Environmental and social governance (ESG) and sustainability have quickly transitioned from “nice-to-haves” to essential components of creating long-term, measurable business value.
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the parking and transportation industry in countless ways. Corporate offices once filled with hustle and bustle have mostly turned into ghost towns, resulting in a significantly decreased need for shuttle and transportation services. So, what’s next for the future of shuttles? As pharmaceutical companies race to distribute vaccines, a vision of life returning to normal draws closer.
My last article was an overview of how large enterprises have historically approached supplier diversity initiatives and why they have underperformed.
This article will focus on ways the enterprise can improve diverse supplier inclusion, selection and support practices. I recommend that teams consider leveraging some of these tips best fitting for their respective organizations.
From being a startup to a scale-up, businesses today have the advantage of cutting-edge technology and a diverse talent pool to realize their vision. But when growth is happening at a faster pace and wider scale than expected, there’s a danger for some companies to fall behind.
This period of growth can cause small businesses to fail if they have limited resources to keep up with the velocity of change. For those ready to take the next step, however, their growth plans often include business process outsourcing (BPO) as a strategy.
The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the need for better collaboration between finance and procurement as organizations needed to act quickly to increase their focus on their cash position, cash flow and net working capital through a more collaborative finance-procurement relationship.
The relationship each side has with suppliers is synchronistic – procurement ensures the right goods and services at the right price with the right supplier, and finance ensures those same suppliers are paid on time, to confirm that hard-negotiated relationships are not jeopardized.
Can you imagine standing in the middle of a snow blizzard without a COAT on? No… me either. It doesn’t sound like a particularly fun way to spend an evening and let’s face it, no one wants to be exposed to the elements. But guess what? Your data is the same. Think about all the consequences for your health if you were to be stuck out in freezing, stormy weather without a layer of protection on: snotty nose, shivering or, even worse, hypothermia and frostbite.
LogicSource and Sourcing Industry Group recently conducted a joint procurement technology survey. The results revealed some consistent, yet alarming, trends in procurement spend analytics. In short, responses made it apparent that procurement organizations at-large have yet to solve their spend data quality challenges.
Three key findings from the survey indicate the market’s need for more expertise and ongoing data services as it relates to procurement spend analytics:
If you’re in Talent Acquisition or Procurement, you know all too well that hiring people – whether employee or non-employee – can be complex and time-consuming. When you’re busy with the day to day, it’s easy to get distracted from tackling process improvements. Yet, it’s not hard to simplify and modernize procedures for your hiring managers. Some simple improvements can make sourcing external workers a more streamlined process.
The stark reality is, many, if not most, businesses fall short when implementing automated processes within procurement. Company leaders driven to improve efficiency and flexibility often attempt to revolutionize their entire function at once, opting for the "done and dusted" approach; this is a flawed strategy.
What do the oracles say about society’s return to normalcy? Bill Gates is pinning his hopes on a semi-normal return to life in the spring of 2021, provided we rapidly adopt the vaccine. Dr. Fauci’s more conservative estimate suggests that we’ll enjoy movie theater experiences, indoor dining and regular school attendance by late fall.
At CDK, we've really focused on some of the changes needed to improve our customer support and experience. It's been a tremendous digital transformation with regard to what CDK does for our customers, but very importantly, what we are doing within the procurement and the supply chain team to help the business be more successful, take costs out, improve on-time delivery and then pick up some additional responsibilities as we've gone along the way.
Companies everywhere have come to accept the impacts of the pandemic on the future of work in stages that are eerily similar to the stages of grief: First, there was the wait-and-see phase, in which business leaders cautiously monitored news of the growing COVID-19 threat; then recovery mode, when enterprises were forced to adopt work-at-home functionality to keep their employees safe.
As the world slowly moves past the Covid-19 pandemic with the arrival of the vaccines, the job market is starting to gather itself and get back into momentum. But the newer challenges for organizations that arise daily have rendered recruitment to take a back seat. A well-established recruitment strategy can be your redeemer in the coming post-COVID era as you start re-establishing your company, even though it may be tricky to envision what HR will look like in a post-pandemic world.
According to McKinsey, global indirect procurement spend has been growing by an estimated 7% each year since 2011. Many of the inflationary factors driving this rise are well outside of most organizations’ control – so what can today’s procurement teams do to keep these essential costs under control?
According to The Hackett Group’s 2021 Procurement Key Issues Study, the 2020 crisis continues to shape the 2021 procurement agenda. Unprecedented business disruption forced procurement organizations to refocus on supporting critical business operations and harnessing the value from supplier relationships, resulting in a pivot toward supply assurance and spend cost control.
In 2021, spend cost reduction remains the top priority for the procurement agenda and procurement must provide stability to the enterprise through spend cost control and supply assurance.
