Nike has an over-inventory problem, and other retailers should be worried too!What's going on:Nike's inventory rise is not an isolated incident! Most retail firms have a large pipeline of in-transit inventories (yet to reach their warehouses, given the long lead times at the time of order placement). This was done primarily due to an anticipated consumer demand increase which never happened!This is going to the industry's performance over the next 2-3 quarters. Result:Nike's

What is your roadmap to deliver 5% EBITDA margins in 2023? The top 1% of Procurement CPOs are solving big challenges of 2023 and beyond, whereas the rest of the 99% are preparing for "keeping the lights on" as a priority! This is how I will set my goals for 2023 1.) Priority Areas for Cost Management = 30% 2.) Risk Management and Negotiation Excellence = 20% 3.) Aggressive Automation = 10% 4.) Digital Process Governance = 20% 5.) Sustainability =20% Let me expand on the first

In summary #01 - Avoid PowerPoint presentations. Your teams are spending too much time on Powerpoint visualizations. You need decisions and not Artbook.You can make decisions based on a summary document in word.Learn from Amazon. #02 - Avoid Emails. This is so dated now! Sending emails doesn't get work done. Penalize the ones who are creating a culture of sending back-and-forth emails or waiting for a response for weeks after sending emails! Use Slack Emails should be rather

1) Allow Employees to be Entrepreneurs 😎 Instead of shelling out millions on substandard generalist 3rd-party solutions, allow your employees to work on 0-1 problems to solve high-impact solutions for you. There are so many Procurement problems that can be solved with ingenious in-house solutions rather than chasing a shiny conference with pretty presentations. Fund such employees and projects, be the first customer and co-own the equity/revenue share arrangements. 💸 💵I ca

We all have heard about the Pareto principle or the 80/20 rule. However, a bit more effective rule is the Price law. I use this rule (and not Pareto) to analyse my tail spend and find cost-saving opportunities! It states 50% of the output is generated by the square root of the total number of resources that are working or contributing to it. Need examples? Soon it is going to be appraisals! Let’s say you have 9 people in your team. So, according to Price law, 50% of your team

"If we have data, let's look at data. If all we have are opinions, let's go with mine." - James Love, CEO Netscape This post will only resonate with a handful of CPOs. Some might find this impractical, but here are the Top 5 things that you need to remove in 2023 from your Procurement Transformation programs and Be Bold about it. Either be Bold about it or go Home. 1) Stop Being Ok with Mediocrity: - Stop working with Legacy vendors. Read about community reviews and not rely

Spend analysis, and esourcing platforms are dead. Their teams are out of ideas, and it has been a while since that has been the case. Remove the fancy UI components and their flashy presentations, and look under the hood to see the adoption rates of their features. Most of the buyers will use only 3%~5% features of Spend analysis tools and esourcing platforms. The widely used feature in spend analysis is exporting data to excel so that buyers can do their own dicing and slici

1.) Tools that need more than 3 months of implementation time and end up as visualizations only! 2.) Sourcing process than runs longer than 4 months for complex tenders 3.) Management consulting firms where fee is not linked to success outcome 4.) Category managers who can only do 3Bid 1 buy type of Procurement and have zero insight in category intelligence 5.) Project managers and Generalists. I am not against the idea of having one but I would choose to work with the person

I want to share my learnings on What exactly a Procurement Excellence function should do? Most of the Procurement Excellence function starts as a thought experiment but ends up as an admin function or merely a support function to churn reports and ad-hoc business analysis work! It is because of weak value deliverables and a lack of strong use case implementations. To create a successful Procurement Excellence setup, one has to develop a comprehensive collection of workstreams

Let me talk about a few overhyped and ridiculously under utilised aspects in procurement Overhyped 1) Solving ESG using platforms: Your teams will end up logging answers to questions. The real activity is still done offline. Stop wasting time and money on “platforms”. Spend it on real on ground activity and community intelligence 2) Chatgpt and LLMs: It’s so good in so many domains (content, programming, general consumer queries) but procurement use cases are still quite fa

"De-Age" your Procurement How to build the right Procurement culture for Millennials? It is becoming tricky to attract and retain a high-quality talent pipeline in Procurement. Extremely difficult. Advanced Procurement CoEs demand niche skillsets. A Procurement category manager who can also code will always be my favourite yardstick (because I am one, and yes, I am bragging here:-P). Coming back to the point, Procurement is not cool enough YET to attract young talent and scal

Want to set up a high-performing Procurement Centre of Excellence that actually works? Here are my recommendations that will save you $300k in consulting dollars! 1) Build Fundamental Units: You MUST have these domains in your CoE a.) Process Efficiency, Governance, Digitization and Change Management : Have 4 dedicated resources here and ensure you get at least ONE data scientist here. Yes! You need one. KPI: 50k Man days saving/year 2.) Data & Dollars Team: In other words, N

1) Old thinking about Cost Savings Unless it hits the cash flow, stop overselling Cost Savings. The worst is when category managers classify cost avoidance as cost-saving! (I know this hurts!). Find ways to remit the dollars back to the income statement. More on this later in a detailed article! 2) Meaningless (Adoptionless) Procurement Digitization Do you also have procurement tools that took 6 months of implementation and 300k in implementation fees, and still you have only

Here are my recommendations that will save you $300k in consulting dollars! 1) Build Fundamental Units: You MUST have these domains in your CoE a.) Process Efficiency, Governance, Digitization and Change Management : Have 4 dedicated resources here and ensure you get at least ONE data scientist here. Yes! You need one. KPI: 50k Man days saving/year 2.) Data & Dollars Team: In other words, Negotiation Factory Team: My FAVOURITE! This is where you need data scientists who have

These are 3 disruptive procurement practices (Not easily palatable for risk-averse CPOs) to increase the output from your precious consulting dollars! 1.) Ready for this? Insource and Pay: If your consulting requirement is getting external insights and benchmarking, you can hire consultants. But, if your requirement is low-medium complexity optimisations, internal assessments, and fixing things internally, you can advertise such projects first on an Internal Marketplace (have

You know what REAL procurement excellence and digitization of top 1% players looks like? ✨ The most transformative and game changing work is boring, difficult and extremely tactical. There is absolutely zero chance of being philosophical in Procurement Transformation and Excel at the execution. (So filter out firms/people who lack execution & tactical capabilities. Goodbye Ineffective Project Managers/Consulting Firms/Conferences). Let me give you an insight what goes under t

🚀 Exciting News! 🚀 🌟 Received my "Top Procurement Voice" tag! 🙌 But there's no time as I've been busy preparing something BIG for you all: The Ultimate Guide to the Top 20 Cost Reduction Ideas is here! 💰💡 And here's the kicker - implementing these strategies can save you at least $200,000 in consulting fees and potentially a whopping million dollars in cost savings! 💸💲 Here's the deal - I need YOUR help! Let's shape your January 2024 Procurement Strategy together. 🔍�