Supplier network

Supplier Diversity, By 2025

March 10, 2016

Analyst Insight: By 2025, issues such as globalization, social transparency, risk management and sustainability will bring new challenges to all the best procurement organizations around the world. For diverse suppliers, these changes will pose new challenges, while bringing new opportunities for those with a vision for the future. - Angie Li, Partner; Curtis Simpson, Manager; Kirsty A. McNally, Manager, all with Advisory Services of Ernst & Young LLP

SRM Is Vital to Business Profitability

March 10, 2016

SupplyChainBrain

Analyst Insight: Supplier relationships and the management of them are critical to business. The strength of the relationship is two vs. one, transparency, collaboration and innovation. Real value is extracted when buyers and suppliers work together. Not surprisingly, businesses focused on supplier relationship management (SRM) lead their peers five to one in terms of value derived from their supply base. - Mickey North Rizza, VP of Strategic Services, BravoSolution

Is Your Relationship With Your Suppliers a True Partnership?

December 23, 2015

CFO

What have your suppliers done for you lately? Or, a better question might be: Have you partnered with your suppliers to drive value?

Bracing for Supply Chain Sticker Shock

August 21, 2015

Michael Deering, Steven Tess and Michael Edwards, PwC

For most of the past three decades, private equity firms and other investors have relied on two simple questions to assess the supply chains of the companies in which they've invested: Are our companies leveraging low-cost country supply sources and are they keeping supply chain costs in check? Deeper inquiries have always seemed unnecessary, so private equity firms and investors have focused on other aspects of the businesses they own to drive value.

Iran Highly Attractive to Automotive Industry

August 7, 2015

Frost & Sullivan

Iran has traditionally been a high-volume automotive market, whose geographic advantage has endowed it the potential to serve as a production hub in the Middle East. The recent lifting of economic sanctions has burnished the country's reputation as a business hotbed, with the automotive market expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 13.4 per cent from 2014 to 2022. Unsurprisingly, global original equipment manufacturers, suppliers and other market participants are exhibiting unprecedented eagerness to be a part of the Iranian growth story.

Walmart Initiative Designed to Support Jobs in U.S. Manufacturing

July 13, 2015

ThomasNet

Walmart has committed to investing $250bn in products that will support and create American jobs by 2023. Based on data from Boston Consulting Group, it is estimated that one million new U.S. jobs will be created through this initiative. Responding to feedback from its vendors that finding U.S. sources of supply was a challenge, Walmart plans to use ThomasNet's platform for product sourcing and supplier discovery.

Vendor Risk Management Programs Still Require Improvement, Study Finds

July 13, 2015

Protiviti

Organizations must make improvements to their risk management programs in order to keep pace with the latest cyber-attack risks and data security challenges, according to the second annual 2015 Vendor Risk Management Benchmark Study, released by the Shared Assessments Program and Protiviti, a global consulting firm.

Upended Business Model Brings New Opportunities to Industrial Distributors, Study Finds

June 22, 2015

UPS

Industrial distributors are facing changing market conditions that are challenging their long-standing business models, according to a study conducted by research firm TNS on behalf of UPS.

Predicted Growth Rate in Equipment Leasing in 2015 Revised Downward

April 16, 2015

CFO

The Equipment Leasing & Finance Foundation on Monday lowered its forecast for corporate investment in equipment and software. The foundation now expects investment to grow 5 percent in 2015, according to the second quarter update to the 2015 Equipment Leasing & Finance U.S. Economic Outlook. In December, the foundation had forecast 6 percent growth for the year.

Zero-Sum Supplier Negotiation Eventually Leads to Everyone Losing

March 26, 2015

Industry Week

Applying leverage in negotiations results in a zero-sum outcome where one side wins and the other side loses. This typically means that the winner ends up with somewhat more than 50 percent of their hoped-for result and the loser gets somewhat less than 50 percent since, just as in sports competitions where the potential results are win-lose, lose-win and tie, the use of leverage doesn't allow for combined outcomes above 100 percent. Zero-sum outcomes not only create a relational imbalance, they create hard feelings. People who lose in one negotiation often do their best to turn the tables the next time such that they win - and you lose.