Category Archives: humour

Duh! Supply Chain Headlines of the Week

Earlier this week I stumbled upon three headlines in particular that conveyed messages that were completely obvious to me and, hopefully, completely obvious to anyone in the supply management space. They were so obvious that the only way you wouldn’t already be aware of these no-brainers is if you didn’t have a brain! Since I literally found all three in a short time-span of about five minutes, I felt the need to share the cluster to find out if anyone else has had one of these anti-climactic realizations that sometimes the art of short headlines leaves much to be desired.

These are the headlines (which were attached to articles which were better than the headlines, by the way) that made me go Duh!

  • Bad Metrics Can Doom Your CRM Project (CIO)
    Bad Metrics can doom ANY project — sourcing, procurement, ERP — not just CRM!It does have a good point on how weekly indicators that sound meaningful usually aren’t — over measuring can be even worse than under-measuring.
  • Supply chain innovation is important (Purchasing)That’s why this blog is here!
    You have to get leaner and meaner and there are limits to how much you can reduce cost through negotiation, spend analysis and decision optimization if you can’t find fundamentally new ways to take cost out of the supply chain.
  • Investment in Procurement Technology Continues (SC Digest)
    Given that properly applied procurement technology always increases efficiency, decreases (transactional) cost, and makes it easier to stop maverick spending in it’s tracks (which can often eat up 30% of savings, as Bernard Gunther pointed out earlier this week in his post), investment in this technology is going to continue to increase until the market is saturated — especially now that there are a number of low-cost options on the market.

Anyone want to share their favourite Duh! headlines of the week? Maybe we can start our own weekly mini-FARK dedicated to sourcing and procurement! It might even coerce the satirical sourcerer out of his slumber! (It’s been a long time since our last weekly Supply Chain Humor post!)

Are Powerful CEOs the New Illuminati? Are Their CFOs the New Initiates?

Conspiracy theorists have long maintained that a secret society composed of a select few, modern Illuminati, are controlling world affairs through government and corporations. It looks like they were right. As referenced in this recent article on Inside Science, a recent “study says world’s stocks [are] controlled by select few”, as per an analysis of the tangled yarn that comprised the 2007 financial markets in 48 countries which consisted of 24,877 stocks and 106,141 shareholding entities.

More specifically, the study found that the Capital Group Companies, Fidelity Management & Research, Barclays PLC , Franklin Resources, AXA, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Dimensional Fund Advisors, Merrill Lynch & Co., Wellington Management Co., and UBS are the top-ten global power holders with major stakes in 36 of the 48 countries studied. In other words, the study found that a very small number of companies in the US financial sector have significant control over 75% of global markets! And since all of these companies are ultimately controlled by a CEO whose power far exceeds that of the monarchs of old, if that’s not the definition of Illuminati, I don’t know what is!

$600 for a Flaming Laptop? We can do much better than that!

Three years ago, Dell made the news in a big way with their flaming laptops which burst into flames, transformed into flamethrowers, or, if you were really lucky, spontaneously combusted (“Another Dell Laptop Burns” RegHardware.co.uk)! And everyone wanted a piece of the action.

But not everyone had $600+ lying around to get in on the action, and in this economy, even $60 can be hard to come buy for those who want their very own piece of flaming electronics memorabilia. But Walmart was up to the challenge! Their entry: a small, light-weight silver-colored Durabrand DVD (CPSC.gov) player that, when overheated, could burst into flames for a a mere $29! What a steal!