Procurement Services Associates

Month: July, 2010

Does it matter what’s driving price volatility in soft commodities?

For those complaining about price volatility, soft commodities are not a place to be right now. These situations put stress on buying strategies and they don’t show any sign of easing up. Still, for some it’s not just uncertainty driving these erratic prices.
Looking through the soft commodity futures, and particularly the [...]

Outsourcing market could be primed for the next big thing

If there’s one thing that the service providers I’ve spoken to recently would be likely to agree on, it’s that 2010 has not been easy – not by a stretch. Uncertainty continues to hold back the wild growth that many predicted. But the possibility that customers are beginning to grow restless with traditional [...]

Vance Checketts to head Aberdeen Procurement & Supply Management Practice

Vance Checketts to head Aberdeen Procurement & Supply Management Practice
Vance will be announced shortly as Aberdeen’s new leader for its Procurement and Supply Management. He strengthens an already strong team there. Spendmatters broke the news here.

Vance and I worked together for years at Oracle. During the .com boom days Vance was ‘CEO’ of Oracle’s Exchange.Oracle.Com [...]

Hypotheses on Moving Wal-Mart’s CEO to a New Role: Running Global Sourcing and Online Retailing

In late June, Wal-Mart announced it was moving Eduardo Castro-Wright, formerly the retail giant’s President and CEO of US operations, to a new role running global sourcing and its online retail business. Procurement Leaders succinctly captures the news headline in a dispatch noting, “The move, which sees Bill Simon taking over as president and CEO [...]

Sourcing Optimization: A Basic Primer From an Expert

Sourcing Optimization: A Basic Primer From an Expert 
 
Spend Matters would like to welcome back Dr. Jason Brown, a former CTO at CombineNet, who will further share information on how companies can best apply optimization to their overall sourcing practices.   Money Savings
In previous posts, I brought up the fact that if analysts are running analytics without [...]