Preliminary Agenda Page

Transactional To Strategic

1) Moving From Transactional Sourcing To Strategic Sourcing: Streamlining Your External And Internal Decision Guiding Systems

• Evaluating your decision guiding systems and procedures: What are the key areas that you should be concentrating on?
• Reviewing internal influence factors to ensure they are aligned with your global cost management strategies
• Ensuring effective transactional efficiencies by upgrading manual systems
• Evaluating your supplier rationalization strategies to reduce redundancies in your supply base while strengthening key relationships
• Addressing internal change management issues to ensure cohesiveness
• Constantly monitoring and measuring your cost management strategies through key measurement metrics

2) Capitalizing On Synergies Across Your Procurement Organization To Drive Cost Savings And Process Efficiencies

• Identifying areas for potential collaboration across direct and indirect businesses
• Technology
• Processes
• Successfully blending existing procurement platforms and processes
• Reaping expected and unexpected benefits from internal collaboration
• Evaluating the governance considerations between a central and decentralized (where there is a strong finance department) model
• Adopting tailored strategies to model your procurement organization and structure

3) Optimizing Change Management Strategies To Reduce Costs While Supporting Dynamic Business Growth And New Business Opportunities

• Organizing a strategic commodity development action plan, determining market trends and key drivers
• Making a convincing argument for renegotiation to open doors for additional partnerships and leverage pricing
• Reducing costs by utilizing sourcing events to identify potential partnerships
• Addressing each constituency in a unique way to increase levels of success

4) Adopting Internal Controls To Drive Compliance And Reduce Maverick Spend

• Overcoming the biggest challenges of controlling spend:
• Performance measurement
• Developing a contract that minimizes variances
• Adopting e-procurement solutions to do away with individual, one-off spend
• Communicating the benefits of compliance in order to secure internal buy-in
• Analyzing data to determine the success of your internal control initiative

5) Evaluating The Complexity Of Supply Channels And Effectively Managing Incumbent Suppliers

• Identifying a purchaser to best manage an incumbent supplier and acquisition process
• Effectively communicating the criticality of supplier performance
• Evaluating current pricing and improving supplier performance by negotiating multiple delivery capabilities
• Discovering how to create a win-win environment for your organization and your incumbent suppliers
• Identifying tips for making key incumbent supplier relationships measurable and sustainable for the future
• Developing a process to maximize the benefits from your incumbent supplier base

6) Streamlining Your Ability To Accurately Forecast Material Costs

• Creating the knowledge base to achieving solid and useful good volume data
• Obtaining accurate external market data and initiatives
• Forecasting and evaluating against all potential scenarios to avoid supply inconsistencies
• Enabling contingency plans to ensure delivery of vital materials

7) Effective Data Cleansing: Effectively Standardizing Vital Processes To Enhance Your Data Warehouse

• Effectively inspecting data for errors, inconsistencies, redundancies and incomplete information
• Ensuring data quality and verifying limiting data entry points
• Matching, merging and linking data from a variety of disparate sources
• Enhancing data using information from both internal and external information sources
• Consistently checking and controlling data integrity over time

Bilateral Accountability

8) Developing A Customer Of Choice Evaluation From Your Suppliers

• Stratifying your supply base and categorizing your suppliers as strategic or preferred
• Determining if there is alignment between your identification of a strategic supplier and the suppliers identification of a strategic customer
• Developing strategies for suppliers to allow input into your organization as a customer
• Creating a feedback loop and developing tools to utilize and streamline the evaluation process
• Surveys
• Supplier forums
• Ensuring continuous improvement by clearly communicating initiatives and forecasts

9) Panel Session: Getting The Most Out Of Your Strategic Sourcing Efforts

• Evaluating electronic tools and avoiding those that depersonalize the process
• Utilizing bid optimization and ensuring the procurement is of sufficient value
• Exploring the number of suppliers, items and delivery points for each purchase
• Capturing low-hanging fruit while sustaining savings in negotiation techniques and processes
• Exploring how to get the supply chain to adopt a better solutions to your sourcing – allowing suppliers to express their expectations and methods of delivery

Minority Spend

10) Optimizing Your Minority Spend To Streamline Strategic Partnerships

• Implementing formal definitions of Minorities and individual compliance conditions
• Establishing Minority spend organizations within each of your spend categories
• Establishing tracking and accounting systems to meet the formal definitions
• Integrating research and development, strategic sourcing, and purchasing processes with new Minority Spend processes
• Developing accurate reporting and management systems

E-Procurement

11) Maximizing The Return On Your E-Procurement Solution Investment

• Identifying your business objectives and effectively communicating your goals throughout the organization
• Determining the functions you plan to automate, including:
• Collaboration
• Supplier scorecards and feedback
• Spend management and visibility
• Payment visibility
• Contract management
• Weighing the benefits of on-demand vs. hosted solutions to meet  your organization’s needs 
• Considering the ability of your solution to address long-term scalability requirements

12) Managing Your Supply Base Through A Web-based E-Procurement System

• Understanding you do not need to be centralized in order to oversee purchasing targets and goals
• Integrating multiple facilities and initiating training initiatives
• Utilizing leverage-based buying and spend reports to decrease multiple commodity purchases
• Analyzing projections and cost saving targets on a daily basis

13) E-Metrics: Effectively Monitoring Your Electronic Pricing, Delivery And Performance

• Determining how suppliers will be measured and the frequency of measurement
• Establishing the list of KPI’s by identifying the elements of indirect goods or services and creating a methodology for measurement
• Successfully obtaining data once the scorecard has been developed
• Ensuring flexibility of scorecard metrics
• Aligning supplier relationships to ensure consistency throughout multiple mediums
• Optimizing accounts receivable and accounts payable to ensure detailed tracking
• Consistently communicating results and developing a two-way feedback system

14) Panel Session: Utilizing E-Procurement To Forecast Future Supply Projections

• Analyzing historic data to create an accurate forecast
• Determining the exact usage of the purchase good or service
• Evaluating the vendor market place for service capabilities
• Determining when to tweak data to avoid the “just-in time process”
• Strategically managing supply costs for commodities

15) Utilizing Master Data Management As An Enabler of E-Procurement And Sourcing

• Centralizing and standardizing information to feed the MDM to your transactional systems
• Evaluating tools to implement centralized price management
• Standardizing policy and procedures to roll out to the entire purchasing organization
• Completing the build up of the logical data model with all required attributes while preparing for development

16) Panel Session: Evaluating Today’s E-Procurement Best Practice Application Platforms

• What are the existing gaps and how can you work to develop a recommended suite of tools to upgrade
• Exploring how they integrate with other applications that are available
• Where is today’s focus on internet portals
• Exploring where integrated connectivity and visibility fit into the supply chain
• Efficiently transferring vendor-management activities to the supplier
• Determining which software applications today are most effective and what’s coming down the pike for next generation software applications 

17) Catalog And Product Content Management: Achieving Enterprise-Wide Savings By Implementing E-Procurement And Sourcing Systems More Efficiently

• Automating catalog management activities where possible
• Managing catalog creation and changes, and improving content quality across the board
• Enabling supplier self-help for catalog creation
• Providing services to support and train your suppliers
• Allowing internal staff to optimize this process so they can focus on other value-added functions

18) Panel Session: Utilizing E-Procurement To Leverage Your Supplier’s Knowledge

• Creating a roadmap of key supplier initiatives and challenges  
• Utilizing the full functionality of the web for transaction processing, report viewing, and collaborative information sharing
• Exploring strategies to leverage the knowledge and expertise of suppliers to the maximum extent possible
• Identifying today’s key web tools to enable suppler self-service

19) Effectively Integrating E-Procurement Into Your Sourcing Processes

• Analyzing how you’re tying your e-tools into everyday business
• How can they fit into a robust supplier segmentation
• Effectively educating your workforce when it’s appropriate to use which e-tool and when
• Evaluating how you coordinate the effort so it’s not a standalone process

EIPP And Procure-To-Pay

20) Panel Session: Using Electronic Invoice Presentment And Payment To (EIPP) To Cut Processing Costs

• Exploring how EIPP might affect the future of receivables management
• Effective ways to use EIPP to earn early payment discounts
• Identifying how the systems are developed and implemented into the revenue chain process
• Exploring best practices in EIPP applications to earn early payment discounts
• Defining strategies to maximize productivity – using EIPP systems in dispute resolution, to automate cash flow forecasting, to offer multiple payment options

21) Gaining Spend Control Of Electronic Invoice Presentment And Payment Solutions 

• Discovering how your organizational goals benefit from the advantages of transitioning to an automated procurement solution
• Realizing the cost benefits of automating links between suppliers and internal users
• Examining lessons learned and benchmarking automation systems adoption
• Technology
• Process
• Creating ‘usability’ within your internal and external user-guidelines

22) Functionally Aligning Procurement And Accounts Payable For Maximum Results

• Evaluating strategies to transition from a legacy process to an integrated, cross-functional general procurement and accounts payable application support system
• Providing fields for collecting data for supporting applications
• Effectively automating accounts payable for efficiency and public accountability
• Defining new roles within procurement and accounts payable for strategic financial relevance

23) Utilizing P-Cards To Streamline P2P Efficiencies

• Providing an efficient and less costly P2P process
• Enabling more flexible purchasing and ordering processes
• Complying with internal controls by:
• Creating card program compliance
• Enabling processing and transactional reporting
• Maintaining a continuous reporting process

Measuring Supplier Performance and Scorecarding

24) Utilizing Scorecards For Supplier Classification And Continuous Improvement

• Exploring the capability to automate scorecards and real-time data collection methodologies
• Effectively structuring the measures the drive the right behavior from your supply base
• Evaluating the level of duration of continuous improvements to your strategy
• Determining how to best allocate the points in your scoring scale

25) Developing Supplier Scorecards And SLAs To Measure Performance And Establish Service Levels

• Gaining insight into best practices for establishing service levels with suppliers and measuring performance against those levels
• Adopting non-price performance metrics to manage the increasing number of spend categories being outsourced to third parties
• Applying lessons learned from direct procurement quality-centric metrics to the indirect space
• Effectively integrating supplier and buyer performance considerations into the strategic sourcing process
• Total cost of ownership
• Total value management
• Carefully monitoring supplier performance as core capabilities are increasingly outsourced to third parties

26) Panel Session: Getting The Most Out Of You Master Data Management System

• Creating straightforward tasks for your team to demonstrate benefits and generate excitement
• Allowing ample time for evaluating and planning of training criteria
• Evaluating tools to obtaining end-user input early in the process
• Evaluating your procurement organizations unique architecture to consider potential performance problems
• Creating data governance policies and procedures
• Exploring strategies to reduce maintenance costs and ensure cross-system data efficiency

27) Evaluating Supplier Qualifications: How Best To Connect The SLA Side Of Expectations

• Obtaining process control across the entire enablement process by utilizing optimization tools
• Gaining visibility into the status of critical supplier enablement – not just inside the four walls of your organization
• Utilizing building blocks such as
• Supplier profiles, notes, history
• Process/Workflow – tasks, tracking schedules
• Supplier self-service
• Real-time reporting
• Outlining and monitoring the qualification phase including:
• Supplier identification
• Supplier approach
• Business assessments
• Technology assessments
• Forecasting and evaluating against potential scenarios that could cause supply inconsistencies
• Enabling contingency plans to ensure delivery

28) Defining KPI’s And Adequately Measuring And Providing Supplier Feedback

• Establishing key criteria for selecting a network of supplier partners
• Identifying KPIs for monitoring and managing their performance on an ongoing basis – ensuring effective interworking between partners
• Facilitating speed of delivery through effective information flow across your network of suppliers
• Achieving breakthroughs in the total supply chain
• Drawing up a robust contract to optimize lead and response times and ensure cost-effective delivery

29) Effective Category Management: Enabling Visibility Into Your Supply And Spend While Increasing Your Global Supply Chain

• Reviewing your categorization methods: Identifying areas where you need to aggregate categories
• Streamlining your sourcing categories to eliminate redundancies while increasing visibility into your spend
• Ensuring that your category management strategies are implemented throughout your global sourcing organization to ensure uniformity

30) Panel Session: Understanding And Ensuring The Financial Viability Of Your Suppliers

• Exploring best-practices into receiving and obtaining supplier data
• Ensuring data integrity, accuracy and quality of financial information
• Utilizing data systems to assess and evaluate corporate performance, shareholder value and financial risk
• Evaluating corporate scorecards and online credit solution to ensure delivery performance

Internal Collaboration

31) Adopting Supplier Information Management Tools To Streamline Internal Business Processes

• Identifying and overcoming the obstacles to achieving sourcing efficiency
• Examining the short- and long-term impacts of implementing e-sourcing tools
• Anticipated
• Unexpected
• Ensuring that your internal processes meet Sarbanes-Oxley requirements

32) Panel Session: Optimizing Your Reverse Auction Strategies And Avoiding Common Pitfalls 

• Developing a mindset to think beyond price
• Identifying quality of value added service
• Considering your buyers influence toward sellers where appropriate
• Understanding hidden costs
• Understanding apparent savings can evaporate quickly (indirect costs, error in supplier data, post-auction negotiation, changes in specs)
• Being aware of the loss leader
• Following the Golden Rules
• Preserving important relationships
• Avoiding the desire to retaliate
• No advantage to putting supplier out of business

Sustainable Sourcing

33) Panel Session: Positioning Your Procurement Organization To Successfully Meet Emerging “Green” Business Requirements

• Developing a supply chain strategy to address changing expectations in terms of:
• Supply assurance
• Energy commodity demand management
• Facility and fleet carbon production, measurement, reduction
• Determining where accountability will be held for buying and selling carbon credits
• Positioning your organization to manage carbon dioxide output:
• Demand
• Consumption
• Output
• Reduction
• Ensuring that the purchasing organization receives access to funding allocated to conservation-related programs

34) Implementing A Sustainable Program For Purchasing “People Services” Contractors, Contingent Labor And Consultant Management

• Detailed dissection of real life case studies on why and what went wrong for "people services" initiative with other companies
• Addressing issues and challenges in People Services and ways to overcome them
• Realizing contract savings, productivity savings, annual savings and how to leverage your people to make it all happen

Responsiveness Through Outsourcing/Offshoring

35) Panel Session: Driving Change In Reliability And Productivity Through Strategic Plan Outsourcing

• Identifying a diverse network of suppliers
• Examining conflict of interest categories and ensuring a level playing field
• Using weighted criteria to enhance results when utilizing a best value approach
• Quantifying the ROI for sourcing to ensure continuous improvement

36) Panel Session: Strengthening And Integrating The Supply Chain Though Technology Globalization

• Ensuring uniformity in adhering to local laws and compliance
• Aggregating the buy and getting everybody on a common system
• Managing the breadth of myriad of accounts
• Benchmarking what makes sense to aggregate to the next level
• Weighing the pro’s and con’s of whether or not to outsource or opt for internal development

37) Minimizing Your Diverse Supplier Portfolio To Reduce Costs

• Analyzing your supplier delivery to offset and forecast demand
• Evaluating advanced modeling techniques to accurately measure and monitor risks
• Providing back-up and making informed decisions about allocating resources
• Reducing supplier spend while simultaneously improving supplier relations
• Understanding the true costs of processes and procedures

38) Exploring Strategies To Mitigate The Risk Of Having An Offshore Supply Chain

• Evaluating your ability to carry more inventory for split sourcing
• Determining the benefits of maintaining US supplier relationships
• Following an integrated and holistic intellectual property approach to mitigate risks and improve competitiveness