Remember when the U.S. was virtually held hostage by OPEC? If they raised the price per barrel, U.S. consumers were stuck with higher prices at the gas pump. And then along came fracking. Boom! The U.S. took the alpha role in energy production. Carbon emissions notwithstanding, this new power freed the U.S. economy from dependance on other oil-producing nations.
Wondering if you have what it takes to be a successful procurement manager? Take a look at these qualities to see if you’re management material. Don’t worry if you’re not strong in all of these areas -- you can find ways to build your skills to improve in areas you consider weak.
A great deal of procurement tasks involve building and maintaining relationships. Not just with your suppliers, but with your co-workers, stakeholders and others you come into contact with through the course of your work.
Supplier management is something that many companies overlook. Customer satisfaction is the natural focus for businesses, but it's not the only relationship you should be cultivating, as it is also critical to have a good relationship with your suppliers. Supplier relationship management is a domain in which all companies can excel because it has far-reaching implications.
A landslide of remote work requests is crashing into businesses, and it’s revealing alarming holes in the way corporations are managing employee mobility. Chances are, remote work is already bogging down your HR department, and if you don’t act soon, your company and employees could be exposed to global tax compliance and employee incentive problems.
Contractor or employee? Outsourced consultant or temporary worker? The job of procuring talent these days is increasingly complex, with so many different categories of workers and navigating many channels to find this talent.
On top of having to make predictive decisions, Talent Acquisition and Talent Procurement teams must also navigate the rules and regulations of non-employees. Determining contractor classification and the cost of non-compliance is a slippery slope that no talent sourcer should have to take on.
Women in the C-suite are slowly gaining momentum, with leaders like Jane Fraser, CEO of Citi, Cathy Engelbert, CEO of Deloitte, and Karen Knudsen, CEO of the American Cancer Society all being named “first female CEOs” within the last few months. But there is still opportunity for other women to level up to the C-suite, especially in procurement.
Think about utility poles, Mohan Tatikonda is saying. He’s a professor of operations management at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business, and for over 30 years his research has focused on how firms can most effectively design, develop, introduce and improve products, services and organizational processes.
And though “think about utility poles” sounds like a strange request, he’s getting ready to talk about the future of work and how people and machines can benefit each other.
Customer and product support has to evolve in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis.
Until recently, remote work has not been common in the procurement field. Nonetheless, the history of remote work started in 1560 when the predecessors to the first corporate offices were built. Nowadays, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of remote work across disciplines, including sourcing and procurement.
Employee volatility across the Fortune 100 is up 8% on average over last year. This means most companies in the Fortune 100 are facing above-average risk of losing key talent.
Just like in spend data classification, the definition of tail spend is subjective. Some organisations classify tail spend at the bottom 20% of spend, while others might set a financial level such as £100,000 or £1 million.
According to CIPS, tail spend “can often be referred to as rogue spend or maverick spend, is usually small value purchases that are conducted by the organisations outside of a contract and often outside of the awareness of the procurement team.”
During the 2006 economic downturn in Puerto Rico, many jobs were lost and people left the island. Fast forward to 2017 when Hurricane Maria made the problem even worse. People left the island in masses; and many didn’t come back. It’s often said that every Puerto Rican knows someone who died and someone who left as a result of the devastation.
Just as we saw in virtually every other industry, the global pandemic forced manufacturers to reevaluate where and how work gets done, accelerating the pace of digital transformation that was already well underway. It also busted one persistent myth: work from home (WFH) is simply not an option for many manufacturing job roles.
In fact, the latest numbers show the success of WFH – a surprise to many industry leaders – has laid the groundwork for an even more interesting discussion. If workers can be distributed successfully, why not manufacturing capacity?
It’s long been acknowledged that both hard and soft skills are needed in most jobs. They are no less crucial within procurement.
While hard skills include the teachable, quantifiable abilities you need to do the job and will be reflected in your qualifications, soft skills are, of course, slightly more difficult to measure. These can include teamwork, communication, conflict resolution and problem-solving abilities.
