Category Archives: About us

Sourcing Innovation Welcomes Back Next Level Purchasing!

Sourcing Innovation is thrilled to welcome back Next Level Purchasing (NLP) as a lead sponsor. Next Level Purchasing, which has been offering on-line purchasing training since 2001, and purchasing / supply management certifications since 2004, is one of the few companies that shares SI’s passion for the continued education of Supply Management Professionals everywhere and that’s why it’s great to see NLP back on SI.

Plus, it’s SPSM (Senior Professional in Supply Management) certification is a groundbreaking offering in the Supply Management space. While the original SPSM certification, launched nine years ago, is fairly basic by today’s standards, it still defines the baseline skill set required by every Supply Management professional, a skill set that is not taught in most business programs and a skill set that didn’t even exist in the curriculums of the big Purchasing Associations, including the ISM, until five years ago (as the ISM did not launch it’s CPSM certification until 2008, four years after NLP introduced the SPSM)! Furthermore, since then, Next Level Purchasing, which recognizes that the Supply Management function has been in continuous change over the last two decades, has launched the SPSM2 and SPSM3 certifications (which are still unmatched in the big associations) which are designed to help a Supply Management Professional advance in her knowledge, skill sets, and career once she has mastered the basics. (And even though the SPSM3 was just launched, they are already in the early planning phases for the SPSM4 and when the need is there, they will be ready.)

Today is a great day to be welcoming back Next Level Purchasing as a lead sponsor. Today, Next Level Purchasing launches its 3rd annual salary survey. The survey, which is sponsored by Sourcing Innovation and which can be downloaded for free on Next Level Purchasing’s website, contains a lot of useful data on salaries by continent, education, years of experience, and certification for everyone in the purchasing profession. Some key findings include:

  • Managers in North America make almost 30% more than Buyers,
  • Purchasing Professionals with Bachelor’s or Master’s Degrees make, on average, 45% more than those with an Associate’s Degree or less, and
  • Purchasing Professionals WITH a certification make $12,250 more than those without a certification, and Purchasing Professionals with a SPSM certification make $15,549 than those without a certification!

In other words, when SI told you to train thyself because it would be worth it, if you train thyself (and get certified), you’re adding, on average, another $1,000 a month to your salary! (Considering that the basic SPSM Certification is only $1,149, this is definitely worth your time!)

To download the Free Salary Survey, log into the Next Level Purchasing Association (NLPA) member’s area and download the report from the What’s New tab. (Membership is free for all Supply Management professionals, so sign up if you are not a member!)

Plus, this year Next Level Purchasing, always looking to add to their educational offerings, launches the first Next Level Purchasing Association Conference. Being held this September, this conference, which will feature keynotes by leading analysts (including Andrew Bartolini of Ardent Partners and CPO Rising and Chris Provines of Value Vantage Partners and ChrisProvines.com), will be centered around a number of workshops designed to increase your Supply Management skills. Instead of the same-old same-old conference where you sit around all day listening to the same people speak over and over, this conference will focus on teaching you, which should put it on your short list as not many conferences these days seem to have that objective.*

Welcome back Next Level Purchasing!

That’s why you don’t find the doctor at many conferences these days!

It’s My Blog

This ain’t a blog for the neutral minded
No security blanket for the media blinded
And I ain’t gonna be just a drop in the cloud
You’re gonna hear my view when I type it out loud

It’s my blog
It’s now or never
It ain’t gonna last forever
So I’m gonna cut through the online fog

(It’s My Blog)
My views are like an open highway
Like Frankie said, “I did it my way”
I’m just gonna cut through the online fog
‘Cause it’s my blog

To the visionaries who stand their ground
For all the lone wolfs who never back down
Tomorrow will be harder, make no mistake
No more getting lucky, gotta make your own break

It’s my blog
It’s now or never
It ain’t gonna last forever
So I’m gonna cut through the online fog

(It’s My Blog)
My views are like an open highway
Like Frankie said, “I did it my way”
I’m just gonna cut through the online fog
‘Cause it’s my blog

It’s gonna stand firm
When they’re calling it out
It wont’ bend, won’t break
It won’t back down

It’s my blog
It’s now or never
It ain’t gonna last forever
So I’m gonna cut through the online fog

(It’s My Blog)
My views are like an open highway
Like Frankie said, “I did it my way”
I’m just gonna cut through the online fog
‘Cause it’s my blog

So, You Want Your Story on SI?

So what’s the first thing you do?

Send a press release, right?

WRONG!

PR Types take note. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. I don’t give a rat-on-a-stick for your bull-crap press release. If you took 30 seconds to skim the detailed FAQ you’d know that not only does SI NOT post press releases, any request to publish such will just get your e-mail address black-listed. And if you bothered to skim a few of the about blog posts, you’d know that when it comes to press releases, SI DOES NOT CARE.

SI does not care that you just stole your competitor’s CPO, that you signed three new deals, that your Senior Director just published a glam piece in the local newspaper, or that you released version 8.07.05, which, on first glance, is indistinguishable from 8.07.04.

SI is not a wire service. It’s not TMZ. And the doctor is not a media whore. SI is not about how many hogwash* posts it can publish how fast, or even about who said what when. And the continual reluctance of many PR professionals to grasp this fact is one of the biggest reasons the doctor has a Problem with PR and, most days, wants everyone and their dog, including you, to Fire Your PR Firm.

In a nutshell, SI is an educational and technology focussed blog. And where your company is concerned, SI is only concerned about the solution that you offer, what it can do for Supply Management professionals and organizations, and how you can help raise the level of understanding and awareness about Supply Management issues and best practices. Because, in the end, that’s what my educated, experienced, intelligent, dedicated, hard-working, career-focussed readers care about. Like everyone else in today’s difficult economy, SI’s readers are overworked, underpaid, and don’t have the time to waste on gibberish. And while it may be somewhat interesting to a few readers that your competitor’s former CPO now works for you, that’s not a press release, that’s a tweet.

And now that getting only 20 press releases that are utterly irrelevant to SI and its readers is a good day, the surest way to get your e-mail automatically redirected to the trash bin is to send SI a press release. the doctor won’t read it, and if it doesn’t get redirected straight to the spam filter, he will delete it.

So, if you want your story on SI, and it’s one that fits, all you have to do is send a short e-mail saying who you are, what you do, and how you think it benefits Supply Management professionals. That gets the doctor‘s attention and even if he doesn’t agree, he will respond, and typically give you an angle that he feels would work. And, typically, he will respond very quickly. In addition, if you offer a demo, he will look at your solution and, in all likelihood, blog about it. He’s never refused a demo (except when asked to sign an NDA, but don’t open that can of worms, it makes him more ballistic than an onslaught of totally irrelevant press releases), and he’s never failed to write a fair and balanced review when the demo was open and honest. (If you don’t believe him, simply review every vendor post.)

the doctor would like to apologize to his long-time readers on having to rant about this subject yet again, but it seems that not everyone is as intelligent, considerate, and well-endowed as they are.

*the doctor‘s father is from Hogtown, so you can be damn sure the doctor knows hogwash when he sees it! It’s in his blood!

One Million, Nine Hundred Thousand, Six Hundred and Sixteen

One Million, Nine Hundred Thousand, Six Hundred and Sixteen words later (including the words in this post), or Three Thousand Two Hundred, and Fifty Five posts later (which does not count well over a hundred guest posts on other blogs) and Sourcing Innovation (SI) officially turns six. Although still not an extraordinarily long time in net-time, it is exceptionally significant in blog-time when the majority (in the 60% to 80% range) of blogs are abandoned within a month and a study of the top one hundred blogs in Technorati a few years back found the average life of an active blog less than three years!

Growth has continued, and as per last week’s post, SI is trending well above 125,000 visits a month, and the current trend indicates that SI is quickly closing on the 2,000,000 visits a year mark. (the doctor fibbed a little in last Sunday’s post when he said the graph was indicative of an average week. An average week actually has a few spikes in it these days, which pushes traffic close to, or over, 40,000 visits a week on average, as in the graph below.) And its reach on the search engines, and Google in particular, is still outstanding with almost 22% of visits coming from Google alone! (This means that traffic will continue to grow year over year. Why? The best SEO you can get is original content — and at almost 2 Million Words, SI is some of the best content there is!)

So stick around. SI is 24/7/365 and the best there is at Xemplification. Your Supply Chain will thank you. After all, it won’t be long before SI is legendary in the blog space!


60,162 visits in a week

Are the Traffic Ranking Websites The New SEO Scams?

As regular readers of this blog will know, back in 2009, SI briefly claimed the top spot on the traffic ranking engines during the summer (see this post). Before then, it was in the number two position for quite some time, and, according to these traffic ranking sites, remained strong in the number two position until about last summer. Then, about the same time that most of the major ranking engines starting introducing premium accounts and services, it started falling — rapidly — even though traffic has been holding steady, and often increasing 2% to 3% month over month, for the past year.

According to these respected traffic ranking sites, which used to at least be directionally accurate, it now gets between 1,000 and 6,000 visits per month. Are you fracking kidding me? On average, SI gets between 4,300 and 5,000 visits per day, which averages out to between 30,000 and 35,000 visits per week, and between 125,000 and 150,000 visits per month (which translates to somewhere between 1.5 and 1.8 Million visits per year). Not Perez Hilton traffic by any stretch of the imagination, but still quite respectable in this space!

Here’s a snapshot of traffic that I took a few days ago using the built in statistics tool in the GoDaddy QuickBlog hosting service. Between May 22, 2012 and May 29, 2012, SI received between 3,500 and 5,500 visits each day and over 36,000 visits in that week.

SI Traffic for May 22 to May 29, 2012

However, if I pay for premium membership, most of the traffic ranking sites will allow me to install (updated / more accurate) traffic monitoring capabilities (which translates into custom javascript / image loads) that will allow the sites to track my traffic more accurately (and do what GoDaddy and Google do for free). I don’t know about you, but if this isn’t an SEO scam legitimized, I don’t know what is. (Short story, I’m miffed, not giving them a dime and they can all go to heck!)

Has anyone had similar experiences with these sites over the past year?