On November 4, 2015, the Art of Procurement podcast officially launched . In 5 years, we've released 345 episodes and surpassed 500,000 listens. We've gone from being a new, unproven idea to being a trusted voice in the community and the #1 weekly podcast in all of procurement. To celebrate this occasion, we are running a special series that will extend through the rest of November. For the next three weeks, there will be a daily 5-minute show that answers one of the most interesting and frequen...
Nov 13, 2020•6 min
On November 4, 2015, the Art of Procurement podcast officially launched . In 5 years, we've released 345 episodes and surpassed 500,000 listens. We've gone from being a new, unproven idea to being a trusted voice in the community and the #1 weekly podcast in all of procurement. To celebrate this occasion, we are running a special series that will extend through the rest of November. For the next three weeks, there will be a daily 5-minute show that answers one of the most interesting and frequen...
Nov 12, 2020•6 min
On November 4, 2015, the Art of Procurement podcast officially launched . In 5 years, we've released 345 episodes and surpassed 500,000 listens. We've gone from being a new, unproven idea to being a trusted voice in the community and the #1 weekly podcast in all of procurement. To celebrate this occasion, we are running a special series that will extend through the rest of November. For the next three weeks, there will be a daily 5-minute show that answers one of the most interesting and frequen...
Nov 11, 2020•4 min
On November 4, 2015, the Art of Procurement podcast officially launched . In 5 years, we've released 345 episodes and surpassed 500,000 listens. We've gone from being a new, unproven idea to being a trusted voice in the community and the #1 weekly podcast in all of procurement. To celebrate this occasion, we are running a special series that will extend through the rest of November. For the next three weeks, there will be a daily 5-minute show that answers one of the most interesting and frequen...
Nov 10, 2020•5 min
On November 4, 2015, the Art of Procurement podcast officially launched . In 5 years, we've released 345 episodes and surpassed 500,000 listens. We've gone from being a new, unproven idea to being a trusted voice in the community and the #1 weekly podcast in all of procurement. To celebrate this occasion, we are running a special series that will extend through the rest of November. For the next three weeks, there will be a daily 5-minute show that answers one of the most interesting and frequen...
Nov 09, 2020•4 min
MRO - or Maintenance, Repair, and Operations spend - is one of those categories that procurement has managed, and managed, and managed again… but don't make the mistake of thinking there is no value left to realize. Mike Croasdale has been focused on helping companies manage their MRO spend for years. If you listen to him describe the opportunities in this category, you're very likely to walk away thinking it is one of the most nuanced and interesting spend categories in the company. MRO present...
Nov 02, 2020•40 min
Regardless of how you might choose to describe your journey through 2020, it is finally coming to an end. And while some of its effects will be with us for a long time, we have reached the point where it is not just appropriate to start thinking forward to 2021, it is absolutely necessary. Christopher Sawchuk, Principal and Global Procurement Advisory Practice Leader at The Hackett Group, and Vishal Patel, VP of Product Marketing at Ivalua, joined us for an AOP Live session on September 15th. As...
Oct 26, 2020•58 min
After months of planning, weeks of preparation, and days of sleepless nights, Mastermind LIVE 2020 is officially in the books. We had set an extremely high bar for ourselves: to run the most unique and meaningful event in procurement. From the session engagement and participant feedback, we believe we achieved our goal. Our speakers spanned a number of industries and disciplines, and our attendees joined us from around the globe. Everyone walked away with a new idea, and we laughed together more...
Oct 19, 2020•18 min
For many years, Peter Smith wanted to write a book that was fundamentally about procurement but would appeal to a wider business audience, One that would peel back the onion on the role of procurement, with tales of what happens when good buying practices are not followed. Following a career as a practitioner, and most latterly leading Spend Matters in the UK, Peter got to work. The result: Bad Buying – how organizations waste billions through failures, frauds, and fk-ups. In this interview, Pet...
Oct 12, 2020•36 min
Telecom has been on an interesting and unique journey as a spend category. Gone are the days when all that was needed to deliver significant savings was a professionally conducted third-party audit or service rationalization/optimization. Today, most organizations are several years post audit, looking for new efficiencies in a category that is not only evolving, it is also encroaching on other categories of spend. Dave Pastore is a Senior Director of Sourcing Operations at Corcentric where he sp...
Oct 05, 2020•34 min
AOP Host Philip Ideson starts each interview with a question about what brought that particular guest to procurement. With this week's guest, business consultant and coach Juergen Scherer, it might have been better to ask what brought him THROUGH procurement, because he has held influential roles across procurement, supply chain, sales, and operations. While he isn't in procurement today, Juergen's doctoral thesis on Procurement Marketing received the Scientific Award of the German Industry Asso...
Sep 28, 2020•46 min
Although procurement professionals don't usually think of ourselves as making 'cold calls,' we do it all the time. If you've ever sat down with a stakeholder for the first time and immediately realized they either don't understand procurement's role or don't particularly care for our processes, you've survived a cold call. In that moment, you can either explain or listen, and although listening is the better way to build understanding and rapport, most procurement professionals aren't prepared t...
Sep 21, 2020•20 min
One year ago, all procurement could talk about was digital transformation. Enter the COVID-19 pandemic, and many of those plans were thrown overboard. We may not be doing what we expected to be working on as we approach the final quarter of 2020, but that doesn't mean there isn't still a strong appetite for procurement change, both at the executive level and within the procurement community. The difference is that we are now trying to lead transformation in the midst of a disrupted landscape wit...
Sep 14, 2020•57 min
Technology is an extremely broad spend category and it is expanding by the day because of our emphasis on digital transformation. Nearly every function and category has an IT software or services component to it. Technology truly forms the foundation, or "lifeblood" as Rene Mathis put it, of corporate initiatives. Rene Mathis is an Associate Director at Corcentric where he specializes in technology category spend. He is currently working side by side with companies that are reevaluating their IT...
Sep 07, 2020•35 min
For the rest of August, I'm taking a roadtrip across the United States, and so because I'm out of the recording studio, I'm going to dip into the archive all the way back to 2016 to share some of my favorite episodes from that year with you that are still just as relevant as today - and if you found the podcast after 2016, there's a good chance that you haven't yet heard these conversations. Today's I rewind to a conversation that I had with Tim Jones, Head of Sourcing at Google. Our conversatio...
Aug 31, 2020•38 min
For the rest of August, I'm taking a roadtrip across the United States, and so because I'm out of the recording studio, I'm going to dip into the archive all the way back to 2016 to share some of my favorite episodes from that year with you that are still just as relevant as today - and if you found the podcast after 2016, there's a good chance that you haven't yet heard these conversations. Today's I rewind to a conversation that I had with Jack Miles. There are few, if any, leaders in the proc...
Aug 24, 2020•31 min
For the rest of August, I'm taking a road trip across the United States, and so because I'm out of the recording studio, I'm going to dip into the archive all the way back to 2016 to share some of my favorite episodes from that year with you that are still just as relevant as today - and if you found the podcast after 2016, there's a good chance that you haven't yet heard these conversations. Today's is a conversation with former procurement practitioner Sylvain Mansottee, now the CEO and Co-Fou...
Aug 17, 2020•37 min
For a long time, procurement has gotten feedback that our terminology - and, more specifically, our abbreviations - have a distancing or alienating effect on internal stakeholders and budget owners. But if language has the power to push people away, it can also be used to purposefully clarify, align, and collaborate. Steve Wills is the founder and Managing Director of Procurement Central and formerly served as the Procurement Advisor to the 2012 London Olympic Games. He has extensive business ex...
Aug 10, 2020•40 min
Marketing is one of those spend categories that procurement often has a hard time breaking into. They are less concerned with cost than their counterparts in other functions, and most of the services they contract are not only complex, project-based efforts, they are usually evaluated from a highly subjective point of view. Kathleen Jordan is an Associate Director at Source One, a Corcentric Company, where she has been focused on the marketing category for years. She is familiar with the opportu...
Aug 03, 2020•49 min
It has been well established that having a diverse and inclusive workforce increases results and employee satisfaction, so why wouldn't' the same be true for companies that invest in building a diverse supply chain? That question is the one that started Jaime Crump down the path to become a supplier diversity expert and consultant. Jamie is the president of The Richmond Group where she provides consulting and coaching services to corporate and certified diversity-owned businesses in the areas of...
Jul 27, 2020•35 min
In last week's podcast , Host Philip Ideson described the concept of the flywheel, a consistent pattern of small but deliberate actions designed to build momentum and deliver business results described in the book Good to Great by author Jim Collins. This week, we apply that idea to procurement directly to ensure our strategies and tactics become (and remain) aligned with the goals and objectives of the enterprise as a whole. This focus has to permeate every effort we are involved in and the ben...
Jul 20, 2020•17 min
At Art of Procurement, we believe that helping procurement teams effectively align their capabilities and outcomes with the goals of the businesses underpins the transformation of a team from transactional to strategic. In this podcast, we discuss a concept that is a big part of our Procurement, Inc approach and a core part of how we manage the Art of Procurement business itself: the flywheel. Because this concept may be new to many of our listeners (it was new to us when we discovered it), we'r...
Jul 13, 2020•12 min
Due to the risks posed by the coronavirus, procurement teams responsible for managing facilities services are currently experiencing quite a change. Services such as janitorial have quickly gone from transactional contracts established based upon cost to highly strategic relationships that must be in place and meet a new high standard for a facility to operate or even open. Arthur Piszczor is a Consultant at Corcentric, where he has been helping organizations manage their facilities services spe...
Jul 06, 2020•35 min
It is never easy to request additional headcount, so making sure the timing is right and having a solid business case are critical to protecting your internal reputation and hopefully getting an affirmative response. There are plenty of ways procurement can stack the deck in their favor, and most of them have to do with demonstrating alignment with enterprise objectives and a vision that explains the value associated with that position in the longer term. Alexis Ryan has been in procurement for ...
Jun 29, 2020•33 min
When it comes to governance during the sourcing process, your experience probably matches one of the following two scenarios: You have a strict 7 or 8 step process, and at the end of each step you have to get an approval of some sort to move to the next. You have an approval council that wants to see proof that you checked every single box during the sourcing process. What do these scenarios have in common? They are burdensome, create mountains of paperwork, and really slow down the process. No ...
Jun 22, 2020•11 min
For many procurement teams, risk management is now priority #1. If that sounds like your situation, how can you make sense of all the unknowns and ensure that each one of your category strategies is prepared to adapt to whatever may come your way? In today's solo show, AOP Founder and Host Philip Ideson shares one way you can balance risk and agility: by taking the business continuity and disaster recovery plans we often ask our suppliers to provide and applying the concept to your category stra...
Jun 15, 2020•20 min
A lot of things have changed as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, not the least of which has been procurement and supply chain teams being thrust into the spotlight in very challenging conditions. As an Executive Search Consultant, Tom Graham has naturally been focused on how this increased exposure has impacted leaders, individual contributors, and entire teams. Since the lockdowns began, Tom has been holding regular, virtual roundtables with Chief Procurement Officers and Chief Supply Chai...
Jun 08, 2020•38 min
Logistics has never been an easy category of spend to manage. Whether your company is multimodal, focused on less-than truckload (LTL), or depends upon small parcel, carriers and third-party logistics providers form a critical link between you and your customers. Superimpose the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic on top of that complexity, and you have one of the most fluid and challenging situations procurement will get involved in. Joe Lazzerini is a Consultant at Corcentric, where he helps ...
Jun 01, 2020•45 min
According to Harvard Business Review , under Zero-based budgeting (ZBB), "Expenses must be justified for each new budget period based on demonstrable needs and costs, as opposed to the more common method of using last year's budget as your starting point, then adjusting up or down. ZBB is a straightforward, intuitively simple way to aggressively strip out costs that cannot be rationally justified." Sounds wonderful, right? Well, as this week's guest (and the HBR article referenced above) point o...
May 25, 2020•45 min
The scope of responsibilities associated with enterprise procurement has grown significantly over the last decade, and yet we keep coming back to the 'good old' RFP. This one enabling tool often defines our reputation as a function, and not always in a good way. At the same time, no other approach has been able to unseat the RFP, and it remains the best way to evaluate supplier costs and capabilities in a standardized and structured way. Dave Hulsen, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of RFP...
May 18, 2020•44 min
