Disruptions, political disputes, security flaws and an air of ambition at the Procurement Leaders Forum – it’s been another busy week.
Financial services sector is saving outsourcing
Outsourcing has been, more than ever perhaps, a key political sticking point in the US elections and ‘onshoring’ is a buzzword that encapsulates the nervousness that traditional manufacturing businesses feel about using outsourcing services. Financial services companies are developing a different relationship with outsourcing however, and as outsourcing businesses feel the chill in certain regions and industries, research is reinforcing this view that financial services are not just bucking the trend, they’re providing vital business to the service provider industry.
Supply chain finance is more politically contentious than we thought
UK PM David Cameron was enthusiastic in the launching of the supply chain finance scheme last week as he looked for ways to inject some valuable cash flow into supply chains that had been abandoned by banks. This week however, we heard both sides of the problem – big business saying there wasn’t enough finance available to suppliers, while analysts warned that supply chain finance schemes just encouraged late payment and didn’t solve anything.
European CPOs are bullish, even if the economy isn’t
The Procurement Leaders Forum in Vienna this week featured bold proclamations, starting with the CPO of PepsiCo talking about ambitions for getting greater and greater sums of spend under management and developing from there. The return to themes of value creation and involving stakeholders in their achievements spoke not of a function that was staggering as the European economies continued to falter, but of a group of CPOs that were ready to take their function’s influence to the next level.
Wal-Mart is a tangle of contradictions in social terms
Wal-Mart, the largest and probably the most-frequently discussed retailer in the world made a bold move this week. In China, executives took to the stage to say that they were ramping up the severity of their sustainability programme. If they’re serious in their claims that supplier that don’t live up to their CSR performance expectations will be cut that’s real progress, but it’s also a problem. It was only a couple of weeks ago that Wal-Mart’s US suppliers were in trouble for appalling conditions in their factories – is a five-year deadline pressing enough? Is there going to be a bias towards taking it easier on more important suppliers?
Procurement shouldn’t be limited within a prescriptive role
Sammy Rashed’s excellent Beyond Procurement series continued, putting the role of a procurement individual as a project manager and internal consultant in the spotlight. It’s not familiar territory for many CPOs, but as Sammy relates from his own experience, procurement has the skillset to make a valuable contribution in this kind of role – which raises bigger questions about where procurement chiefs are at their most influential.
Steve Hall is deputy editor for Procurement Leaders Magazine. Follow him on Twitter@thestephenhall.
Source Article from http://www.procurementleaders.com/blog/my-blog–steve-hall/five-things-weve-learned-this-week-22-26-october
