Cloud computing meets supply chain transparency and risk
Supply chains? Yawn, right? While supply chains may seem boring, they are of vital importance to organisations, and their proper management can make, or break companies. Some recent examples of where poorly managed supply chains caused at best, serious reputational damage for companies include the Apple Computers child labour and workers suicide debacle; the Tesco […]
Vertical Solutions Extends Customer Experience And Field Service Footprint With Three Partnerships
Vertical Solutions Partnerships Showcase Why Complex Field Service Is A Critical Glue Between ERP and CRM In Improving Customer Experience Announced March 4th, 2014 at the Microsoft Convergence event, Vertical Solutions, made three significant partnerships with Blue Horseshoe Solutions, Cincom, and Vidcie. The Cincinatti, Ohio based customer experience software vendor provides cloud contact center […]
2014 Predictions: The Return (and Supply Chain Evolution) of the Private B2B Marketplace
Back in the early 2000s, independent electronic B2B public marketplaces gave birth to the software to run them, which then gave birth to the brick and mortar companies that wanted to control their own destinies to use such software to run industry consortia marketplaces. But, they found the technology lacking in deep support for much […]
Sourcing reinvented: cloud supply chain and spend management
If the future is a networked world, then we may well find that the future belongs to sourcing vendors. No other category of vendors has had its landscape transformed so fundamentally by the advent of the Web, to the extent that leading vendors such as Concur and Ariba took early decisions to wholly rearchitect their […]
HPthe other transformation
With all the negative news swirling around HP, it is easy to lose focus on the complex operations that continue to drive the $120 billion behemoth. Every global supply chain was rocked by the Japanese tsunami and the Iceland volcano explosion impact on European air travel. HP’s mammoth supply chain which produces 2 printers a […]
The SAP Business Suite and HANA
Most folks using procurement technology would rather not get into the underlying bits and bytes of technology architecture, let alone the nuances of database technology. For the most part this makes sense, though we’d argue that for systems integration, a lot of incremental business value in the P2P and services procurement areas can be derived […]
Cost Management Failures: 10 Reasons SMBs Stink at Procurement
Last week, we began a blog series exploring the state of procurement in the small and middle market sectors. See 2013: The Year of Source-To-Pay Adoption for SMB Procurement and 3 Essential Procurement Services For Small and Middle Market Businesses. As we continue our analysis of SMB procurement practices, it makes sense to do a […]
Some Secrets of the Industry Analyst Briefing
Over on Spend Matters PRO, my colleague Peter Smith recently penned a must-read column for software providers, BPOs and consultants in the procurement and supply chain ecosystem: Providers Take Note: A Look Inside the Brain of a CPO (subscription content – try before you buy here). His post got me thinking about writing a similar […]
KPMG to Acquire BrainNet — Initial Reporting, Analysis and Recommendations
On Friday, KPMG announced it was acquiring European-based procurement and supply chain consultancy, BrainNet. While terms of the deal were not disclosed, Spend Matters estimates the value of the transaction at between $50-100MM. This range is based on estimated BrainNet revenue slightly above $50MM — which may have been even higher — and relative 1-2X […]
The End of Global Sourcing as We Know It? The MIT/Sloan View (Part 2)
Please click here for the first post in this series. In an article in MIT Sloan Management Review, supply chain academics and experts David Simchi-Levi, James Paul Peruvankal, Narendra Mulani and Bill Read offer up a number of hypotheses examining how global sourcing is changing. On Spend Matters, we have explored the authors’ second argument […]
