Why you should care even more in the current situation about how your suppliers, and their suppliers, are financed

 

Post COVID-19 supply markets – how will they change and how will you respond?

 

Is it time to bring supply chains home?

 

Will you abandon SRM?

 

Simply doubling down on cost reduction won’t be a sustainable solution

The last few weeks has seen countries, businesses and most importantly people facing unprecedented challenges. For us, what is becoming evident is the ability of people and businesses to respond to these challenges and adapt rapidly to what for some time might well be the new normal.

Supplier management in times of crisis

 

Catch the tiger by the tail – managing major consulting organisations

You’ve heard the story before, a new executive has joined the business, has ignored all processes and bought in ‘their favourite consulting company’ to review operations and they started 3 weeks ago….

Managing consulting and professional services organisations is a challenge almost every organisation grapples with. It is often compounded by the consulting company having contacts, relationships and often alumni at all levels of your organisation, meaning that, to manage them effectively, you also need to manage your own internal stakeholders effectively as well. Here we look at the common challenges faced in managing consulting companies and some techniques to help you.

Why does supplier innovation seem so difficult?

Article_Innovation_Banner

There are a number of challenges that arise when we want to explore guided innovation as a source of value in a (hopefully strategic, but not always) supplier relationship. The challenges range from stimulating good ideas through to handling the ideas and keeping suppliers engaged. In this blog we’ll look at just one of the challenges we uncovered through performing our annual global research into SRM best practices – what do people actually mean when they use the term innovation?

Excel vulnerabilities show risks in using the popular tool for SRM

In 11 years’ of research, State of Flux has demonstrated one very consistent feature of the way organisations manage relationships with suppliers: they fail to invest in technology. In the decade that has seen an explosion in business-ready cloud-based software such as Salesforce.com and HubSpot, it is remarkable that for 86% of organisations, the main software for managing information about supplier relationships is Microsoft Excel.

Claim and counterclaim tell the story of a failing relationship

The best supplier relationships build value for both parties. The worst end up in court. That’s where car rental company Hertz found itself with Accenture. It had waited three years for the global consultancy firm to build a new website and mobile apps it was happy with.

1 2 3 4 5