Category: Career

Posted on

News you can use: 7/15/2015

sn_bigboy_ThomasHawk

Photo: Thomas Hawk, Flickr

  • CEO Pay Has Risen 90 Times Faster Than Average Worker Pay Since The 1970s

    Defenders of outsized executive pay argue CEOs get what they deserve: that their performance justifies the huge outlays. But the paper doesn’t find much evidence for it, at least in the aggregate. Between 1978 and 2014, the stock market rose only about half as much as CEO pay did. And CEO pay has been rising across the board, both at companies that have been doing well and those that haven’t.

    http://www.fastcoexist.com/3048172/ceo-pay-has-risen-90-times-faster-than-average-worker-pay-since-the-1970s?partner=rss

  • Workday is creating a supply chain tool for the healthcare industry

    “Health care providers are dealing with a significant amount of complexity,” said Workday Vice President of Industry Strategy and Alliances John Webb. “New regulations, industry consolidation and a shifting patient relationship are changing the way they manage their organizations. With Workday, health care providers will have the people, financial and supply chain insights they need, all in one system built on a flexible foundation from which they can continually adapt and grow in a dynamic industry.

    http://www.pymnts.com/news/b2b-payments/2015/workday-launches-finance-supply-chain-tool-for-healthcare/

  • 4 Surefire Ways to Grow Your Circle of Influence

    1. Do what you say. Nothing erodes personal credibility faster than a lack of trust. Building trust is fundamental to increasing your circle of influence. If you possess the skill to execute project A and the will to do so ethically, then others’ trust in you will increase. Just be consistent because once you break that trust it’s like taking a piece of paper, wrinkling it up and then trying to flatten it out again — it never actually returns to its original state.

    http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/248220?ctp=BizDev&src=Syndication&msc=Feedly

  • LOGISTICS COSTS ARE UP, BUT SO ARE WAYS TO MANAGE THEM

    But the most prominent reason for rising supply chain management costs, researchers found, was transportation. According to the CSCMP, transportation costs increased by 3.6 percent last year due to larger shipment volumes, the emergence of same-day delivery models and the continuing adoption of eCommerce. These trends are forcing warehouse management strategies to change and have largely led to the adoption of warehouse management Software-as-a-Service solutions.

    http://www.pymnts.com/in-depth/2015/logistics-costs-are-up-but-so-are-ways-to-manage-them/

  • How I Broke Through My Own Mediocrity

    The mediocre entrepreneur doesn’t “Blink” in the Malcolm Gladwell sense. In Gladwell’s book he often talks about people who can form snap correct judgements in two or three seconds. My initial judgement when I meet or even see people is this: I hate you. And then I veer from that to too trusting. Finally, after I bounce back and forth, and through much trial and error, I end up somewhere in the middle. I also tend to drop people I can’t trust very quickly. I think the great entrepreneur can make snap judgements and be very successful with it. But that doesn’t work for most people.

    http://lifehacker.com/how-i-broke-through-my-own-mediocrity-1716887232

  • Small Cloud Providers Serve Supply Chain Management Market

    The SCM market is highly fragmented. The top 10 vendors have about 55% of the market, with the remainder split among 57 vendors. These 57 experienced average annual revenue growth of 9.6%, indicating strong demand for specialized offerings that are competitive with, and sometimes complementary to, the larger providers’ products.

    http://www.ebnonline.com/author.asp?section_id=1084&doc_id=278076

Posted on

News you can use: 7/8/2015

sn_baddata

  • Enterprises Don’t Have Big Data, They Just Have Bad Data

    The truth is, most of them suffer from one of the old adages in computing: garbage in, garbage out. Not only do most of them actually not have Big Data in terms of data complexity or volume, but most of them actually have Crappy Data, and it’s probably hurting their business. According to Experian Data Quality, inaccurate data affects the bottom line of 88 percent of organizations and impacts up to 12 percent of revenues.

    http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/01/enterprises-dont-have-big-data-they-just-have-bad-data/

  • Procter & Gamble’s Futuristic Control Tower Environment

    Another partner for the P&G Business Sphere solution is SAP.  Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, SAP begun talking about their new supply chain control tower solution last year.   Their control tower incorporates the idea of reacting to alerts with prebuilt playbooks that allow an organization to react quickly and with agility to unexpected situations.  (See The New SAP Supply Chain Control Tower for a description of playbooks and their control tower solution stack).

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevebanker/2015/07/01/procter-gambles-futuristic-control-tower-environment/

  • 6 Best Practices for Managing Unhappy Employees

    If the issue stems from something within your company, gather as much information as you can before deciding how to act. But even if it’s a lifestyle factor influencing your employee’s behavior, don’t ignore it just because it comes from outside your four walls. Use it as an opportunity to show them that they’re more than just a name on an HR folder. Offering assistance, whether through a formal employee assistance program or other means, will build their loyalty to your company.

    http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/247595

  • The Hidden Cost of a Summer Slump

    “Satisfied and engaged employees are less likely to abuse the company’s sick policy,” he says. But it’s not enough to just do a head count. Schwarz says managers should compare absenteeism between different teams, departments, locations, and performance levels to determine whether there are more people taking leave during the summer months. Then, he recommends looking to see if one manager has a larger degree of absenteeism than another.

    http://www.fastcompany.com/3048157/the-future-of-work/the-hidden-costs-of-the-summer-slump?partner=rss

  • The Secret To Walt Disney’s Corporate Strategy
    Hint: It is a massive feedback loop…
    sn_disneystrategy
    http://www.fastcodesign.com/3048046/infographic-of-the-day/the-secret-to-walt-disneys-corporate-strategy?partner=rss
Posted on

The future of sourcing automation

Strategic sourcing and its cousin procurement have always been welcoming of innovation and automation.

Anybody with a business degree knows the basics about warehouse procurement and the 40-year-old ability to have a computer system automatically purchase more of a “widget” when inventory is too low.

Then the ability for a system to search against multiple suppliers for the best price of said “widget” was introduced.  We are cooking with gas!

Customers seem to think that this level of computer intelligence and automation is limited to commodities.  It is becoming clear that is not the case.

Contracting

The physical act of papering a deal can be tedious and time consuming.  Evolved sourcing departments have developed templates to ease the process.  As the work becomes more repetitive and less strategic, departments look to have that work performed by third parties or entry level positions.

Those jobs will not be transferred or go offshore in the coming years, they will be completely automated via computer systems.

Don’t believe me?

Did you know that several articles being released by the associated press are written by bots?

A company called Automated Insights created a program called WordSmith that generates simple news stories based on things like sporting events and financial news. The stories are published on Yahoo! and via the Associated Press, among other outlets.

It is only a matter of time before this technology is turned to repeatable contracting events eliminating simple transactions.  Solutions from Seal software are already close to making this happen.

Market Intelligence

Senior level sourcing professionals might take comfort in the higher functions they are performing such as category management and supplier performance. In the coming years this job will become easier.  Bad news is there will be less jobs.

Frequent readers of this blog will notice a reporting trend on IBM’s Watson technology.

Right now Watson is focused on mining health information, social media, and big data.  There will inevitably be a focus on supply chain market conditions.  It has the potential to become a living, breathing Gartner report that changes daily focusing on software, services,  labor pricing, and even cloud pricing (and thus a hybrid of commodity and service).  And if Watson doesn’t do it, somebody else will eventually.

Having a system that is monitoring which suppliers are getting into certain service markets and who is doing well and who isn’t (via formal reports and customer feedback via social media) is very powerful.  There may be well-meaning sourcing professionals who are doing this by hand right now (hello), but it takes days or sometimes weeks (trust me) – with AI, it can be done in minutes.

Will your job go away?  No.  But a company will be able to do so much more with less bodies.

Moving Forward

Even with automation reducing certain kinds of jobs, the good news if you are a sourcing professional is that there is a looming talent crisis.  The key is to have the right skill set…

sn_sourcing_sweetspot

Be thankful it wasn’t a pie chart

Sourcing departments are essentially responsible for risk avoidance and cost reduction/savings. The better teams also provide strategic focus and trending for their customers.

The days of martini lunches with the big box sellers are over.  They are being replaced by analytic dashboards and reverse auctions (maybe we can make serving mint juleps at the auctions a thing). Take a look at the capabilities companies are focusing on:

sn_sourcing_deloitte_figure2

Change is coming (I was going to make a terrible Game of Thrones reference and say “winter is coming” but that sounds so ominous and I am already going with a terminator theme).  Automation, bots, and other AI technology are going to impact the procurement and sourcing industries… for the better.

As platforms become more transferable via Openstack and other open source initiatives (and as software itself becomes a platform),  the view will shift from an intangible/incomparable concept of service into a familiar commodity-like view that can be evaluated and presented like a rising or declining stock asset (with the same dashboards and buying intelligence ).  Sourcing professionals and their customers will finally have the right mix of information to make better decisions and develop true supplier strategies.