Forrester Sourcing Forum Dispatch: Learning From Cisco’s Global Procurement Transformation (Part 1)

By on November 10, 2010

Image representing Cisco as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase

I spent the better part of yesterday at Forrester’s Sourcing and Vendor Management Forum in Chicago, which featured a number of excellent presentations by practitioners and Forrester analysts on both IT/services procurement and the broader sourcing and vendor management landscape. The first non-analyst of the day to speak was Michael Charney who serves as Senior Director, Procurement Relationship Management, Global Procurement Services, at Cisco. Charney gave a drink-from-the-fire hose detailed summary of the global procurement transformation underway in the indirect/services area at Cisco. He began by sharing that procurement “change is about connecting differently to the business” on a global basis. This is especially important when 45% of your 76,897 employees are “engineers and sales people,” in Charney’s words.
Charney’s story of transformation isn’t all that different from most companies. But Cisco’s frenetic growth and global expansion makes managing indirect and services spend all the more demanding…

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Obsessed with how companies manage, spend and save money, Jason writes about procurement, trade and supply chain issues @ Spend Matters. He has significant first hand experience developing and marketing technology and services products, has advised numerous companies on sourcing and related techniques as well as M&A pursuits.  In previous lives before tech, he was a management consultant and merchant banking analyst.

One response to “Forrester Sourcing Forum Dispatch: Learning From Cisco’s Global Procurement Transformation (Part 1)”

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