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Supply Chain Tools: Index-linked Pricing
One of the best tools to share price risks between buyers and suppliers is index-linked pricing. Most procurement professionals have heard of and used commodity indices to tie pricing to the wider market, but in short they are a third-party tracking tool for commodity...
Are Supply Chain Rebates Evil?
I first encountered supply chain rebates a few years into my supply chain career, and confess they baffled me. How could a savings mechanism where a supplier cut their customer a check retroactively ever be sustainable? Yet one of my suppliers was using them...
How to Become a Corporate Vice President
All my career I wanted to be a Vice President. Everything I did professionally drove toward that goal, including: Lateral moves from engineering to supply chain (which also had a bunch of other factors I won’t go into here) Earning a technical master’s degree, two...
Why is Supply Chain Management Important?
Why is Supply Chain Management important? I stumbled across this question recently, and it got my wheels turning on why my chosen profession matters. While people I talk to now generally know what supply chain teams do (we get you the proverbial or literal toilet...
What makes a Utility Supply Chain unique?
Supply Chains in different industries have a lot in common – including price sensitivity, negotiations, the importance of resiliency, warehouse space issues (always either too much or too little), and the typical process of bid to purchase order to receipt. However,...
Building Your Dream Procurement Team: Roles, Responsibilities, and Staffing Levels
We’ve been talking about supply chain structure and reporting chains recently, so let’s chat a little about front-line procurement roles. Today we’ll talk about role descriptions, and also talk about staffing levels needed when building/rebuilding/reevaluating a team....
Supply Chain Structure: One Central Team or Decentralized Services?
Recently we’ve been talking about which C-suite role a supply chain team reports to, both the more common executive leaders and the less common ones. So today we’re going to talk a bit about the structure of a supply chain team in an organization. In particular, we’ll...
Demystifying Supply Chain: The Essential Roles of Procurement, Logistics & Warehousing
What is the difference between “supply chain” and “procurement”? One of my favorite silver linings after COVID is that when people ask me what I do, I now answer “Supply chain” and they reply, “You’re the people who get us toilet paper!” Or sometimes I can see them...
C-Suite Smackdown Continued: Who Else Could Lead Your Supply Chain?
Continuing our conversation from last week, let’s talk about some of the less common spots a supply chain team can fit into an org chart. Last week we looked at having the supply chain leader report to the CEO, CFO, COO, CRO, and CAO. This week, let’s look at the...
C-Suite Smackdown: Where Should Your Supply Chain Leader Report?
An experienced executive and mentor of mine once told me, “Every org chart fixes some problems and creates others.” I saw this happen firsthand when I was the leader of a 150-person team, with members from multiple businesses within a conglomerate company. The...
Contracts in Focus: Understanding Contracts as Instruments of Purpose
This morning as I checked my inbox, I had a survey waiting for me from World Commerce and Contracting. The survey sparked me because it asked a set of questions about the purposes of contracts, and I found my answers highly varied across the questions. I will note...
Guide to Dubai for the Female Professional
Before I went to Dubai on a business trip last week, I went hunting for a “woman professional’s guide to Dubai” and turned up short. So after networking with a friend of a friend who had been to Dubai before the pandemic and gathering my own data, I decided to write...
Stuck in Supplier Diversity Limbo? Get Real Results
Many supply chain teams have supplier diversity initiatives, targets, and goals. These are typically not even new programs, as many of them have been on the agenda for ten, thirty, or even fifty years. They have survived multiple supply chain leaders, multiple CEOs,...
Hidden Tax Trap: How Shipping Costs Are Costing Your Business Money
Sometimes in the supply chain we need quick wins. One potential source of a quick win is in paying sales taxes on shipments. While this may seem to be the responsibility of the tax department, how the supply chain structures agreements and invoices has a big impact on...
Navigating Supply Chain Worries: Turn Concerns into Action
The award for “most eye-catching headline of the week” in my news feed goes to sponsored content from GS1. The headline was “Stop doom-scrolling your supply chain” and (as sponsored content) is advocating for increasing visibility tools. The article cites three main...
Robots vs. Relationships: Will AI Wipe Out Supply Chain Jobs?
A Visual Capitalist article on the impact of artificial intelligence on various job categories wandered across my news feed a couple weeks ago, and I’ve been pondering it ever since. Following the data trail, this data was a visualization of a white paper by the World...
Mastering the Supply Chain Triad: Delivering Excellence in Delivery, Savings, and Efficiency
“You can have it fast, you can have it good, you can have it cheap: pick two” is a very old phrase for any purchase, and is a central tenet of supply chain work. While in a previous supply chain leadership role, my company had a major shake-up in senior leadership. As...
The Power of Brevity: Crafting Impactful Executive Summaries for Supply Chain Success
One of my clients had a communication problem. It wasn’t the usual “not enough” problem that so often comes up, it was an executive summary problem. The supply chain leader was doing beautiful, in-depth bid analyses with long spreadsheets and each supplier’s column in...
Understanding the Significance of Perfect Orders in Supply Chain Excellence
What is a perfect order? And why is it relevant? Of all supply chain metrics, the pinnacle metric is the perfect order. It serves as a comprehensive measure, encompassing critical components that lay the groundwork for supply chain efficiency. A perfect order is an...
Unveiling the Dynamics of the Supply Chain Cycle: Enhancing Delivery Assurance and Performance Assessment
Unveiling the Dynamics of the Supply Chain Cycle: Enhancing Delivery Assurance and Performance Assessment In the intricate dance of the supply chain cycle, the pivotal roles of delivery assurance and performance assessment come into focus. While often discussed as the...
Unveiling the Dynamics of the Supply Chain Cycle: Order Generation and Fulfillment
The “order generation” and “order fulfillment” links in the supply chain are where most companies are strongest in the supply chain cycle. This is where the supply chain team cuts purchase orders, commits to purchases with suppliers, and coordinates inbound logistics....
Unveiling the Dynamics of the Supply Chain Cycle: From Demand Planning to Supply Planning
In this segment of our comprehensive series exploring the entire supply chain cycle, we delve into the central aspect of the planning function: demand and supply planning. In larger or more mature supply chain teams, these planning functions often form integral parts...
Unveiling the Dynamics of the Supply Chain Cycle: From Contracts to Business Planning
Embarking on the first installment of our comprehensive series delving into the intricacies of the full supply chain cycle, we kick off by exploring the critical junctures of contracts, sourcing, and business planning. While we could start anywhere in this cycle,...
Elevating Negotiation Mastery: Strategies for Success Beyond the Basics
In our ongoing exploration of negotiation dynamics, it’s high time we delve into fundamental aspects: the basic parameters and rules that underpin successful negotiations. Gone are the days of fixating on the physical placement at a negotiation table—our current era...