Spend Matters Commentators
Jason Busch is passionate about how companies, governments and individuals manage, spend and save money. While his forte is writing and speaking about procurement, politics and economic issues, Jason has significant firsthand experience creating and launching new products and solutions in the supply chain and sourcing sectors. Throughout his career, he's also helped hundreds of companies save money through strategic sourcing and related initiatives, including finding the right technologies to kick their organizations into overdrive.
Jason's main focus at the moment is building Spend Matters, Spend Matters UK/Europe and MetalMiner into the world's top procurement, supply chain and commodity management resources. Launched in the fall of 2004, Spend Matters was the industry's first blog, but has since grown into the largest media and research site in the sector and the anchor property of a portfolio of sites. At Spend Matters, Jason personally covers a range of technology research areas including services procurement, P2P systems, supplier management / supply risk management, strategic sourcing and commodity management. Jason also serves as Managing Director of Azul Partners, a holding company with ownership interest in Spend Matters and other portfolio sites and organizations.
In previous lives before spending five-years at FreeMarkets in a range of corporate development, marketing and line roles, Jason was a management consultant and merchant banking analyst. He's also been a part-time journalist and columnist throughout most of his academic and professional career and has authored thousands of articles and white papers.
Jason holds both an MA in history and an undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania. Jason is married to fellow author and sourcing expert, Lisa Reisman. They have three sons and live in Chicago. Jason is an avid runner and can often be found training on Chicago's lakefront when he's not behind the screen of his Macbook or spending time with his family.
To contact Jason, send an email to: jbusch (at) spendmatters (dot) com
Gregg Brandyberry is a Partner and co-founder of Wildfire Commerce. A recognized pioneer in procurement technology, Gregg was most recently the VP Procurement of Global Systems and Operations at GlaxoSmithKline, a fortune 150 pharmaceuticals company. Mr. Brandyberry has over 30 years experience in a variety of industries including automotive, textile, manufactured goods, electronics and healthcare. He has experience in laboratory, quality, manufacturing, IT systems, operations, procurement and supply chain having held senior management roles in each discipline.
At GlaxoSmithKline, Brandyberry led the design, development and implementation of web enabled decision support systems, electronic sourcing and eProcurement. In addition he had responsibility for Supplier Diversity, Compliance and the electronic bidding and negotiation of over $4.0B/yr.in spend through a best practice worksourcing organization called the Global eSourcing Team. In 2003, under Gregg's leadership, GlaxoSmithKline was awarded the prestigious Charter Institute of Procurement and Supply award for "Best Use of Technology by a Procurement Organization". Additionally in 2005, AT Kearney identified GlaxoSmithKline as having deployed a global best practice portfolio of electronic procurement tools (2005 Assessment for Excellence in Procurement).
Mr. Brandyberry sits on many advisory boards including the National Minority Supplier Development Council – International Advisory Board, Purchasing Magazine Editorial Board, and is a Trustee for the Center For Strategic Sourcing Leadership (CSSL).
In 2008, Mr Brandyberry was named as one of the Top 25 Supply Chain Executives by Supply Chain and Logistics magazine. He was also recognized as one of the Top 100 Most Inspirational Pharmaceuticals Executives by PharmaVoice100 (the first supply chain executive to achieve this award). Most recently he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by Emptoris, LLC the leading eSourcing, Spend Analytics and Contract Management technology provider.
Mr. Brandyberry has a deep passion for providing a "hand-up" for small diverse businesses and communities. He is a founding board member of a non profit "Adopt a Neighborhood for Development (A.N.D.) with active programs in the Mantua community of Philadelphia, PA and the City of Durham, NC. He lives in the Northern Liberties section of downtown Philadelphia.
To contact Gregg, send an email to: greggbrandyberry (at) wildfirecommerce (dot) com
Dr. Brown is a dynamic, task-oriented technical leader with over 17 years of experience in process optimization and management, product management, project management, software development, web application, quality assurance, information technology, and information security.
By successfully listening to clients and evaluating markets, Dr. Brown has developed many easy-to-use SaaS products that address operational inefficiencies by applying the right mix of technology and process change in areas such as payroll processing, employment benefits, human capital management, supply chain operations, logistics and production planning.
For the past seven years he has applied this experience in supply chain, logistics, and procurement at CombineNet, where he was the Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Product Management, overseeing the product vision and strategy for bringing combinatorial optimization to the sourcing professional's desktop.
Prior to his experience at CombineNet, Dr. Brown was the Chief Technology Officer at two online payroll and benefits companies, where he developed various applications that empowered professional employer organizations and end employers to more efficiently process payroll and benefits while being able to see total liabilities before final submission.
Dr. Brown received a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from the University of California at Davis and a Masters of Science and Doctorate of Philosophy in Statistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Brown can be reached via e-mail at jason (dot) brown (@ )alumni (dot) ounce (dot) edu or on LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/in/drjasonbrown.
William Busch is VP for Business Development and Sales of Spend Matters and is also Jason's dad. He serves in a similar business development capacity for Spend Matters affiliate blog, Metal Miner and is Copy Editor for Spend Matters. Before joining Spend Matters, Bill spent 13 years in general contracting restaurant construction and construction maintenance as well as residential rehabilitation and remodeling.
Bill got his start in category procurement and operations at a young age, serving as the Director of Reprographics (the in-house printing operation) for the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in the 70s and 80s. In this role, he negotiated the purchase of all copiers, copier vending, paper and supplies campus wide. Bill completed most of the curriculum for an MBA at Wharton before dropping out to become Founder and President of XL Graphics, Inc., a full service graphic design and printing company, which he ran for close to a decade. He holds a BA from Temple University, Cum Laude, in economics.
Bill lives in the Roxborough section of Philadelphia. He is an avid boater, fisherman and musician and can be found spending much of the summer months in Margate, NJ. To contact Bill, send an email to: wbusch (at) spendmatters (dot) com
Mr. Daniels is the President of Capsaicin LLC, which powers private-labeled software products that deliver transparency, context and action for next-generation applications and business intelligence. His wide-ranging professional experience incorporates product and IP development, business intelligence, marketing, shared services operations, strategic sourcing, and business process outsourcing.
Capsaicin provides its partners a unique opportunity to differentiate and enhance their offerings to deliver faster, better and more profitable results through creating competitive advantage. Capsaicin has proven results with Fortune 100 companies delivering a wide range of transactional, data integration and business intelligence solutions including marketing optimization, spend & risk management, research, and others.
Prior to founding Capsaicin LLC, Mr. Daniels was a founder at JVKellyGroup, a spend management consulting firm that was acquired by D&B. Mr. Daniels was also a founding partner and COO of Global 1000 Advisors LLC, a venture consulting firm focused on the creation and management of intellectual property assets. Global 1000 Advisors was spun-out of Nextera Enterprises, where Mr. Daniels previously served as Chief Engagement Officer.
Mr. Daniels also previously served as VP Director of Strategic Business Development at Citibank, where he was involved in shared services and eCommerce. Prior to Citibank, Mr. Daniels co-founded Document Concepts, a technology-oriented document solutions company.
Mr. Daniels received his BA with departmental and thesis honors from Washington College.
Lynn James Everard – Contributor
Lynn James Everard is a Value Strategist with over twenty-seven years of procurement and value management experience. As a lifelong target of supplier sales campaigns he knows what customers need and want from their suppliers. He uses his expertise in procurement, contract management and strategy development to help buyers maximize the value they get from their suppliers and he helps suppliers effectively communicate the economic value of their products and services to their customers. He has experience in a number of vital business sectors including health care, services, distribution and Information Technology. Mr. Everard has earned the Lifetime Certified Purchasing Manager (C.P.M.) designation from the Institute for Supply Management. Over his career he has achieved validated cost savings in excess of twenty-five million dollars.
Mr. Everard's expertise has been sought out by government agencies and law firms. He has given testimony before the U.S. Senate Antitrust Subcommittee, the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission. Mr. Everard has also served as an expert witness and advisor in a number of antitrust litigation cases and has served as a resource to a number of states' Attorneys General.
Everard is the author of over one hundred published articles, research reports and white papers. He was co-founder of the Foundation for Healthcare Integrity. Mr. Everard holds a bachelors degree from SUNY at Buffalo and has done significant course work in Materials Management, Accounting, and Finance. He lives in Coconut Creek, FL.
To contact Lynn, please send an email to: leverard (at) bellsouth (dot) net
Sherry R. Gordon is President of the Value Chain Group. Sherry is an innovator in enterprise measurement and performance improvement techniques and a thought leader in supplier performance management. She brings many years of experience as a practitioner, management consultant, entrepreneur and business person.
After the acquisition of her company, Valuedge, she was Vice President, Supplier Performance at Emptoris, a leading provider of enterprise supply management software solutions. Valuedge's supplier assessment software became part of Emptoris' software suite.
Before founding Valuedge, where she was President, and CEO, she ran the New England Suppliers Institute (NESI), a non-profit organization focused on improving the customer-supplier relationship and also improving supplier performance via lean enterprise practices adoption in the supply base, supplier development and education. NESI offered some of the first public workshops in the country for suppliers on lean manufacturing.
Sherry worked for manufacturing and distribution companies as well as the consulting firms Arthur D. Little, Inc. and the former Arthur Young. Besides supply chain management, Sherry has a background in quality, materials management and lean enterprise and was an examiner for the Baldrige-based Mass Excellence Award for two years.
In 1999, she published an e-book, "Improving Company Performance Through Supply Chain Management Practices". Sherry produced a video in 2000: Creating the Lean Supply Chain: Implementation Stories. She appeared in the February 2002 ISM Satellite Seminar: "Complexity Management: Webs, Chains and Other Business Relationship Models". In 2002 and 2005, Sherry was chosen by Supply and Demand Chain Executive magazine as a "Pro to Know". Her article, "Seven Steps to Measure Supplier Performance" appeared in the August 2005 issue of Quality Progress.
She wrote the book, Supplier Evaluation and Performance Excellence: A Guide to Meaningful Metrics and Successful Results published by J. Ross Publishing in 2008.
Sherry is a frequent speaker on enterprise performance improvement and supply chain topics and has spoken at events for ISM (Institute for Supply Management), The Conference Board, ASQ (American Quality Society), the Supply Chain Council, ASMI, PMAC (Purchasing Management Association of Canada), LAI (Lean Aerospace Initiative) and others. Sherry has been active in AME (Association for Manufacturing Excellence) as Chairperson of the 2004, 2005 and 2006 AME/IndustryWeek Best Plants Conferences. She is on the Board of Advisers for the Entrepreneurship Program at the Simmons College School of Management.
Ms. Gordon has a B.A. from University of Michigan, M.A. from Columbia University, and MBA from Simmons School of Management. Sherry lives in the Concord, MA.
To contact Sherry, send an email to: sgordon (at) valuechaingroup (dot) com
Thomas Kase’s main passion in life is the interaction between information technology, how business is conducted, and how the two continue to shape each other – particularly in the corporate supply chain. He has extensive direct experience from both the buy and sell-sides of the negotiation table. He has provided consulting or otherwise supported a long line of Fortune 500 organizations and their procurement professionals, and has worked as a solutions advisor and event (RFx) manager for several solutions providers including Procuri (currently Ariba) and AECsoft USA (currently SciQuest). During the dot-com days, Thomas was the co-founder and CTO of a technology company focused on B2B solutions. Before that, he worked in the Japanese process control, automotive, and IT industries, a stint that will lend additional international perspective to the Spend Matters team.
Thomas grew up in Sweden (the country of SAABs and Volvos, not to be confused with the land of fine watches further south in Europe), where he completed his undergraduate studies with degrees in mechanical engineering and econometrics from Swedish universities. Thomas’ MBA studies were conducted at Yale’s School of Management, but were interrupted to start his own company.
From travelling to over 50 countries and living in Europe, Japan, and all over the US, Thomas knows how to move his household without breaking anything – and in the process he has developed considerable fluency in English, Swedish, Japanese, German -- and has the ability to sound quite convincing in a few others.
Thomas lives with wife and two daughters in the Atlanta area, where he spends his free time with family, various projects around the house, or with one of his vehicles.
Jason Magidson is a Partner and Co-Founder of Wildfire Commerce. Most recently, Magidson was Director of Innovation Processes at GlaxoSmithKline, where he helped many parts of the business recreate themselves to generate new sources of revenue and reduce costs.
A highly successful implementer of transformation and innovation that drives bottom-line results, Dr. Magidson has helped organizations generate hundreds of millions of dollars (through a combination of sales increases and cost reductions). He has worked with functions including: sales training; sales compensation; procurement; logistics and distribution; research & development; manufacturing; recruiting; finance; and, marketing.
In a previous role at GlaxoSmithKline, as Director of Global Procurement Systems and Processes, Dr. Magidson managed a team that created and implemented an award-winning suite of procurement systems. These systems received an award from Baseline ROI Magazine for highest return on investment on technology (5000% ROI over three years). Jason also played a major role developing, managing, and supporting Procurement's corporate social responsibility programs.
Prior to joining GlaxoSmithKline, Magidson spent ten years working in a pioneering management education and advisory firm (co-founded by Russell Ackoff) that served numerous Fortune 1000 organizations, nonprofits, community groups, and government agencies. Clients included IKEA, DuPont, Anheuser-Busch, and Super Fresh (A&P).
Dr. Magidson's publications include articles in Harvard Business Review and the Journal of Product Innovation Management. He has also written two books: Idealized Design: How to Dissolve Tomorrow's Crisis Today (co-authored with Russell Ackoff and Herb Addison; 2006) and Laughter is the SALT of Life (2008).
Dr. Magidson received his undergraduate degree from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. from The Union Institute & University. He serves as President of the Board of Directors of Adopt a Neighborhood for Development, which facilitates corporate-community partnerships that promote neighborhood self-development. Dr. Magidson lives in Haverford, Pennsylvania.
To contact Jason, send an email to: jasonmagidson (at) wildfirecommerce (dot) com
As a consultant and executive, Thom has personally advised dozens of senior executives around the world on issues ranging from strategic sourcing and supply chain to strategy and change management. His track record of bottom-line results for clients across many industries from aerospace to IT services is valued in the billions of dollars. His clients include Bayer, ServiceMaster, Masonite, Hertz, TRW, Celanese, W. R. Grace Chemicals, United Technologies, Robert Mondavi, and Eaton. He has also worked with major private equity firms including KKR and Clayton, Dublier & Rice.
Prior to founding Tenzing Consulting, Thom was a vice president at FreeMarkets and part of the early executive leadership team that pioneered online bidding and “e- auctions” that have revolutionized 21st century procurement. His contributions were instrumental in growing the company from $1 million in 1998 to nearly $200 million in 2001 clearly establishing it as the leading global business-to-business e- marketplace. FreeMarkets was acquired by Ariba in 2004. Thom began his consulting career at Gemini Consulting in 1988 where he was a vice president and was also a principal at A. T. Kearney from 1996 to 1998.
Thom has a BA in Economics from of the University of Virginia and an MBA in Quantitative Analysis from The College of William and Mary. He is an instrument-rated private pilot and currently resides in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Sheena Moore is the full-time Associate Editor at Spend Matters, and comes to us from a heavy writing, editing, and marketing background. As a print producer at Publicis in the West, Sheena was responsible for creating national and global print campaigns for a variety of large-name clients. She has also worked as a freelance proofreader/copyeditor for clients such as Cole & Weber United, Merkle, and Schawk! Marketing. She now regularly contributes to Spend Matters.
Sheena completed BAs in English Literature and Political Science at the University of Washington in Seattle, after which she served as an intern in the literature office of the National Endowment for the Arts, in Washington DC. She is currently pursuing a MA in English Literature at DePaul University.
In her free time, she coaches a rowing team for breast cancer survivors (http://www.recoveryonwater.org), rows herself at Lincoln Park Boat Club in Chicago, travels as much as she can, reads altogether too many books, collects records (yes, the vinyl ones), and misses skiing in Washington State, where she grew up.
To contact Sheena, send an email to: smoore (at) spendmatters (dot) com
Rees Morrison, Esq. is the President of Rees Morrison Associates (RMA). For the past 20 years, Rees has consulted solely to law departments in the areas of cost reduction, operational reviews, spend control, re-engineering, structure and organization assessments, client satisfaction, technology, benchmarking, and other issues. Rees has assisted more than 250 law departments.
Before RMA, Morrison was a partner at Thomson/Hildebrandt for six years, Altman Weil for five years, and Arthur Andersen for four years, before which he served as the Consulting Assistant to the General Counsel of Merck. Before that Morrison was a Director in the Law Department Group of Price Waterhouse, vice president of two software firms, and an associate at Weil Gotshal & Manges and two other law firms.
Graduating from Harvard College in 1974 (magna cum laude), Morrison earned his law degree from Columbia Law School (1978) and an LLM from New York University (1984). He taught at Cardozo Law School and moderated the Lexis Counsel Connect Law Department Management discussion section.
He is a Certified Management Consultant, a member of Scribes, a fellow of the College of Law Practice Management, and has been on the Board of Advisors of Corporate Counselor, Law Department Management, and Metropolitan Corporate Counsel. A Life Fellow of the American Bar Foundation, he has participated in the ABA's Law Practice Management Section and ACC's Law Department Management Committee.
Morrison founded the monthly, Managing Litigation Costs. He has addressed more than 120 groups in his career, co-chaired 11 law-department management conferences and has published more than 140 articles. Among his six books are Law Department Benchmarks: Myths Metrics and Management (Glasser LegalWorks 2nd ed. 2001); Client Satisfaction for Law Departments (Corp. Legal Times 2003); and Law Department Administrators: Lessons from Leaders (Hildebrandt Inst. 2004). Morrison started the Association of Consultants to Law Departments.
He hosts the blog LawDepartmentManagementblog.com, having written 3,900+ posts. Rees lives in Princeton, New Jersey .
To contact Reese, send an email to: Rees (at) ReesMorrison (dot) com
Paul Noël readily accepts his nature as a "middleman". Throughout his career, Paul has bounced back and forth between the buying and the selling sides of companies stitching together processes that better bridge that gap. He has worn hats on both sides and used those experiences to build industry-leading solutions that continue to provide value to both buyers and suppliers in equal measure; this being the only enduring value a middleman can deliver.
Paul is just off a 5 1/2 year stint at Ariba as a major driver of their transformation from a traditional enterprise software provider to a largely SaaS company. Finding himself at the confluence of Softface's enrichment technologies, Ariba's analytics and FreeMarkets' shared-services methodologies, Paul pulled all three together to form Ariba's first OnDemand solution: Spend Visibility. He then gave the solution an extra push to become viable in the market by actively selling and even implementing at the first few customers.
What emerged became a model within Ariba for how the SaaS/OnDemand transformation would roll out and how Ariba would manage the change. Paul went on to take over the Procurement and Network side of Ariba's offerings and bring to market Ariba's Procure-to-Pay offering that successfully brought together all the transactional processes in spend management in one clean solution. With his work on the Network, Paul was keen to increase the value for the supplier side of the P2P equation both to ensure higher adoption and enablement and to stay true to his middleman roots.
Paul also directed Product Management at Softface and Blackhog prior to Ariba. In both cases, he lent his procurement and spend management expertise to the building of their products and his sales and marketing expertise to their success in the market.
For the decade before Paul was building software-based solutions, he was in companies building solutions for both the buying and the selling processes. His most seminal experience came from his first job out of school when he was employed for the subsidiary of a medium-sized Japanese trading company. He and his manager were given one year to find a niche where they could make some money. Paul found one in being a sub-contract manufacturer for the burgeoning networking hardware industry. Essentially, he sold to networking companies that he could buy, kit, assemble, test and package network adapter cards for them. After success with small volumes in done locally in Silicon Valley, Paul took his clients' increased volume requirements to China and South Asia, sourcing assembly, components and packaging throughout the region. Managing all aspects of the buying, manufacturing and selling of his services and then seeing the shrinking margins of sub-contract management in volume production, Paul became keenly aware of the need for middlemen to always live by the value they bring.
Paul graduated cum laude from Santa Clara University and attended Sophia University in Tokyo where he learned to read, write and speak Japanese. He gets lots of practice being middleman with 3 young children at home and with his wife's extended family in Paris.
Often found blogging about metals and trade issues on Spend Matters affiliate blog, Metal Miner, Lisa Reisman is also a Contributing Editor to Spend Matters. Lisa Reisman serves as Co-Founder and Managing Director of Aptium Global. Founded in 2004, the firm's mission is to help domestic manufacturers reduce material costs particularly around metals and related metals services categories. Aptium Global helps industrial companies stay competitive on a global basis, preserving US jobs and improving shareholder returns.
Lisa Reisman has over 15 years of experience in management consulting and direct materials sourcing. In addition to past roles at Andersen and Deloitte Consulting, Lisa has also owned and operated her own metals trading company, sourcing and selling a full range of metal products from and to emerging markets including: Russia, China, India, Romania, Venezuela, Mexico, Taiwan, South Africa, Ghana, Pakistan and Israel. Her industry expertise spans multiple sectors within manufacturing. She has worked in the aerospace and defense, trucking and shipbuilding industries as a trader and in the high tech, automotive, earthmoving equipment, building products/construction industries as a consultant.
Lisa is regarded in the manufacturing world as a thought leader and influencer, and as an advocate for privately held US manufacturers. She has written over fifty whitepapers and columns on manufacturing, economics, and global sourcing. Most recently, she and partner Stuart Burns launched the blog MetalMiner. Lisa is an evangelist of the concept of Lean Sourcing, an approach to direct material cost reduction which is based on the concepts of strategic sourcing and lean manufacturing. It requires organizations to understand and award supplier contracts by taking into account all factors that influence total enterprise cost. Lean Sourcing helps companies not only to reduce unit prices for key materials on a one time basis, but it creates sustainable cost reduction approaches that continue to pay dividends for years.
Lisa earned her MPA from New York University, where she received a Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Administration Fellowship. She also holds a BA in political science and journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As an expert in global trade and supply chain issues, Lisa is INCOTERM certified and holds a Six Sigma Black Belt. Her opinions have been quoted in numerous industry trade magazines such as Business Credit Magazine, Darwin Magazine, The Industry Standard, GlobalAutoIndustry and Automotive Industry Action Guide among others. She has recently authored a column on Lean Sourcing in tight commodity markets for Modern Plastics Worldwide. She currently serves as Editor-at-Large of Surplus Record, an industrial publication with a circulation of 75,000. Lisa is a regular columnist for the blog: Spend Matters.
Lisa is married to fellow blogger, Jason Busch. They live in Chicago with their three sons.
Robert A. Rudzki, a former Fortune 500 financial and procurement executive, is President of Greybeard Advisors LLC. Greybeard is a firm comprised of deeply-experienced industry executives and managers. Since its formation 5 years ago, Greybeard has become a leading provider of advisory services for procurement transformation, strategic sourcing and supply chain management. Mr. Rudzki has personally been an advisor to some of the leading companies in major industry sectors.
Prior to founding Greybeard Advisors in 2004, Mr. Rudzki served as Senior Vice President for Bayer Corp, the North American subsidiary of Bayer AG. At Bayer, he led a nationally-recognized transformation that generated significant improvements in costs and working capital, and was a finalist for Purchasing Magazine's Medal of Excellence. Prior to Bayer, he was an executive at Bethlehem Steel Corp., where he oversaw Bethlehem's global procurement and logistics activities. During his tenure, Bethlehem's procurement organization was recognized as "top quartile" in a global benchmarking study conducted by A.T. Kearney, and was also twice recognized by Purchasing Magazine as a "Best Place to Work."
A frequent speaker at conferences, Mr. Rudzki is co-author of the supply management best seller Straight to the Bottom Line®, and is co-author of On-Demand Supply Management. He is also the author of the leadership book Beat the Odds: Avoid Corporate Death and Build a Resilient Enterprise.
Mark Schaffner is the Vice President of Marketing for Verian Technologies, a leading provider of purchasing and invoice automation solutions. Mark has worked in a variety of capacities at Verian Technologies since 1997. Mark's unique perspective on supply chain issues comes from his experience helping organizations reduce costs, increase productivity and enhance financial visibility. Mark's particular expertise has been helping large organizations use technology to achieve their business objectives.
Prior to his time at Verian Technologies, Mark held the roles of Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Chief Operating Officer and CEO of software and technical services companies. In addition to this experience, Mark held the role of CEO for a large medical distribution company.
A lifelong student of business, Mark has a personal library of over 500 books on business strategy, operation, finance, marketing and sales. He claims to have read most of the books, but the only proof we have of his education are two diplomas. One a bachelor's degree in business administration from Bowling Green State University and the other an MBA from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
To prepare for his blog postings, Mark scours news sites to see how today's stories will impact supply chain issues tomorrow. But he also has a fondness for pop culture, hence his references to Dominoes Pizza, Kermit the Frog and Best Buy.
Mark's claim to fame around Verian is that he's the only person in the company (and maybe Charlotte) with an iPhone and a BlackBerry, one of which is always ringing. When he's not at work, Mark is chasing around three teenagers at home.
You can read more of Mark's postings at http://www.verian.com/blog/. To contact Mark, send an email to: mschaffner (at) verian (dot) com
Peter is one of the UK's leading authorities on procurement and a professional leader with considerable expertise and experience in public and private sector procurement issues. He has an MA in Mathematics from Cambridge University, is a Fellow and was 2003 President of the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply, the largest global Institute in this sector.
His management career included spells as a senior manager with the Mars Group, then Procurement Director roles for the Department of Social Security (the DSS), the Dun and Bradstreet Corporation Europe, and the NatWest Group. Peter founded 'Procurement Excellence' in '04, and since then has won significant strategic consulting, interim management and training work, with a particular focus on Government clients. He worked on implementation of the Gershon Efficiency Review, and was responsible in 2005 for the development and implementation of the UK National Police Procurement Centre, acting as its first Director.
Peter developed the best practice model of procurement used by the UK Finance Ministry to review all Government Departments' performance and has also worked for the National Audit Office and Audit Commission in the UK. He also holds two non-executive positions; as a Commissioner for the Legal Services Commission, which manages the UK's £2 billion p.a. Legal Aid programme, and for Remploy, the UK's leading provider of employment services for disabled people. His first (co-authored) book, "Buying Professional Services" will be published by the Economist Books in early 2010.
Peter lives in Surrey with his wife, Jane and cat; his daughter is at university. When he is not thinking about procurement, he enjoys food, wine, sport (watching and doing) and music (rock, indie, country, folk, Americana...)
