What really is lean procurement? From some of the descriptions of lean procurement that I’ve seen, it seems to have morphed into something that is either myopically focused and/or totally unrecognizable as lean to me. Let’s start with myopically focused. Yes, it is a good thing to do more with less, i.e., run procurement with fewer people. [...]
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A recent conversation I had with the quality manager at a supplier who produces tools for milling, drilling, tooling and turning confirmed that Purchased Price Variance (PPV) is alive and well and still creating unintended consequences. Here’s the story. Production suddenly discovered that the torque wrenches (or keys, as they’re called) were no longer fitting in their shipping [...] I wrote about ideas for avoiding a supplier price increases in last two posts: 9 Ways to Fight a Supplier Price Increase and Supplier price increases — get creative. Avoiding price increases isn’t purely a matter of “just say no”, which doesn’t usually work unless you’re a big gorilla customer with a lot of market clout or are [...] 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, [...] 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 [...] 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 [...] 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 [...] 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 [...] 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) [...] 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 [...] |
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