As we all know, daily life can be trying and difficult for a plethora of reasons. It's also why we should all do our best to not sweat the small stuff. I try, for instance, to not go crazy over the cost of gasoline, but my patience is running on empty.

[More]

UPDATED Speaker Page
Event Breakdown
REGISTER HERE

They may have lost Dear Leader, but North Koreans still have a-ha.
(via The Daily What)

Getting your vitamins.
The Cost of Getting in Shape: Am I Getting Enough Protein/Iron/Zinc/Vitamin E??? -- WELL. I had NO IDEA that my personal eating habits would raise such ire from the masses in last week's comment section. To speak to one specifically: "exercise not making you thin" brings up a good point relating to this entire series: I don't want to be "thin." Believe me, I've been thin. As a teenager I shot from 5'4 to 5'10 in two years and all the calories in the world couldn't keep up with me. Had I started smoking and kept my diet limited to diuretic teas and eating six almonds a day, perhaps today I could be trotting the runways at Fashion Week instead of writing thi...well...that's another story. One where I wouldn't have been able to pull 1:41 split times (times I haven't seen since college) last night in our 2K team relay!

[More]

Spend Matters welcomes a rant from lead analyst Thomas Kase.

Even though Apple gets the most press about poor working conditions in China these days, we'd argue there's something else much larger, nefarious and cultural lurking beneath the timecard surface. As appealing as it might be to blame Apple for the errors of their Chinese suppliers' extremely abusive practices, this looks a lot like the results of a culture gap.

I'd argue it's not so much a China-specific issue either. Based on first-hand experiences from spending seven years in Japanese manufacturing industries in the '90s, the same workload expectations and obsessive/martinet managerial approaches were clearly on display all over Japan as well, with 'karoshi' or 'death-by-overwork' entering the vocabulary.

[More]

When I moved to Chicago ten years ago, one of the first things I did was register with the Chicago Cubs to get on the waitlist for season tickets. Having been a huge baseball fan and player when growing up in Philadelphia (and even on the "unofficial" JV team at Penn for a season), it's been a dream of mine for the past decade to get season tickets to arguably the most historic and cursed team in baseball -- within probably the best stadium ever built to watch the game itself (for everything else, Wrigley stinks, I'll admit). After a decade of waiting, the Cubs sent me a package saying our waiting list number was up and that we had to buy our seats or lose our spot on the list.

[More]

Spend Matters would like to welcome a guest post from Vantage Partners. See previous posts in this series here: Part 1 and Part 2

Buyers can enable providers to help them reach their goals in a number of ways. In this third part, we explore two additional outsourcing goals -- allowing the buyer to focus on core capabilities and moving more items from fixed to variable costs -- and how the buyer can help the provider enable them to achieve these goals.

Focusing on Core Capabilities
We often hear buyers say that they have outsourced certain "non-core" functions so that they can focus their attention and efforts on more important or strategic activities. When you charge functional experts with managing the service provider relationship, the result is often micromanagement. Rather than focusing on core activities, retained managers end up putting even more time and energy into the very work they said they outsourced.

[More]

Welcome, BravoSolution!
Spend Matters and MetalMiner are pleased to welcome BravoSolution as a Bronze Level sponsor of Commodity Edge: Sourcing Intelligence for the New Normal. Click here to register, here for a full event breakdown, and here to check out our confirmed list of speakers.

P2P KPIs!
Susie West's top 10 KPIs in purchase to pay -- They are critical to identifying problems and continuously improving. But what should the KPIs monitor in order to ensure every part of your purchase-to-pay business is as tight and as healthy as it can be? Should you have four or five? Or should you have one hundred? If you have one hundred, should you remove the 'K' in KPIs? A KPI should have a definition, so you know what's included. And it should be loaded - it should be meaningful.

[More]

Click here to read the first post in this series.

Based on Apple's 2012 Supplier Sustainability report, both in absolute and percentage terms, the largest increase in Apple's auditing programs appears in the "repeat audit" areas. This should not be a surprise, but rather a logical extension of marshaling supplier development efforts to focus on the largest suppliers that Apple continues to do business with. However, the level of first-time audits also hit an all time high for Apple, suggesting that they continue to work their way down to smaller and lower-tier suppliers. It would be fascinating to see the breakdown in results by supplier based on size, number of times audited and specific region, but alas, Apple does not provide us with these details. But it is worth noting that Apple did introduce two new categories of audits that it broke out separately for 2012: Process Safety Assessments and Specialized Environmental Audits. Of its total audits, roughly 10% (27 in total) comprised the former and just over 5% comprised the latter, of these two newly broken out categories.

[More]

For someone who has been researching and covering supply chain risk for a decade, it's extremely refreshing to see what once were esoteric topics become mainstream, albeit due to avoidable -- and unavoidable, in certain cases -- tragedies that disrupted global supply chains. But the topic has not just hit center stage from a boardroom perspective. It's now mainstream to the point where President Obama is compelled to take action and develop a National Strategy for Global Supply Chain Security. For those who have not yet read the announcement, it's worth spending more than the minute or two it takes to scan to really reflect on what it represents that the White House is getting involved in the topic. As far as we are aware, it appears to be the first time that a large government has called out supply chain risk and seeks to tackle the challenge head on -- given its importance to national and global security.

[More]