Category: Supply Chain Career
-
Contract Negotiation Deep Dive: Introductory Clauses
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. Today’s article kicks off a series on supplier contract negotiation, which is where I… Read more
-
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
-
From Tactical to Strategic: Why Procurement Needs to Chase Value, Not Just Savings
The inimitable Mathew Schulz posted on LinkedIn last week about how the best procurement pros chase value instead of savings. This got me thinking about savings vs. value, and the differences between a procurement team who thinks tactically vs. one who thinks strategically. One reason I left a previous employer was that a change in… Read more
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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