Best Practices
Direction Counts More than Accuracy
Years ago, while working for Green Giant, I phoned our steel can sales rep to ask for a 4% reduction. We had information suggesting steel prices had fallen 8%. He certainly wasn’t very happy and, as...
The Four Cornerstones for Leveraging Cost Transparency
Cost transparency is the golden arrow in a procurement professional’s negotiations quiver: the key to building and maintaining a robust, sustainable, low-cost supply chain This is a true story about...
Using Should-Cost Models for Actionable Transparency
Modeling is powerful. It not only lets procurement know what price they should be paying, it also provides compelling arguments during negotiations. Not everything a company buys is as simple as a...
Going Fishing with Suppliers
When the going gets tough, sometimes the best thing procurement can do is drag a supplier into a fishing boat and make it clear they need to land a whopper or the boat is going to sink with everyone...
The Procurement Conundrum: Savings or PR?
Asking for favors undermines procurement’s negotiating position, and tough negotiations and good relations make an awkward couple. Why not try a tag team? These are tough times to be in business....
Trust Your Suppliers, Not Their Data
Depending on a supplier to provide customers with unbiased information is like asking the proverbial fox to guard the henhouse. Procurement professionals need to trust their suppliers’ products,...
Land the Purchasing Job You Want
The competition for good jobs today is unprecedented. Certainly not news. Most of us have had the frustrating experience of applying for a job we really want, only to find hundreds of others had the...
Know What You Should be Paying
In a Perfect World Imagine the negotiating edge you would have if you knew – and could demonstrate – what you should be paying for the products you buy, especially when suppliers approach you for...
Are you following the Golden Rule?
Making suppliers’ costs transparent gives them incentive to think long-term. It aligns procurement’s interests with the suppliers’ interests. In ProPurchaser’s Four Cornerstones for Leveraging Cost...
Converting Sales Reps into Champions for Your Cause
Procurement’s job is to inject Cost Transparency into the negotiation so everyone can win: procurement gets what they need: a lean, competitive price; and the supplier makes a profitable sale at a...
A Lower-Carbon Future Starts with Low-Hanging Fruit
Procurement professionals are in a strong position to initiate positive change on a broad scale because it is relatively easy to achieve significant carbon savings. The trick is to ask suppliers the...
Negotiate With the Right Data
In a recent survey, 25% of purchasers told us they rely upon free, open-source cost data accessed through search engines like Google. Some of this data is fine but not all of it is suited to the...
Would Your Hand Still Be In The Air?
ProPurchaser President Rod Sherkin has been presenting at supply-chain conferences for years. At ISM2019 in Houston, Texas he spoke about the importance of cost transparency – a topic that is...
The Power of Peer Pressure
Driving down costs by ‘coaxing’ voluntary behavior change Anyone who survived the social pressure cooker of high school knows about the power of peer pressure. For supply chain professionals trying...
Plant Tours Worth Every Minute
You gotta go look The struggle to find “good fit” suppliers never ends. And finding the right suppliers has never been more important than it is right now. Global competition and the need to drive...
A Negotiating Tactic Every Procurement Pro Should Know
When suppliers send you “We are writing to inform you” letters announcing a price increase, push back by using this ingenious tactic invented by our colleague, Mike Brown. You may be pleasantly...
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