Exclusive – Anglo-French aircraft carrier cancelled – the real story

by Peter Smith on September 3, 2010

Liam Fox has scuppered the idea of a shared UK / French aircraft carrier.   Spend Matters have a good piece here including the first time I have seen the word ‘buggary’ included in that blog…and a classic Monty Python excerpt…but we can go one better.
We have just obtained a copy of a secret document from [...]

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Procurement news – September 3rd

by Peter Smith on September 3, 2010

Not such a pleasant taste; Compass fall out with mid-Essex Hospital Trust
Compass, the catering firm, is suing Mid Essex Hospital Services National Health Trust  hospital for imposing unreasonable contractual penalties, the Telegraph reports.
“Compass claims it was fined over £46,320 for supplying a box of out-of-date ketchup sachets, £84,540 for a chocolate mousse [...]

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‘New Year’s’ resolutions No. 2:Supply Risk Management

September 2, 2010

Continuing our slightly anomalous ‘New Year’s Resoultion’ series, today’s suggestion is to stand back and take a look at where ’supply risk’ is most critical in your organisation , category, or project.
Analysis around risk in the supply chain is often focused very much around the possibility of suppliers going out of business; and indeed this [...]

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IACCM ‘Ask the Expert’ today

September 2, 2010

Just a reminder;  at 4pm UK time today I am taking part in an IACCM  ‘Ask the Expert’ interview / call.
The theme is Contracting For Professional Services: How To Improve Results
You can register here; free to IACCM members, a very small fee otherwise.  Perhaps not surprisingly we will be [...]

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HP’s summer just keep getting better….

September 2, 2010

So, Hewlett-Packard, how was your summer?
Lost your CEO in a didn’t-actually-have-any-sex scandal, share price crashed, now paid $55 million to the US Government – without any admission of liability I should stress – based on payments made to prime contractors in return for them channelling spend to HP as part of those Primes’ large government [...]

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‘New Year’s’ resolutions – No.1: Engage those stakeholders

September 1, 2010

I described the other day how this feels to me like the beginning of the year; so on that theme, here is the first of a series of potential New Year’s Resolutions for procurement people.
Most of us are pretty good (or at least we like to think we are) at managing the external dimension [...]

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Measuring procurement savings – part 3

September 1, 2010

Continuing our series (after a slight delay) on savings measurement, we come on to attributing savings.  This was the issue that generated a question from a reader that set off this whole series- should savings that were clearly discovered and / or driven by business units be credited to ‘procurement’?
I think the answer to that [...]

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Reading Festival review

August 31, 2010

If you’re not a music fan, you may want to look away now…but before we get into the review, let me give a plug for Ticketmaster; far better than See Tickets, who finally delivered Reading tickets two days before the event!  And Viagogo, the authorised re-seller, has a somewhat complex process (to protect buyer and [...]

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Supplier / acquirer due diligence and Blackburn Rovers’ buyer

August 31, 2010

How much due diligence do you do on your new suppliers?  That obviously depends very heavily on how much you are buying from them and how critical it is to your organisation.  But it has surprised me over the years that such analysis is often very limited or even non-existent, including for potentially ’strategic’ suppliers.  [...]

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Back to work / school; is this the REAL New Year?

August 31, 2010

The first week in September always feels more like the ‘new year’ than January 1st to me.  It must be the academic year influence I suppose; obviously I went through that myself, and have a daughter now at university.  But my parents were both teachers, so perhaps growing up that made it feel more strongly [...]

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