Procurement Archives - Supply Chain Game Changer™

Is Your Supply Chain A Cost Centre or a Value Creator?

It’s Time to Welcome The Supply Chain CEO!

The Supply Chain function within your company has many responsibilities. From planning to negotiating to buying, from moving goods to processing goods, and from managing data to managing inventory. These responsibilities are at the core of making your company run. But is Supply Chain a Cost Centre or a Value Creator?

Yet often the Supply Chain is undervalued. While every function must help your company grow and prosper when the heat is on uninformed Executives can view Supply Chain as merely a Cost Centre. As such there can be unrelenting pressure to continue to cut costs.

Why is Supply Chain often undervalued? And how do you increase the value of Supply Chain in the eyes of your Executives and other functions?

10 Hiring Mistakes in Supply Chain! (Infographic)

Hiring in Supply Chain is, in some ways, tougher than it ever has been with a propensity for hiring mistakes.

With the baby boomer generation entering retirement, and companies placing more strategic emphasis on the function, the war for Supply Chain talent is on.

We put together this infographic based on our experiences in the recruitment marketplace to answer:

What are the most common mistakes that causes hiring managers and HR to lose out?

Supply Chain Collaboration – The New Way to Drive Value!

Create Collaborative Innovation with Suppliers!

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Supply chain collaboration is a hot topic today and no wonder: companies that collaborate effectively across the supply chain have enjoyed dramatic reductions in inventories and costs, together with improvements in speed, service levels, and customer satisfaction.

Supplier chain collaboration itself isn’t new. What’s new is that it’s taken on a much greater urgency and importance.

4 Tips When Buying Shipping and Packaging Supplies in Bulk!

4 Ways Packaging Optimization Can Improve Business Processes!

Does your company supply or ship items to clients? If so, proper packaging is essential to ensure that ordered goods can reach your clients in excellent condition. Or else, you’ll risk losing clients due to poor quality services.

Most companies order shipping and packaging supplies in bulk because they save time and money. It helps streamline business operations, saving you the hassle of making weekly or monthly purchases. Since you won’t have to pause production to wait for packaging materials, your business can continue operating normally.

Building Trust in Your Supply Chain: Effective Vetting Techniques for Reliable Partners!

What is the Best Supplier Vetting Process?

Supply chain management demands more than just operational efficiency; it requires trust.

Establishing reliable partnerships within your supply chain optimizes operations and ensures resilience against potential disruptions. This article delves into practical vetting techniques that enhance trust and reliability with your supply chain partners.

The Digital Supply Chain Journey: Step 4 – Supplier Onboarding!

The Digital Supply Chain Journey: Step 3 – Electronic Connectivity!

The foundations of any Digital Supply Chain is the real time, end-to-end electronic connectivity of every node and aspect of your Supply Chain. Unless your company is entirely self-sufficient this connectivity requires extensive and exhaustive Supplier Onboarding.

And this onboarding is not restricted to the first tier suppliers with whom you have direct contact. You must connect with second, third, and fourth tier suppliers, many of which you will often never have even heard of before.

And that is an enormous challenge, to say the very least.

Is Single Sourcing, or Sole Sourcing, Dead?

10 Vital Supply Chain Lessons from the Coronavirus Pandemic!

The Coronavirus Pandemic has quickly and severely disrupted Supply Chains of every kind around the world. Lockdowns have resulted in the temporary closure of Manufacturing and Distribution facilities and discontinuation of Logistics and transportation modes.

Additionally dramatically higher demand for household supplies (eg. toilet paper) and medical personal protective equipment have resulted in stockouts and shortages.

In many cases the use of single sourcing, or sole sourcing, Procurement strategies has limited the ability for Supply Chains to access alternate sources of supply and more rapidly support higher than normal demand levels.

As we progress through and past the pandemic, is it time for Procurement to adopt parallel Supply Chain strategies, such as dual sourcing, and limit or abandon single sourcing and sole sourcing?

Procurement Don’t go to the Dark Side!

Procurement Outsourcing – Keep your Integrity!

Early in my career I worked in a department that was responsible for the design,testing, sourcing and procurement of packaging materials. It was a great experience and introduction to so many aspects of the Supply Chain.

But one day one of my peers was fired. He was responsible for negotiating with the packaging suppliers. As it turns out he was taking kickbacks. When that was discovered and verified he was summarily dismissed. He went over to the dark side.

I never got the precise details but I don’t believe he could have got more than a few thousand dollars for his illicit efforts. More importantly he got a black mark on his resume, and in his life, that he could never erase.

That was my first lesson on the do’s and don’t of Supplier Relationships.

Raising the Bar: Step Up Your Supply Chain Game by Refining Your Supplier Selection Process!

Featuring Our 12 Best Procurement Articles!

Supply chain management encompasses an extensive range of tasks, systems, and processes that come together to facilitate the optimum flow of materials, goods, and services from the source to the end consumer.

Despite the technological advancements of the past decades which have brought automation and digitalization to the table, ensuring the efficiency and smooth functioning of supply chains has become more difficult than ever due to their increasing complexity and the ongoing transformations taking place across all sectors and markets.

Strategies for Improving Supplier Relationship Management (SRM)!

Strategic Supplier Relationship Management – Do’s and Don’ts

Strategies for improving Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) are the hallmark of the Modern Procurement Function.

In this article we are providing our list of 10 strategies for effective Supplier Relationship Management and overcoming Supplier management challenges.

Report Card: Most Executives Think Procurement Isn’t Strategic Enough!

Could the CPO Be Replaced by the Chief Value Officer?

As we’ve chronicled on the Argentus Blog, it’s no secret that the world of Procurement is changing and fast. With automation, big data and burgeoning AI systems removing more and more of the profession’s “tactical” or “clerical” tasks, the Procurement report card is that companies are calling on their Procurement teams to be more strategic, more nimble, and more innovative.

They’re expecting their Procurement functions to deliver not just bottom-line cost-savings, but other sorts of value, adding to organizations’ overall competitiveness.

Procurement, you’ve come a long way, baby!

But a new survey of 200 C-Suite executives from a variety of industries and functions presents a rather dispiriting picture of the Procurement function today – or at least how it’s perceived.

The 3 Pillars of Digital Procurement!

Procurement Bots – Transformer or Destroyer?

Procurement professionals have the same question looming over their head on a daily basis about Digital Procurement:

“How do you plan on dealing with digitalization?”

Are We Facing the End of Supply Chain Management?

Imagining the Supply Chain of the Future!

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A new article in Harvard Business Review has been generating some automation-related controversy in the Supply Chain Community, as well as lots of buzz and interesting conversation. Naturally, we want to weigh in and the end of Supply Chain Management.

Titled, “The Death of Supply Chain Management,” the article discusses the way that automation, AI and big data are transforming the industry.

It raises the alarm that the function will soon cease to exist, only to – as these “X is dead“ articles often end up doing – assert that it will still exist, just in a very different form.

Our 2018 Top 10 List!

It’s been a tremendous start to our second year at Supply Chain Game Changer. Our goal has always been to share experiences and expertise, including our 2018 Top 10 list. In the first half of 2018 our readership continued to grow substantially over our first year, 2017. And we were selected as one of the Top 25 Procurement blogs in the world.

In 2018 we added video content and introduced our “Seasoned Leadership in Action” Interview series. For the purpose of this Top 10 List we have excluded all “Seasoned Leadership in Action” articles as we are not trying to promote a popularity contest amongst individuals. That being said the response to the Interview series has been absolutely outstanding.

We also continued to add more and more Guest posts provided by industry leaders. We have 17 new Guest contributors so far in 2018 on top of the outstanding roster of contributors who started with us in 2017.

As we end the first 6 months of 2018 we wanted to publish our Top 10 List, so far.

Thank you for your tremendous, ongoing support. If you haven’t subscribed yet please sign up! Subscribe Here!

So here is our 1st Top 10 List of 2018…

Procurement Experiences and Trends!

What is Virtual Procurement and Why Should You Care?

Where is procurement, outsourcing, sourcing, supply chain, and purchasing going? What is happening in the marketplace? What are companies thinking at the executive level and what type of actions are they taking?

First off, we will outline a few of our observations about what we are seeing first hand. Secondarily, we will include information from other procurement professionals and procurement firms about their experiences, what they forecast, and what they are seeing.