Tag: Supplier Relationships

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News You Can Use: 8/22/2018

The Source: Magic quadrant and Negotiation

  • Will vendor rankings replace magic quadrants? HfS Research thinks so

    We’re done, the whole quadrant craze is starting to smell pretty bad and we know the industry is fed up with it. Increasingly, many of these 2×2 matrices are missing several of the market leaders (who refuse to participate) and having them all stacked in the top right just smacks of pay-for-play (even if the analyst has fair intentions). Let’s be honest, noone trusts these matrices and they are harming the entire credibility of the analyst industry. Sure, there are many honest, quality analysts with integrity, but their craft is being soiled by several quacks who are basing their vendor placements purely on vendor briefings, whether they like a particular vendor, and whether some vendors pony up for their research services. There are many “analysts” out there who do not bother to do sufficient customer research and we all suspect who these characters (and their employers) are…

    https://diginomica.com/2018/08/13/will-vendor-rankings-replace-magic-quadrants-hfs-research-thinks-so/

  • Transactions without conflict

    It’s possible to negotiate a substantial contract in a few minutes by email—if both sides care more about forward motion than they care about the last decimal point. Or, to be more honest about it, if they care more about the benefits of the future than they care about the narrative of treating their partner like an opponent.

    In an economy based on connection instead of scarcity, the ease of those connections, the reliability built into them, our confidence that the future will match promises made–all of these benefits dwarf the narcissistic narrative of the deal maker who simply seeks to win today, at all costs.

    https://seths.blog/2018/08/transactions-without-conflict/

  • How Brexit could create a crisis at the Irish border
  • Talking about your team’s success too much in an interview could cost you the job

    “If it kind of comes out in part of your interview where maybe you were part of a team and you’re really only talking about the accomplishments of the team and not necessarily your individual contributions and what they did, I think that’s something that can hold people back,” Salzer, who is a solutions architect at Amazon Web Services, told Business Insider.

    Instead, make it clear that you were a key contributor to your company. Emphasizing your individual accomplishments in a team is a key way to sway hiring managers.

    https://www.businessinsider.com/interview-tips-amazon-jobs-2018-8

  • We need to talk about organizational change management

    We know, for example, that 70 percent of change programs fail to achieve their goals, largely due to employee resistance and lack of management support. We also know that when people are truly invested in change it is 30 percent more likely to stick. While companies have been obsessing about how to use digital to improve their customer-facing businesses, the application of digital tools to promote and accelerate internal change has received far less scrutiny. However, applying new digital tools can make change more meaningful—and durable—both for the individuals who are experiencing it and for those who are implementing it.

    https://diginomica.com/2018/08/16/we-need-to-talk-about-organizational-change-management/

Photo by Josh Blanton on Unsplash

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News You Can Use: 2/15/2017

  • It’s Time to Go Beyond Supplier Management, But Where is That?

    Organizations these days need more than traditional historically focussed spend analytics that tell them, weeks or months after, what was spent, on what, from whom, by whom, from where, to where, and in what quantity. You need to know what is being spent, by whom, on what in real time … and where the dollars are trending towards. Is a new supplier taking all of the spot buy spend, or even worse, spend that is supposed to be on another contract? Are product and services tastes changing? Are market costs changing? The application has to not only be able to keep up, but identify the most pertinent trends and options for dealing with them … it has to have advanced predictive analytics that, at the very least, identifies the most relevant changes (and ranks them by value or statistics or outlier distance from the expected norm), if not offering prescriptive analytics on how to take advantage of changes, minimize losses, or control them in (historically) well understood situations.

    http://sourcinginnovation.com/wordpress/2017/02/03/its-time-to-go-beyond-supplier-management-but-where-is-that/

  • IT and Functional Departments – Finding the Middle Ground

    Procurement also brings market information (suppliers, price points, service levels) that IT may not be as focused on, but that could be critical to the overall solution. IT groups can at times limit themselves to certain suppliers for system or software solutions, but there may be alternate suppliers that easily integrate, or provide enough value to justify the effort required for working with disparate suppliers or systems. Procurement can bring that perspective forward and champion the needs of the business to balance the costs associated with IT change.

    http://sourcinginnovation.com/wordpress/2017/01/23/it-and-functional-departments-finding-the-middle-ground/

  • How Levi’s is radically redefining sustainability

    Levi’s has always been a leader in sustainability. In 1991, it established “terms of engagement” that laid out the brand’s global code of conduct throughout its supply chain. This meant setting standards for worker’s rights, a healthy work environment, and an ethical engagement with the planet. “It wasn’t an easy thing to do,” Dillinger says. “At the time, we were worried that doing this would drive up our own costs and prices.” In fact, what happened was that these practices were quickly adopted by other companies, who used it as a template to write their own rules. “We were actually leading industry toward new standards,” he says.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/3067895/moving-the-needle/levis-is-radically-redefining-sustainability

  • Don’t Be the Kobe Bryant of Your Office

    It doesn’t matter how productive you are if no one enjoys working with you. Steve Nash, a former NBA player that the researchers found to be particularly valuable at making his teams better, was famous for constantly high-fiving his teammates. There’s never been a direct measure of a “high-five to productivity ratio,” but doling out praise and encouragement seems to be indicative of creating a high-quality team culture, which in turn increases performance.

    http://www.thesimpledollar.com/dont-be-the-kobe-bryant-of-your-office/

Photo: Oliver Cole

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News You Can Use: 11/18/2015

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  • Provider Damnation 66: Tier 1 Suppliers

    A contract locks you in until an exit clause is hit, which, in an average contract in an average organization, typically is only invokeable when a supplier fails to deliver a significant portion of the contracted goods after a significant amount of time has passed (and your organization has been stocked out for weeks and lost millions of dollars), the quality gets abysmal and the warranty return rate hits the double digits, they violate a federal safety or import regulation, or they commit a crime — assuming you have a well drafted contract.

    http://sourcinginnovation.com/wordpress/2015/11/05/provider-damnation-66-tier-1-suppliers/

  • Technology is Harming Our Relationships, and We Can Stop It (the paradox of choice)
  • This is how millennials will change management

    Emotional intelligence is the new buzzword among millennial managers. Concepts of self-awareness, self-regulation, and relationship building will be key to millennial-managed workplaces. “Millennials are highly relational,” says Espinoza. While you may hear the old generation of managers say, “I don’t want to be friends with anyone who works for me because one day I might have to fire them,” Espinoza says millennial managers would never take that attitude. This generation of managers will put people and relationships first.

    The blend of work and life for these relationship-oriented millennial managers also means that the relationships they have at work won’t just be considered work relationships, but are likely to extend beyond working hours.

    http://www.fastcompany.com/3052617/the-future-of-work/this-how-millennials-will-change-management

  • If Coupa goes public, will it ruin the company? – YES

    In what many consider to be a controversial article titled The Myth of Ariba, a former executive for the company said the following; “Ariba was a real company with a real product that got swept up in its own hype, with unfortunate consequences,” and that “Ariba was basically a fraud . . . creating [the impression that Ariba was constructing a global marketplace]. . . even though this was seen as being “a rather impossible task.”

    According to the article and related book, they “went through the motions” of building this marketplace because “the stock was the only thing that mattered. A valuable stock gave Ariba currency it could use to buy other companies.” In the end, “Ariba started out very much as a real company, but was actually blindsided by the Internet boom.”

    https://procureinsights.wordpress.com/2015/11/11/if-coupa-goes-public-will-it-ruin-the-company-by-jon-hansen/

  • Is It time to re-evaluate your BYOD policy?

    That said, it may surprise you to find out that a growing number of security experts believe companies should follow the second option. Too many employees are skirting the policies to begin with, so you may be better off forbidding personal devices to connect to the network all together, especially if your industry is highly regulated.

    http://www.cio.com/article/3002687/mobile-security/is-it-time-to-re-evaluate-your-byod-policy.html#tk.rss_all

  • Is the IT offshore industry’s business model illegal?

    There is a “widespread practice in high skilled workplaces,” wrote Morrison, “by which jobs of United States citizens and lawful permanent residents are terminated, often in large groups, and whose work is transferred to contract workers who are present in or brought to the U.S. as employees of firms providing these contract services.” These workers are predominantly on H-1B visas.

    The use of contract workers on temporary visas “is not incidental to the process,” wrote Morrison. “Rather, it is the explicit business model of the contracting companies to staff their contracts with such temporary workers.”

    http://www.cio.com/article/3005260/outsourcing/is-the-it-offshore-industrys-business-model-illegal.html#tk.rss_all