right Information
  3. RFX: You’re Missing the Most Important Point
  4. Open the Doors for a Truly Successful RFP
  5. Stuck with an ERP? You Do Have Options!

2015 Reprise

  1. RFX: You’re Asking for the Wrong Information
  2. RFX: You’re Not Asking for the Right Information
  3. RFX: You’re Missing the Most Important Point
  4. Open the Doors for a Truly Successful RFP
  5. Stuck with an ERP? You Do Have Options!

All Hail the CPO. Wait, what?

You want to be a CPO. But do you know what are the requirements for the job? Especially when the number of companies with CPO positions is still few and far between? (Recent stats from a CapGemini study found that only 9% of Procurement organizations have a CPO that sits at the C-Suite table. In SI’s view, unless the head of Procurement sits at the C-Suite table, it’s not a real CPO position.)

Chances are you don’t, especially since a search for CPO job descriptions yields few and not all are consistent (since each organization has their own view on what a CPO is and what the CPO needs to do during the first year or so). But more importantly, chances are you don’t know what is required to fulfill both the written, and more importantly, the unwritten requirements of the job.

But you don’t need to be in the dark. the doctor and the maverick, in their latest collaboration, have assembled a typical CPO job description and a multi-part series explaining the written and unwritten requirements, in detail, so that you, an aspiring Procurement professional, know exactly what is required to be a CPO. The first four parts of this series are now online on the new Spend Matters CPO site (in addition to the first parts of the Agenda series and the Lean / Six Sigma series). Check them out! They will be worth your time. (Part I: The Job Description and Part II: Examining the Job Description, Part I, Examining the Job Description, Part II, and Examining the Job Description, Part III.)

Best Practice Vendor Selection for True Multi-Nationals Reprise Part V: Stuck with an ERP? You do have options!

This is a reprise of a series that first ran in 2012. It’s as relevant, and important, today as it was then.

Despite claims to the contrary, you are not stuck being a sap or hearing prophecies from an ethylene-gas inhaling delphi. You do have options. Acquisitions might have some analysts in a tizzy, but you only need to remember one thing. Don’t Panic.

It’s been years since the acquisitions of Ariba & Emptoris.

They were not the only best-of-breed game in town then, and they certainly aren’t the only best-of-breed game in town now. In fact, for many companies, SI would argue that they are not even in the best-of-breed category as the length integration cycles required to integrate them into their acquirer’s platforms slowed down development and now there are only a few module or functions left that, in SI’s opinion, are still best-of-breed. However, there are lots of other options, and these options exist on both sides of the Atlantic.

Best of Breed vendors eat, sleep, and drink supply management

Unlike do-it-all or ERP vendors, best-of-breed supply management vendors are focused entirely on a critical supply management process and, as a result, they tend to be much better at it than do-it-all or ERP vendors, especially supplier enablement, which we all know fuels the e-procurement benefits engine.

Best of Breed on an ERP backbone can offer significant advantages

  • Best of Breed providers often know the strengths and weaknesses of ERP systems they are replacing better than the consulting implementation partners, who care more about if they can weasel their way into long-term strategy consulting than a successful implementation. (For example, there are a couple of vendors with over 100 customer SAP implementations, who know the system way better than a Big 5 consultant on his second implementation.)
  • Best of Breed providers have enabled hundred of thousand of suppliers, maybe more, over the years … in all regions of the world … your 347 suppliers aren’t going to make them flinch (and they will be faster and cost less, because once again, they, or their carefully selected integration partners, have been there, done that … a few hundred thousand times.)
  • Best of Breed provider’s customers are all former ERP e-procurement / consulting implementation customers … that’s right, most of whom have already failed using the ERP/consultant approach, spent the millions, got 7 punch-outs and 11 catalogs implemented … now they spend thousands and get … well, you already know … actual results and benefits.
  • Best of Breed providers have to be better than the ERP or broad portfolio providers, because they can’t fall back on their CRM sales or app server license revenue if they don’t deliver.
  • And because of all of this, Best of Breed providers have way more references than the ERP providers. Those big ERP guys based in Germany have two significant e-procurement references … one they’ve been using for 3 years, and another from a company I never heard of on this side of the Atlantic … I know of one Best of Breed provider who has 19 published case studies, and has only lost one customer in 14 years, and that was after this company was a customer for 9 years, and decided to outsource IT, and the outsourcer, IBM, brought in an ERP to replace all of the internal systems.
  • Best of Breed providers’ SaaS-type offerings and supplier networks eliminate the need for your IT department or external consultants to be involved, so they implement faster and less expensively
  • The most successful Best of Breed providers have service organizations or carefully selected service partners around the globe to assist with implementations and provide stability.
  • Best of Breed providers fill in the gaps where ERP fall short. ERP may try, but it is not all-in-one and they are usually a year or more behind the Best-of-Breeds functionality-wise.
  • Best of Breed works and they have the client stories to prove it. Follow SI’s advice and check their references.
  • Best of Breed will help your SUM (Spend Under Management) soar.

Consider your options carefully. A Best of Breed solution on your ERP backbone might be the best decision you can make.