The Coupa Top 5: Cross-Functional Creativity
What does it take to be a leader in procurement, or in any other area for that matter? For starters, an open mind and a willingness to learn from others in the field and in other disciplines. This week, we learn from the best.
The Most Important Skills for Future Procurement Chiefs – Procurement Leaders
Our friends over at Procurement Leaders are launching a year-long initiative, I Am A Procurement Leader to showcase what it takes to become a leading CPO. They’re actively soliciting procurement leaders to contribute. We’re looking forward to following along.
Three Customer Service Lessons Procurement Can Learn from Uber – Supply Management
Uber is stealing business from taxis and winning lots of fans, including Chris Sawchuk from The Hackett Group. Speaking at the Procurious Big Ideas Summit, he cited setting clear expectations, transparent pricing and instant feedback as core skills procurement needs to apply to its internal customers.
Why Capital Expenditures Need More CFO Attention – McKinsey Insights
The process to develop and manage small capital projects is often left to project owners in operations and engineering. Only when budgets get squeezed does finance step in to apply their brand of rigor. McKinsey makes the case for a rigorous, multi-disciplinary approach to capital spending for projects of any size, in good times and in bad.
Five Steps to a Successful Procurement Brand Strategy – SIG
Brand ambassadors? Value proposition? Building excitement? That sounds like marketing speak, and it’s coming from the mouth of Tim Cronin, VP and CPO of Guidewell. It’s not enough to create value, you also have to get people on board and communicate value. It’s time to take a few pages from marketing’s playbook, he says.
Coming Up With the Big Idea in Procurement: Lessons from Rio Tinto CFO Chris Lynch – Spend Matters
When faced with a monopoly supplier, you can either accept that you have no negotiating leverage or get creative. Chris Lynch did the latter, modeling a virtual competitor to show that cost savings were possible. This brought the recalcitrant supplier to the negotiating table, proving not only is creativity possible in finance and procurement, it also pays.
