Author: Janice Marquardt
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Do You Have Vendors or Suppliers?
Language matters. Early in my supply chain career, my supply chain leader sat across his desk from me and told me, “Vendors sell hot dogs. Suppliers are partners.” I think I was implementing a supplier scorecard program at the time and was constantly referring to our suppliers as vendors. Since that moment, every time someone… Read more
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Dirty Negotiation Tactics and How to Counter Them
Anyone who has been in multiple negotiations has dealt with dirty, hardball tactics. Maybe you’ve even used them yourself in an attempt to gain the upper hand. While related to negotiations focused on changing the rules, hardball tactics are in a little different category. Most importantly, hardball tactics are all about short-term gain with no… Read more
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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 pricing. The consumer price index is a common and popular index,… Read more
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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 consistently, and successfully arguing for their value with my supervisor and… Read more
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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: While all of these are good and align with the advice I was given by more senior leaders, I think they got me into people leader/management positions. They did not get me the last step from… Read more
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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 paper), there’s more to it than that. I’ve worked for… Read more
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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, different industries have different considerations and tolerances beyond these basics. For a company sourcing… Read more
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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. Role Descriptions When searching Indeed for supply chain roles, I found a list of 18 roles. I had… Read more
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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 cover four structures: No formal supply chain, decentralized,… Read more
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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 simply thinking it. Yes, we get you… Read more