This post has been cross posted from Spend Matters UK/Europe. You can read the original post, authored by Peter Smith, here.

At some stage in the future, we may look back on this weekend as a turning point for the Euro, or even the whole direction of Europe and the integrated Europe ideal.

The Presidential election in France is the biggest event, but there is also the vital general election in Greece, local elections in Italy which will test the climate faced by the caretaker Prime Minster, Mario Monti, and a key regional election in Schleswig-Holstein which could weaken Angela Merkel's position in Germany.

If the socialist contender, Francois Hollande, wins in France, we will almost certainly see a move away from the purist "austerity is all" policy promulgated by the Sarkozy / Merkel alliance. At the very least, there will be a stronger focus on creating growth rather than purely cutting expenditure. Ironically perhaps, there is no chance of Hollande actually taking any of the classic measures to drive growth, such as de-regulation, opening up markets, or tax incentives for entrepreneurs. His prescription is re-negotiation of the EU fiscal pact, swingeing tax increase for the wealthy and more public works and other expensive job creation schemes.

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It's been awhile since we've posted what's going on with Spend Matters UK, Healthcare Matters, and MetalMiner. See below for what Peter, Tom, and Lisa/Taras/Stuart are up to.

From Spend Matters UK/Europe
PRGX and more on Spend Analytics – essential tools for procurement -- We introduced PRGX and their SpendTrax spend visibility platform here recently – we were impressed at our demo by its speed and usability. In part 2 today, we'll look at what you can do in terms of more detailed supplier analysis using this platform. The supplier management tool enables the user to dig into a specific supplier in more detail. As well as taking the basic spend data – probably from one or multiple ERP feeds – the platform enables the user to bring in other relevant external feeds, for instance from information providers like D & B or Bureau Van Dijk.

Management Consultancies Awards – saving lives, saving money... -- If you follow me on Twitter, you will have got all the results from the Management Consultancies Association annual awards dinner last Thursday. It was a very good event, even if it felt a little strange personally ; it's usually a CIPS event when I'm in Black Tie, and I'm used to knowing loads of people. Last week, 600 diners – and I knew about 4 people there!

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My colleague Peter Smith has been beating hard on the research drum of late. His latest paper is available for download here: Balancing Internal and External Service Provision -- Key Decisions for Procurement Professionals. This is one of the more generalized and observant papers Spend Matters has published over the years that accomplishes far more in scope than we usually set out to achieve in narrow studies and briefs. As Peter notes, this paper contains important and broader messages, including the challenge and opportunity of optimizing the use of resources from both inside and outside the organization, blending them successfully to achieve their goals.

If we go back 30 years or so to the beginning of Peter's career in procurement and when I was kid growing up in the early days of Reagan and Thatcher -- how we both miss those times -- virtually everything from the function or department was done by the internal staff of the organization. There was little in the way of automation or IT tools; management consultants were still a fairly exotic breed; and while there were other professional service providers in certain business areas already well established (such as consumer market research firms), there was little of that nature in the procurement space! It's shocking how much has changed in just a few decades.

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By Jason Busch and Peter Smith

My colleague Peter Smith recently penned a primer in the area of supplier management, which will be especially useful for those just coming up to speed on the topic and seeking to implement programs to address supply chain risk management and supplier performance management, among other areas. The paper can be downloaded from our research library: Supplier Lifecycle Management: Reduce risk, Improve Performance and drive Supplier Value. Peter frames his analysis by suggesting that the performance of a supplier has a huge impact on an organization's success and will ultimately determine how the procurement function and its leadership will be regarded by the business. Moreover, suppliers that provide an excellent product and service can provide real value -- regardless of the quality of the sourcing process or contract.

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Peter tackles the impending Olympics, supplier lifecycle management, the new CIPS website, and this intriguing-looking band:

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Duncan Jones (Forrester) on why Strategic Relationships Go Bad – part 1 -- Duncan Jones of Forrester has published an excellent and very interesting research paper, titled "Transform Your Strategic Supplier Relationships From Duels Into Duets". You can get it here if you're a Forrester subscriber – I think you have to pay if you're not.

Who owns your supplier? And does it matter? -- Wetherspoons, one of the UK's largest pub chains, reported their results last week. What was interesting was the comment of Tim Martin, chairman and founder, that although their cost pressures were increasing, he didn't think his customers were capable of accommodating increased prices. So he was planning to take the hit on margins, which of course is not what all the shareholders or City analysts wanted to hear. But Martin appears to follow the principle that if you put the customers first, then in time profits will follow, and shareholders will eventually be satisfied.

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I realized I hadn't done a UK round-up in quite some time, and if you're not reading the UK site regularly, you should be! Here's what Peter's been up to of late:

Our readers speak on outsourcing – an evil menace, or a force for good? -- A couple of readers came at it from the "all outsourcing is rubbish" angle. Well, it is simply too much of a fact of business life to reject the entire process completely. No organisation can do everything itself – the days of Henry Ford buying his own steel mills are long gone, and whether it is cleaning, audit, IT support, web hosting – we all "outsource" in some way. When you buy a ready meal from Tesco you're outsourcing something that our grandparents would have done themselves. So I don't think we can simply say, "outsourcing is wrong" or "the public sector shouldn't outsource". I do accept though, as Final Furlong pointed out, the success rate is way lower than it needs to be in both public and private sectors.

OB10 and why you should care about e-Invoicing -- We've promised (threatened?) to cover e-Invoicing a little more enthusiastically in 2012, so let's start now, with a word about OB10 and the recent announcement of the formation of the European e-Invoicing Service Providers Association (EESPA). The link between the two incidentally is Charles Bryant, who works with OB10 and is also the newly elected Vice-Chair of EESPA – the Chair is Esa Tihilä from Basware.

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In the first post in this series, we offered up the initial three items on a list contained in a Spend Matters UK/Europe research paper, Managing Indirect Services -- Procurement's Greatest Opportunity?, describing the reasons complex services procurement is often so difficult (and of course we provided our own commentary as well). Today, we'll feature four additional points from Peter Smith's paper, plus some additional thoughts. To begin, Peter's fourth observation is, "Services are often 'personal' to the budget holder, even in a corporate environment. Personal relationships can add a markedly different dynamic to procurement decisions compared to those made on purely objective business grounds."

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As we discussed earlier this week, my British partner in crime Peter Smith recently published a research paper titled Managing Indirect Services -- Procurement's Greatest Opportunity?. In it, Peter leverages some of the concepts from a book he recently co-authored, Buying Professional Services: How to Get Value for Money from Consultants and Other Professional Service Providers (Economist Books). One of the more succinct and refreshing aspects of his coverage of services procurement is his seven-step rationale for why organizations find it so hard to tackle services procurement and complex services categories for the first time compared to other direct and indirect spend areas. The first three items on Peter's list are:

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