In my last post, 9 Ways to Fight a Supplier Price Increase, I listed approaches to handling a supplier price increase. These involved pushing back.  These days, commodity prices may be at the heart of increases. They can be volatile and unpredictable and offer little room for black and white approaches. Besides using hedging, a [...]

1/3/2012 11:26:06 AM

Back in the day when I was running New England Suppliers Institute, a regional non-profit industry organization that worked to improve performance by improving the customer supplier relationship via lean enterprise, supplier development, education, and networking, one of our board members was the procurement manager at a semiconductor equipment manufacturer. He used to give an excellent and very [...]

12/21/2011 9:10:41 AM

Smaller companies often do not believe that they can do much about evaluating and managing supplier performance. The oft-repeated phrase is, “We can’t because we’re small.” However, I’ve found the reverse is true in many cases: We can because we’re small. Smaller firms have an ability to be agile and move quickly, unimpeded by the [...]

1/10/2011 10:03:37 AM

One of the guiding principles in continuous improvement methodologies such as lean enterprise and total quality management is employee involvement: those who do the work know it best and will be able to make improvements. In other words, management is not close enough to the work to understand them enought to improve work processes. Employee involvement in continuous [...]

1/7/2011 8:15:45 AM

Over on Spend Matters, Jason Busch just wrote two articles, Calculating the Supplier Performance Management ROI Equation Part 1 and Part 2. These articles, which are based largely on my wiki paper, Improve Supplier Performance: Iasta Supplier Performance Management Wiki Paper, address the issue of the ROI for supplier performance management (SPM), a seemingly illusive issue for many companies [...]

12/1/2010 9:37:53 AM

It’s been proven that supply chain risk events can cause a company’s stock to tank and company to lose market value. Now enter the new supply chain risk market makers: the channel checkers. These are the analysts who follow large manufacturing firms’ supply and demand and make a living out of predicting whether production plans [...]

11/24/2010 7:47:47 AM

Supply chain risk management (SCRM) is the hot topic at conferences, the blogosphere, and in many supply management circles. Supply risk experts, pundits and wannabes are shouting supply risk warnings from every rooftop, inundating us with webinars, talks, and articles, a veritable group of naysayers predicting the end of the world. Yet, it seems that [...]

11/12/2010 7:41:03 PM

I couldn’t resist making a few comments about the new show on NBC, “Outsourced” which aired last week. For those of you who haven’t heard of it or seen it, the show is about a call center in the U.S. being outsourced to India. If you think about it, do you know of any Americans [...]

9/27/2010 2:41:42 PM

A tip of the hat to Benjamin Benulis at Silicon Laboratories in Austin, TX for alerting me to two funny supply chain videos.  Well, they would be even funnier if it weren’t so painfully true. Here are the links:

I want my widgets now

Where are the widgets I ordered?

What strikes me about these two videos [...]

8/27/2010 6:40:52 AM

There’s a new article on the eSourcingwiki, Understanding and Improving Supplier Performance. The wiki paper is also available for download on this page. It’s a good overview of the benefits and process of supplier performance management. If you haven’t read my book yet, this article provides an overview of some of the key concepts in it. In general the [...]

8/26/2010 8:20:56 AM