Monday 31 March 2014

POP QUIZ! How Much do you Know About the History of Procurement?

By Sarah Clarke

On Friday we published the BravoSolution take on 'A Brief History of Procurement' and as promised, we're publishing Monday's pop quiz on the very subject!  It's 7 questions, none too challenging, (it's only meant as a little piece of fun to brighten up a Monday afternoon) see how you get on ...

Friday 28 March 2014

A Brief Wander Through the History of Procurement

By Sarah Clarke

We've been slaving away this afternoon in the BravoSolution offices thinking about the history of procurement and some of the defining moments that made our industry into what it is today. We've come up with this timeline. We've even prepped a little quiz to test your procurement smarts, which we'll be publishing next week.  Sign up here and we'll let you know when the quiz goes live.

In the meantime, here's our top seven defining moments.  Which ones do you think we've missed?




Wednesday 26 March 2014

Shotgun Training – (Part 4 “Don’t take your shotgun to town”)


Today’s the big day! We have done the leg work and it is time for us to propose a training plan for our sourcing organisation. Now that we are armed with actionable data, we can put down the idea of trying to train everyone on all sourcing skills and take a focused approach.

Tuesday 25 March 2014

Maximising Success from eAuctions

In anticipation of our next Real World Sourcing Series expert briefing, 'Evaluating Bids and Tenders', we'd like to offer you the opportunity to access some of the sessions we've previously delivered. Our industry experts (and former CPOs), Guy Allen and Peter Smith have spent some time in the BravoSolution recording studio and these briefings are now available online.

Monday 24 March 2014

Risk Management in the Supply Chain: Part 3 - You know the issues, but how do you retain the value?


For the final part of this series, I want to focus on how technology can facilitate both the people and process elements of procurement and supply risk management.

Wednesday 19 March 2014

Shotgun Training (Part 3 – “Understanding your current skill state")


In our last post we discussed defining the target skills for our training program via a Skills Grid. In this post we are going to bring more color to the conversation by determining who already has which skills. We will do this in a way that will set us up to prioritise skill development against our business needs.

Monday 17 March 2014

Risk Management in the Supply Chain: Part 2 - Taking people through the process


As discussed in part 1, the ‘people’ element of risk underpins the behavioural approaches to risk management in organisations; but the ‘tolerance’ and ‘prudence’ over risks within the supply chain ultimately determines the process for managing these risks in practice. 

Wednesday 12 March 2014

Shotgun Training (Part 2 – “Creating a new target”)


Read part 1 here

In skeet shooting, the shotgun pellets can spread to cover an area a large as 40 square inches at 40 yards out (thanks Google).  The clay target is most commonly about 4 inches wide and 1 inch tall. So by my non-scientific reckoning, even when a shot is dead on at 40 yards out, 36 square inches of the shotgun shell’s content does not hit the target.  That’s 90% of its content wasted.

Monday 10 March 2014

Risk Management in the Supply Chain: Part 1 - People


After attending the latest Real World Sourcing Series event on Risk Management in the Supply Chain, where Guy Allen gave a comprehensive overview of the pertinent issues in supply chain risk and how they could be managed within an organisation... I wondered how this affects us all in our day-to-day lives as procurement and supply management professionals, especially in terms of the people involved, the processes followed under the emerging governance of technology.

Wednesday 5 March 2014

Shotgun Training (Part 1)

by John Ryan Shaw

I think most of us have heard of a shotgun wedding, but how many of you have heard of the shotgun approach to training?

Monday 3 March 2014