State Of Flux Ideas and Insights | Page 9

A fresh look at category management

You know the story, it’s that time of year again (budget, strategic planning, major re-forecast coming around), so let’s dig out those category strategies and run them through the machine. Procurement teams (and perhaps even some s ...

4 Feb 15

Women on boards and how the humble procurement department can help

Recently I attended a dinner where Dina Medland was talking about the insights she had gained around diversity in the boardroom. While the points Dina was making were more around boards being more representative of their customer base, the con ...

9 Dec 14

Can companies be both Jekyll and Hyde with suppliers?

Emotive press headlines such as ‘hook and switch’ and ‘pay to stay’ have sent shock waves through some parts of the business world. What these revelations must do is lead us to question the pressure that is being put on ...

25 Nov 14

With great (buying) power comes great responsibility

The Apple-GT Advanced Technologies (GTAT) relationship could have been a brilliant collaboration: for Apple, rumoured access to low cost ‘nearly unbreakable’ sapphire screens; and for GTAT, it could have been an organisation changi ...

29 Oct 14

eAuctions and SRM – are they mutually exclusive?

In describing customer-supplier relationships the term partnership has been frequently overused and remains, on many occasions, misused. In the 1990s when the concept of SRM and supplier partnerships first emerged, both were considered by many ...

23 Jun 14

Why do public sector supplier relationships seem so accident prone?

Earlier this year Mr Bill Crothers, Chief Procurement Officer at the Cabinet Office, was very forthright about a number of the government’s IT suppliers. He accused some suppliers of taking advantage of relationships with government and ...