Next Level Purchasing Association Podcast

When you encounter situations with lots of constraints and complexities, it becomes quite challenging to figure out the best supplier selection. For these types of situations, some purchasing departments utilize supply chain optimization technology to support their decisions.

As corporate social responsibility becomes more widely discussed, more organizations are asking purchasing departments to increase supplier diversity spend. But supplier diversity programs have unique challenges.

Simplified, spend analysis is the systematic review of historical purchase data. The output of a spend analysis is a summary of purchases by various variables, such as category, supplier, and/or business unit. The primary reason for conducting spend analysis is to identify opportunities for cost savings.

Whether they are happy about it or not, it is becoming more and more common for purchasing professionals to be made responsible for management of the warehouse. Therefore, do not be surprised if warehouse management is added to your list of responsibilities in the near future. To prepare for this trend, we wil explore the similarities between purchasing and warehouse management.

We’ll be exploring best practices in sourcing something that just about every organization purchases and some organizations spend millions of dollars on – office supplies! We'll discuss some of the hidden challenges and secrets to success of office supplies sourcing.

A good contract management process ensures that both the buying organization and the supplier fulfill all of the obligations that they agreed to in signing a contract. It also helps the buying organization achieve all of the benefits it expected to when contracting with a supplier.

Instead of a purchasing department sourcing for a category of goods or services to establish a favorable contract with a supplier, joining a GPO will give that purchasing department access to an existing contract with favorable pricing and terms. Purchasing departments join GPO’s primarily for savings. By combining its spend with that of other companies, a purchasing department gets the buying power and leverage of a much larger organization.

In the late ‘90’s, the field of supply chain technology exploded with new innovations such as eProcurement, reverse auctions, and more. The bursting of the dot-com bubble slowed the pace of innovation but, in 2006, we are seeing the return of innovative technology in the supply chain field as well as the Internet in general. We will explore three emerging supply chain technology innovations: software delivery, community intelligence, and buyer-supplier collaboration.

What do your suppliers think when negotiating with you? We identified several negotiating principles for purchasing managers.