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Supplier Price Increases – Get Creative (Part 1)

In my last post, 9 Ways to Fight a Supplier Price Increase, I listed approaches to handling a supplier price increase. These involved pushing back.  These days, commodity prices may be at the heart of increases. They can be volatile and unpredictable and offer little room for black and white approaches. Besides using hedging, [...]

9 ways to fight a supplier price increase

Back in the day when I was running New England Suppliers Institute, a regional non-profit industry organization that worked to improve performance by improving the customer supplier relationship via lean enterprise, supplier development, education, and networking, one of our board members was the procurement manager at a semiconductor equipment manufacturer. He used to give an excellent and [...]

If you thought outsourcing was just for purchasing geeks, now appearing in your living room….

I couldn’t resist making a few comments about the new show on NBC, “Outsourced” which aired last week. For those of you who haven’t heard of it or seen it, the show is about a call center in the U.S. being outsourced to India. If you think about it, do you know of any [...]

Supplier defects: preventing the ultimate sacrifice

Supply chain failures seem inevitable these days, but are especially disconcerting when they indicate a larger systemic problem in critical equipment that is supposed to save lives. The U.S. Army just announced a recall of 44,000 Advanced Combat Helmets (ACH) manufactured by ArmourSource LLC (formerly Rabintex) due to concerns that they provide substandard ballistic protection. Another similar recall [...]

The Perils of Outsourcing Space Exploration

If you didn’t think space exploration was dangerous enough, here’s something else to worry about. NASA has been looking into outsourcing parts of the space exploration program to outside suppliers, reasoning that this is the best way to speed up rocket development and to save money. They reasoned that private contractors would be able to provide [...]

Managing and Improving Supplier Performance in a Lean Environment

I am in Covington, Kentucky attending the AME International Lean Conference, Journey to Greatness. Attendance is excellent despite the economy and its adverse impact on other conferences this year.  This may be due to various lean journeys presented by practitioners and couldn’t be more relevant in a down economy.  AME (Association for Manufacturing Excellence) [...]

Upcoming Webinar: Evaluating Your Suppliers

The Purchasing Management Association of Canada (PMAC) is offering a monthly webinar series on various topics of interest. As the second in the series, I am giving a webinar entitled: Evaluating Your Suppliers: Practical Approaches to Getting Results. It runs from 12:00 pm until 1:30 pm ET on Thursday, October 15th. This is a practical [...]

When Selecting Suppliers, Know What You’re Looking For

One of the greatest challenges in selecting the right suppliers for your company is know what you’re looking for. In order to know what you’re looking for, you need to have a supplier selection strategy that is linked to the priorities and strategies of your firm. Then this strategy needs to be translated into [...]

The New Chrysler: Ask Not What Your Suppliers Can Do For You

The government has helped bail out Chrysler. The government has not bailed out its suppliers. And now Chrysler is looking to get back in the game on the backs of its suppliers, who, if they are still in business, are not eager become lenders to their customers. Chrysler has received over $10.4B from the government so far. And [...]

Selecting the Right Suppliers: Challenges and Best Practices

Mark your calendar for Thursday, September 10, 2009, when I will be the speaker for the International Association for Contract and Commercial Management’s (IACCM) Ask the Expert call: “Selecting the Right Suppliers: Challenges and Best Practices“. 

Tim Cummins, President and CEO of IACCM, will host this discussion with me. The session will cover the following areas: [...]