News and Events

Cost Savings, cost savings, cost savings – if we focus on cost savings at the expense (no pun intended 😊) of what is most important to our “customer” then we Fail. Period.  Herein, lies the single biggest difference between Strategic Souring and Category Management – focusing on your “customer’s” Value Drivers.  It’s really not that [...]

I was asked to present at a supply chain conference held by a major university in Chicago and I titled my presentation “Going from Competitive to Collaborative Supply Chain Models” and I was quite surprised by the reaction as I thought this was not such a radical concept. I started my discussion by pointing out [...]

Those of us that are Supply Chain junkies have heard all the stories about Walmart.   Back in the day (and maybe even today) Walmart was notorious for their somewhat aggressive, even brutal Strategic Sourcing tactics.  They could and did “make” many Suppliers wealthy AND they could and did “break” many Suppliers and put them out [...]

You remember the old proverb: For want of a nail, the kingdom was lost?  Similarly, lack of good solid Project Management will doom the best laid Category Management (CM) strategies.  We are often surprised how often Category Managers and teams don’t have the basic competencies of Project Management and then thy wonder why they are [...]

We are in the midst of responding to a RFP to help the prospect build a Strategic Procurement Competency Model.  Actually, this is a client of over 6 years and not a prospect.  And they define strategic procurement with three components – Category Management, Strategic Sourcing and Supplier Relationship Management.  We have no qualms about [...]