EP 107 - Social 2.0: The Dawn of Micro Communities

Procurement Foundry is an online private community for people working in supply chain. Mike founded this community when he knew he needed a safe place to network and discuss challenges with other professionals, but didn’t have the time or energy to go to regular networking events. Procurement Foundry now has over 2,000 highly engaged members with 20 chapters in the world.

How can you join Procurement Foundry? If you’re a professional working in supply chain, you can head to the website and fill in their membership request form. Then, your application is vetted and processed by a team to make sure you’re not a consultant or salesman. Once in, you have access to several discussion channels, job boards and even virtual meeting rooms.

Mike says that Procurement Foundry has a huge amount of potential he hadn’t foreseen when he first started the community. First of all, the huge amount of empathy amongst the members means people are willing to share templates, strategies and advice to other professionals. Secondly, the huge amount of expertise in the community means there are plenty of talent opportunities, which translates into a great talent pool for hiring managers and great learning opportunities for students. Finally, the high engagement means that Mike is able to accumulate a lot of data on the members, which helps understand the direction in which the industry is going. If you’re all for collaboration, Procurement Foundry is the place to be!

In this episode we discuss:

• [1.35] What is Procurement Foundry?
• [6.23] Everyone wants to join
• [10.43] What we all can learned from the community
• [20.40] What can you expect, resources, content etc
• [29.33] data like you have never seen it before

Resources and links mentioned:

• Procurement Foundry