Category: Processes
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Contract Negotiation Deep Dive: Governing Law and Force Majeure
Disclaimer: I am not an attorney and cannot give legal advice. This series is from a supply chain practitioner’s perspective on negotiating contracts and is simply offering my perspective on common contract clauses. Seek professional legal advice for your own contracts. In our continuing series on contract clauses from a supply chain perspective, last week… Read more
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Contract Negotiation Deep Dive: Indemnification and Termination
Disclaimer: I am not an attorney and cannot give legal advice. This series is from a supply chain practitioner’s perspective on negotiating contracts and is simply offering my perspective on common contract clauses. Seek professional legal advice for your own contracts. In our continuing series on contract clauses from a supply chain perspective, last week… Read more
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Contract Negotiation Deep Dive: Warranties and Hazmat
Disclaimer: I am not an attorney and cannot give legal advice. This series is from a supply chain practitioner’s perspective on negotiating contracts and is simply offering my perspective on common contract clauses. Seek professional legal advice for your own contracts. In our continuing series on contract clauses from a supply chain perspective, last week… Read more
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Contract Negotiation Deep Dive: Product Changes or Discontinuations and Buyer’s Property
Today’s article continues our deep dive into contract clauses, focusing on changes and buyer’s property. While these are manufacturing-centric versions of these clauses, it’s worth noting that managing change orders is also critical in construction or software implementation contracts. I also tell a story about how sometimes a change order simply costs pizza… Read more
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Contract Negotiation Deep Dive: Law Compliance and Purchase Orders
Disclaimer: I am not an attorney and cannot give legal advice. This series is from a supply chain practitioner’s perspective on negotiating contracts and is simply offering my perspective on common contract clauses. Seek professional legal advice for your own contracts. In our continuing series on contract clauses from a supply chain perspective, last week… Read more
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The Do’s and Don’ts of Attending Internal Customer Staff Meetings
As a supply chain professional, it’s incredibly easy to fall into the “they vs. we” trap. “They” are the internal customer, the engineer, the end user, the operations team. “We” are the procurement, supply chain, or logistics team. While there are many ways to start shifting this mentality and start healing the rift between supply… Read more
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Bonded Warehouses and FTZs: Your Guide to Import Optimization
I first encountered Foreign Trade Zones (FTZs) and bonded warehouses while working for a manufacturer who was getting many components out of China. Before that point, most of my employers were getting the majority of their shipments domestically, either from US manufacturers or through distribution. FTZs and bonded warehouses are a fascinating approach to importing… Read more
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Supply Chain Disruption: Predicting Supplier Bad Days
The hot topic in supply chain for the last few years has been supply chain disruption. Supply Chain Brain’s annual supplier partnership publication is themed around disruption, everyone working anywhere in supply chain in 2021 remembers what working through disruption looks like, and continuing global conflicts impact everything from grain to nickel. Executive leadership teams… 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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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