Tag: Sourcing Software

Posted on

News You Can Use: 7/5/2017

  • Five building blocks of a data-driven culture

    A single source of truth is a central, controlled and “blessed” source of data from which the whole company can draw. It is the master data. When you don’t have such data and staff can pull down seemingly the same metrics from different systems, inevitably those systems will produce different numbers. Then the arguments ensue. You get into a he-said-she-said scenario, each player drawing and defending their position with their version of the “truth.” Or (and more pernicious), some teams may unknowingly use stale, low-quality or otherwise incorrect data or metrics and make bad decisions, when they could have used a better source.

    Also:

    HiPPO, “highest paid person’s opinion,” a term coined by Avinash Kaushik, is the antithesis of data-drivenness. You all know them. They’re the expert with decades of experience. They don’t care what the data says, especially when it disagrees with their preconceived notions, and they are going to stick to their plan because they know best. And, besides, they’re the boss.

    https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/23/five-building-blocks-of-a-data-driven-culture/?ncid=rss

  • A Higher Minimum Wage Is Not Doing The Bad Things Critics Said It Would Do

    Contrary to the simple supply-and-demand theory, higher minimum wages, Allegretto says, may end up saving companies money in the long run. “We know that turnover decreases when you increase minimum wages,” she says. “If companies invest more in their workers, the workers are going to be more satisfied. In industries like the restaurant industry, where the turnover rate is sometimes above 100% in a year, that’s a lot of money to spend on recruiting and training and re-recruiting constantly,” Allegretto says.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/40434565/a-higher-minimum-wage-is-not-doing-the-bad-things-critics-said-it-would-do

  • Goal Setting Is a Hamster Wheel. Learn to Set Systems Instead
  • What Makes a Good UX? Part III “Mission Control Dashboards”

    You see, whereas static first generation dashboards give you useless (and I mean useless) reports (which, at best, show a stoplight indicator with no description or backup data that lulls you in to a false sense of complacency or urgency), a modern mission control dashboard replaces those static widgets with modern fully enabled GUI widgets that allow users to drill down, initiate, and execute relevant actions such as data retrieval, workflow kick-off, or collaborative corrective actions. They can embed “apps” and “portlets” and allow a user to get what they need, and where they need, in 3-clicks, without missing anything important. They are the customizeable interactive views that applications have been missing. But, again, this is only the case for truly modern dashboards. First generation dashboards still belong in the dung-heap. For a truly deep dive into what these are, what they can do, and how they are used, check out the Pro piece [membership required].

    http://sourcinginnovation.com/wordpress/2017/06/21/what-makes-a-good-ux-part-iii-mission-control-dashboards/

  • There’s a war brewing in Japan, and the banks should pay attention

    Now there is a similar war brewing in Japan. This time it is for mobile P2P payments. A few players are vying to become the Japanese equivalent of Venmo, a company founded eight years ago in the United States and now owned by PayPal. The local equivalents are Anypay, Kyash, LINE Pay and, to a certain extent, Yoropay. What makes this war particularly interesting is how similar it is to the news app war. So much so that Anypay was even founded by the former CEO of Gunosy, Shinji Kimura.

    https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/27/theres-a-war-brewing-in-japan-and-the-banks-should-pay-attention/?ncid=rss

Photo: Alain Pham

Posted on

News You Can Use: 11/4/2015

sn_terminal_Jordan Sanchez

  • Millennials: Death to the Cubicle!
    Open floor plans are not the answer, having worked in open spaces and cube farms – neither are good.  It is about the culture of the work place.  If the company has their people on the phone all day, you need enclosed places.  If you are developers that need to collaborate (and spent large portions of the day in quiet), open floor plans work nicely.  

    Millennials have grown up understanding that work is an activity, not something that happens in any predetermined time or space. Accordingly, they insist on having the freedom to choose where and when they work, and they want to be measured on performance — not face time or office politics. So how does that change the way our workplaces and workflows are designed?

    http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/252164

  • Federal IT outsourcing spend alarmingly poorly managed

    The GAO analyzed agency policies, procurement and contracting data, and interviewed agency and contractor officials. While leading companies strategically manage about 90 percent of the IT procurement spending, these government agencies strategically managed just a fraction of that. The U.S. Navy, for example, which spent $3.3 billion on IT services in 2013, awarded just 10 percent of that work via strategically managed outsourcing contracts, according to the GAO. The U.S. Air Force strategically managed 17 percent of its $1.4 million IT services spend, the U.S. Army did so with 27 percent of its $3.5 billion spend, and NASA did so with 35 percent of its smaller $855 million IT outsourcing investment. DHS was the best performer, sourcing 44 percent of its $2.2 billion IT procurement budget in strategic deals.

    http://www.cio.com/article/2999467/outsourcing/federal-it-outsourcing-spend-alarmingly-poorly-managed.html

  • 11 Tweaks to Your Daily Routine Will Make Your Day More Productive
    Listicles… there are some solid points in this post once you get around the trash:

    “Eating a frog” is the greatest antidote to procrastination, and the most productive people know the importance of biting into this delicacy first thing in the morning. In other words, spend your morning on something that requires a high level of concentration that you don’t want to do, and you’ll get it done in short order. Make a habit of eating three frogs before you check your e-mail because e-mail is a major distraction that enables procrastination and wastes precious mental energy.

    http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/251989

  • Software vendors – fear and loathing

    Why? Because the most successful software firms are masters at high-pressure, bullying sales tactics. Take Oracle. The company specializes in trying to convince potential new customers that its license terms and model are harmless and easy to use.

    Once the customer licenses the product, however, Oracle takes a new tack. The company launches software audits and then argues that there are license restrictions it did not talk about during the sales process but that the customer has now breached.

    How do Oracle and other vendors get away with these tactics? Path dependency. Software vendors know that once a large company has implemented an enterprise-wide or otherwise significant software tool it is hard to switch.

    http://www.cio.com/article/2997879/enterprise-software/software-vendors-fear-and-loathing.html#tk.rss_all

  • The Six Strategic Sourcing Samurai

    So who are these six strategic sourcing samurai? They are the six remaining companies that took the time and effort to not only research and build a solution, but take it to market and wait while the market caught up with the vision that a few pioneers had fifteen years ago — a vision of true best-cost global sourcing from a total cost of ownership (and, more recently, from a total value management) perspective.

    http://sourcinginnovation.com/wordpress/2015/10/30/the-six-strategic-sourcing-samurai/

  • 39% of L.A. millennials ‘chronically stressed’ about money, survey finds

    A new survey by Bank of America and USA Today found that L.A. millennials ages 18 to 34 say they have a clear understanding of their financial situation and 44% are prepared for a rainy day, with three months of living expenses saved up.

    But 75% say they worry about their finances “often” or at least “sometimes,” with 39% saying they are “chronically stressed” about money.

    http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-millennials-money-20151022-htmlstory.html

  • Are US tech giants harming national security by partnering with China’s firms?

    A report made public this week from a security firm with longstanding ties to the Defense Department, the Defense Group Inc., said IBM’s partnerships in China, which are part of a global initiative that the company calls Open Power, are already damaging US national security. “IBM is endangering the national and economic security of the United States, risking the cybersecurity of their customers globally, and undermining decades of US nonproliferation policies regarding high-performance ..

    http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/defence/are-us-tech-giants-harming-national-security-by-partnering-with-chinas-firms/articleshow/49606797.cms

Posted on

The Supply Chain: 4/1/2015

sn_SupplyChainManagement_o2

  • Supply Chain News: Strategic Sourcing Software Enabling Companies to Continue to Raise the Bar on Capabilities, Gartner Says
    http://www.scdigest.com/ONTARGET/15-03-26-1.PHP?cid=9138&ctype=content
  • Dunkin Donuts saves $114 million thanks to SCM cooperative

    Formed following the successful merger of five different operating companies in 2012, NDCP opened its corporate office in metro Atlanta in August 2013 as a more geographically central location to support customer expansion plans and access best-in-class supply chain resources. Leveraging more than 30 years of proven expertise in sourcing, purchasing and distribution, the organisation is passionate about delivering the best service and products at the lowest sustainable price to members.

    http://www.supplychaindigital.com/supplychainmanagement/3889/Dunkin-Donuts-saves-114-million-thanks-to-SCM-cooperative

  • Resetting supplier relationships should be top of the board agenda

    Procurement has often been viewed as the poor relation when it comes to business strategy, but there is clear evidence that corporate reputation and customer satisfaction can be directly affected by poor or non-strategic purchasing decisions. For example, an organisation we have worked with took a strategic decision never to charge a customer for speaking to the customer service department, only to discover some months later that one of its outsourced call centre providers was still using premium rate numbers. Clearly no one had told the procurement department about the strategic decision, let alone involved them in formulating the strategy in the first place. Being more joined up can only be good for business

    http://www.supplymanagement.com/blog/2015/03/resetting-supplier-relationships-should-be-top-of-the-board-agenda

  • Procurement professionals split on how to tackle maverick spend

    Almost one third (31 per cent) of respondents from public and private sectors said control of indirect spend should be handed to the procurement function to solve the problem, even though indirect costs appear to be the shared responsibility of a number of different departments within the respondent organisations: procurement (63 per cent), senior department heads (42 per cent), finance (39 per cent) and operational staff (25 per cent).

    http://www.supplymanagement.com/news/2015/procurement-professionals-split-on-how-to-tackle-maverick-spend