For most business leaders, it's difficult to make any decision without letting bottom line bias come into play. Globalization, in addition to evolving social, economic and regulatory trends, has elevated corporate competition to a new playing field altogether. For procurement departments in particular, cutting costs, doing more with less, and running agile operations are the new standards for success.

We've heard it before: chief procurement officers aren't just cost-cutters. They're contributing real value to the organization. But is that really true?

Organisation-wide purchasing is often the responsibility of the procurement team with the business reliant on them to source the right goods and services at the best price. But different departments within an organisation will often have very specific and specialist requirements and there are significant merits in empowering selected personnel to source exactly what they need, when they need it.

Studies document that innovation in engineering and production works best when the two disciplines are contiguous. Pairing the two was problematic for one company until an online marketplace came to the rescue.

The big North American distributor of industrial products was looking for a means to eliminate paper and curb the flood of e-mail exchanges generated by its supplier-management efforts. It also wanted to keep closer tabs on a growing supplier base. Time for an automated solution.

Deem Inc., a vendor of cloud and mobile commerce technology, has launched an updated version of Deem Spend, a suite of applications to help companies streamline their direct and indirect spend.