Managing Supplier Relationships

I hope that you have enjoyed the article "Skillfully Managing Supplier Relationships."

This article, like several that I've done over the past two years, was based on an accompanying podcast from the Purchasing & Supply Management Podcast Series^SM. So let me ask you about that...

Personally, I enjoy doing the podcasts and want to do more and more. I feel like the value of the articles rises when there is an additional audio resource to go to for more information. And, with 15 podcasts as of right now, there are hours upon hours of educational material available...for free!

But, with about 75,000 PurchTips subscribers, there hasn't been much feedback despite lots of downloads. Are you listening to the podcasts? If so, are you finding value in them? Should I do more? Do you have any suggestions for future podcasts?

If you haven't checked out any of the podcasts yet, definitely check out the latest one. I've probed a senior purchasing executive for some tips to help you - it's hard to get that type of advice for free and so easily accessible!

To Your Career,
Charles Dominick, SPSM
President & Chief Procurement Officer
Next Level Purchasing, Inc.
Struggling To Have A Rewarding Purchasing Career?
Earn Your SPSM^® Certification Online At
http://www.NextLevelPurchasing.com

Leadership & Micro-Management

A week or so ago, I posted a short blog about leadership. In it, I encouraged aspiring leaders to become more comfortable with delegating.

In some situations, however, a leader does need to roll up his or her sleeves to ensure that s/he gets the deliverable s/he wants. Most leaders would love it if they gave general (read: cryptic) instructions and got the results that they wanted every time. In reality, there is bound to be a miscommunication from time-to-time where it takes more time to give instructions on how to fix the deliverable than it would have taken to just be explicitly clear at the outset.

The key is to be able to identify those situations where step-by-step specific instructions up front are warranted. This requires knowledge of the skills of your team members as well as your track record in delegating to them. But Kelly Services' SmartManager newsletter has a few additional useful tips in their article entitled "When Micro Managing Is A Good Idea."

BTW, SmartManager is a pretty good newsletter. I get it by email as a client of Kelly Services. Nice, concise, useful tips for managers. Where I see relevant articles that can be applied to the purchasing profession, I'll link them here.

To Your Career,
Charles Dominick, SPSM
President & Chief Procurement Officer
Next Level Purchasing, Inc.
Struggling To Have A Rewarding Purchasing Career?
Earn Your SPSM^® Certification Online At
http://www.NextLevelPurchasing.com

Returning From Iasta reSource 2008

Well, I'm sitting in the Indianapolis airport waiting for my flight back to Pittsburgh and hoping that I'll get home in time to see at least the 3rd period of Game 3 of the NHL Eastern Confererence final (go Pens!).

Though my presence at Iasta's reSource conference was limited to the time allotted to my presentation, I did get to stick around to attend one breakout session. It was on the topic of multi-round eSourcing negotiations. I'm glad I attended that one.

It seems that there is a lot of struggle around the ethics and effectiveness of multi-round eSourcing negotiations vs. pure reverse auctions. I personally know that multi-round eSourcing negotiations can be both ethical and effective, but there have to be guidelines. I feel a new PurchTips topic coming on...

All in all, reSource was a very classy event. I admire the management team's entrepreneurship as well as their accessibility to their customers. I've been at events where the C-levels are almost "protected" from their customers. That wasn't the case with Iasta. A very personable, easy-going group with a lot of pride and passion.

Unfortunately, I missed some presentations regarding Iasta's optimization capabilities. Optimization is such a cool topic in my book. It is one that had a lot of buzz in the early 2000's, kind of lost that buzz when people realized it wasn't for your every day, mainstream type of purchase, then seems to be regaining a buzz as more uses are found for it.

To Your Career,
Charles Dominick, SPSM
President & Chief Procurement Officer
Next Level Purchasing, Inc.
Struggling To Have A Rewarding Purchasing Career?
Earn Your SPSM^® Certification Online At
http://www.NextLevelPurchasing.com

Iasta Recognized Again

I just received a press release yesterday noting that Iasta was named to Entrepreneur Magazine's Hot 100 list. You may recall that I recently did an interview with the CEO of Iasta for this blog just a few weeks ago.

This is impressive. Not just the honor, but the fact that Iasta has the PR people keeping tabs of all of the honors that they can apply for. We need to do more of that here at Next Level Purchasing.

Speaking of Iasta, I will be speaking at their reSource Conference on Tuesday. If you're going, contact me at cdominick [at] nextlevelpurchasing [dot] com ahead of time and maybe we could meet face to face there. I'm flying in that morning and flying out immediately after my presentation, but I'd still like to try to meet you if you'll be there.

Have a good weekend, everyone!

To Your Career,
Charles Dominick, SPSM
President & Chief Procurement Officer
Next Level Purchasing, Inc.
Struggling To Have A Rewarding Purchasing Career?
Earn Your SPSM^® Certification Online At
http://www.NextLevelPurchasing.com

Online Classroom Will Be Down On May 8

We will be upgrading and testing our database on May 8, 2008 between 8:00AM and 5:00PM Eastern US time. The online classroom will be down during this time.

NOTE: An incorrect starting time for the outage was posted earlier. The official start time for the outage is at 8:00AM Eastern US time.

The new database will give us a lot more scalability for adding new features for you. As they say: "Temporary inconvenience, permanent improvement!"

I apologize for any inconvenience and appreciate your patience.

To Your Career,
Charles Dominick, SPSM
President & Chief Procurement Officer
Next Level Purchasing, Inc.
Struggling To Have A Rewarding Purchasing Career?
Earn Your SPSM^® Certification Online At
http://www.NextLevelPurchasing.com

Green Marketing Is A Pet Peeve Of Mine

I am a big supporter of environmental responsibility in business. I love the fact that, today, more businesses are environmentally conscious than ever.

Having said that, I believe that businesses should be environmentally responsible because it is the right thing to do, NOT to be able to use their thinly-veiled environmental efforts as a marketing scheme.

It seems that everyone is trying to market themselves through claims of environmental responsibility to the point that it is getting unclear what some of them are selling. Some organizations are actually embarrassing themselves through their attempts at green marketing.

Take ISM, for example. They issued a release touting the "green-ness" of their International Supply Management Conference and, for one of the examples, said that "temporary tattoos celebrating ISM's new...qualification — are printed with vegetable oil ink on recycled paper."

To me, that is environmental waste, not environmental responsibility. Who are they marketing this qualification to? Four-year olds?

Recycled paper is still paper. Paper that can be used more responsibly so that fewer trees have to be cut down and fewer forests have to have their natural habitats destroyed for the sake of creating paper. Even office supply vendors are cutting their ties with paper suppliers because of environmental irresponsibility.

Today's management teams expect us to use environmental responsibility as a factor in our supplier selections. So what can we - as buyers, purchasing managers, procurement executives - do about this green marketing problem?

I say that we challenge our suppliers' claims. Show them that it will take more than just using the word "green" in their marketing collateral to win a higher score on our supplier evaluation sheets. Dismiss their thinly-veiled efforts and explain what real environmental responsibility is. Share your sustainability definitions with your strategic suppliers and, where your firm has sustainability expertise, share that with those suppliers so that they, too, can make a difference for the planet.

By purchasing professionals upping the standards of environmental responsibility claims, we can help the planet and hopefully get rid of the noise that is masquerading as green marketing.

To Your Career,
Charles Dominick, SPSM
President & Chief Procurement Officer
Next Level Purchasing, Inc.
Struggling To Have A Rewarding Purchasing Career?
Earn Your SPSM Certification Online At
http://www.NextLevelPurchasing.com

The SPSM Certification Gets Results...Here's More Proof!

As we approach the four year anniversary of the SPSM^® Certification, we have been getting call after call and email after email raving about the results that our students are getting in the real world.

If you've been to our site, you know that we like to feature our students who are willing to share their success. And you know that we also like to showcase students from around the world because of the fact that the SPSM Certification is globally recognized.

Today, we added a new testimonial from someone whose accomplishments deserve to be recognized. It is featured on our Web page for the class "14 Purchasing Best Practices," but I'll also post it here.

"After signing up for the Senior Professional in Supply Management® Program, we formed a commodity team following the instructions in 14 Purchasing Best Practices. This commodity team has now ensured that our procurement and supply management plan for Anti-Retroviral and Anti-Malarial Medicines produces savings as well as quality medicines. We have been able to source for products internationally at much reduced prices as compared to earlier purchases. For example, we recently sourced 550,000 USD worth of Anti-Malarials against a forecast of 750,000 USD for that same quantity where the forecast was based on previous pricing. These results have made it easy to justify the investment in my education with Next Level Purchasing." Patrick W. Githendu, B. Pharm, MBA, SPSM Procurement Manager Namibia Global Fund Programme Windhoek, Namibia

What can I say? Our purchasing training WORKS!

To Your Career,
Charles Dominick, SPSM
President & Chief Procurement Officer
Next Level Purchasing, Inc.
Struggling To Have A Rewarding Purchasing Career?
Earn Your SPSM^® Certification Online At
http://www.NextLevelPurchasing.com

Negotiation Tactics

I hope that you have enjoyed the article "Good Negotiation Tactics That Can Backfire."

The one thing I hoped that you'd get from this article is that almost every negotiation tactic has appropriate situations for its use and inappropriate situations for its use. Good negotiators aren't just those people who know the most tactics, they are the ones that can assess a situation and know which negotiation tactics to use and which to avoid.

To Your Career,
Charles Dominick, SPSM
President & Chief Procurement Officer
Next Level Purchasing, Inc.
Struggling To Have A Rewarding Purchasing Career?
Earn Your SPSM^® Certification Online At
http://www.NextLevelPurchasing.com