The need for a new approach to complex, global supply ecosystems
How confident are you in knowing the ins and outs of your suppliers’ working practices? Confident enough to stake your reputation on them?
Move over business growth and customer relationships; if slavery isn’t on your boardroom agenda you’re not only missing a trick, but you could be falling foul of the law. The Modern Slavery Act 2015, which aims to stamp out modern slavery, forced labour and human trafficking in the supply chain, has serious implications for vast swathes of business. Around 12,000 organisations in the UK across a variety of sectors are predicted to be affected. But with change comes opportunity – the opportunity to beef up best practice among procurement partners and tick a very large customer box in the process.
Supply Management highlight that 81% of procurement professionals do not pass on supplier insights to the wider business, according to a study by Proxima. The study of 40 senior procurement executives finds that there is a disconnect between information being collected from supppliers and the insight that business leaders use to make strategic decisions.
B2B Marketing look at Proxima's research into the Digital Disconnect; exploring why the inability to measure the effectiveness of digital marketing means that up to $38bn of global marketing budgets are being wasted every year.
Spend Matters highlight Proxima as a Provider to know in 2015. Discussing our services and overall approach to procurement, Spend Matters note that "Proxima is certainly a firm to have on your shortlist for pretty much any procurement outsourcing opportunity".
If like the rest of the world, you’ve been keeping a close eye on the movement in the market over the past week or so, from the sudden slump, to the rapid recovery, you may have found yourself asking the same questions being asked by nervous boards the world over. Why did no-one see it coming?
For many businesses around the world, it has become suddenly apparent how close the connections between European / US and Asian economies are - with the suddenly tumultuous Chinese economy having a global impact. An impact that will no doubt continue to swing wildly over the coming weeks, even months.
The procurement community has long bemoaned its internal reputation as a relatively un-strategic cost centre. While that reputation has been, at least sometimes, well deserved, the promise of an innovative procurement programme offers benefits well beyond purchasing discounts.
Digital Marketing Magazine discusses Proxima's latest research: The Digital Disconnect which highlights up to 35% of all web activity fraudulent or artificial and 54% of online ads not even seen by a human – the truth is that between 40% to 60% of global digital spend is potentially wasted.
MyCustomer discusses Proxima's latest research: The Digital Disconnect highlighting CEOs and CFOs are becoming increasingly concerned by the lack of business transparency regarding the commercial impact of digital marketing. From wasted investment to the risk associated with brand damage, digital has fast moved from high impact to high risk.
Spend Matters discusses Proxima's research: The Digital Disconnect. While digital may be the fastest-growing channel, with spend on digital marketing set to consume around 50 percent of total advertising budgets in the UK, how much of that investment is reaching the right audience?
Wallblog provide key highlights from The Digital Disconnect infographic, available here. The infographic outlines trends from our recent research into digital marketing spend. Digital may be the fastest growing channel, with spend set to consume around 50% of total advertising budgets in the UK. But the research asks how much of that investment is reaching the right audience?
Buyers Meeting Point outline the highlights from the digital disconnect webinar, available here. Webinar panelists Mark Simester, Marketing Director at Warburtons, Charles Ping, Chief Executive at Fuel, and John Butcher, Marketing Specialist at Proxima outlined in the webinar how procurement can play a role in better managing digital marketing spend.
The digitization of media has created a plethora of new opportunities for companies to better communicate, connect and deliver goods and services to the world. However, in this fast moving environment, how many are investing in the right digital tools and channels to support key business objectives?
Proxima's John Butcher talks to accountingWEB around the role procurement can play in ensuring the CMO and CFO can attain better control over digital marketing spend.
Spend Matters discuss Proxima's research: The Digital Disconnect, which explores why global companies are wasting up to 60% of digital marketing budgets through commercial mismanagement of spend, plus offers best practices for overcoming this disconnect.
Supply Management highlight a recent study by Proxima entitled The Digital Disconnect which explores why up to 60% of digital marketing spend is wasted by global businesses every single year.
Media Post explore Proxima's latest research into The Digital Disconnect, highlighting why global businesses are wasting up to 60% of digital marketing budgets on ineffective digital marketing activity.
Digital Marketing Show discuss Proxima's Digital Disconnect research, which explores why companies are wasting up to $37bn of global marketing budgets every year due to ineffective digital marketing practices.
Strategy Eye Digital report on the increasing disconnect between the money spent on digital advertising and the actual return on investment. Highlighting Proxima's latest research: The Digital Disconnect, Strategy Eye Digital take a look at the reasons behind this disconnect and how companies can overcome it.
Ask ten people to define “what is supplier relationship management (SRM)?” and you’ll get ten different answers. My version is that it’s a means of aligning your business appropriately with your suppliers. Yet it’s far less well understood (and adopted formally) than CRM. So why should we in procurement be bothered?
There’s a marriage craze in the US – at least on the corporate side. Already this year, according to The Wall Street Journal, “the value of M&A deals in the U.S. has set a 20-year high of $821.2 billion…with 4,373 such deals so far this year, compared with 4,627 in all of 2014.”
Proxima discuss why auditing needs a check-up in April's edition of in-procurement magazine from in-tend. Looking at the current reforms and regulations, Proxima's Richard James identifies the opportunities that have arisen from this changing audit market, and how companies can use these to their advantage when tendering their audit. Find the full article on page 34.
For some time, we have been talking about the opportunities for procurement and supply chain specialists to assume larger, more significant roles within their organizations. These opportunities have emerged as the supply chain has become more complex and companies grow more reliant on suppliers to fulfil their respective business promises.
The Webster's dictionary defines success in a fairly straightforward way – an accomplishment, or meeting of an aim or objective. Success in the procurement field, however, is a more nebulous concept. Perhaps that’s because procurement’s objectives aren’t usually clearly defined. Or perhaps, more accurately, it’s because procurement’s objectives are defined quite differently by its practitioners and the business leaders they serve.
NelsonHall have launched a tool to assist strategic sourcing managers in assessing vendor capability in procurement BPO services. The NelsonHall Vendor Evaluation and Assessment Tool (NEAT) for procurement BPO enables sourcing managers to differentiate between providers by showing how vendors are positioned within a specific market segment.
In this Procurement Perspectives podcast, Buyer's Meeting Point's Kelly Barner discusses Proxima's latest research into consumer attitudes towards companies involved in supplier-related failures.
In the increasingly virtual corporation, it's the support functions that knit everything together. Well - the strategic elements of them anyway. The process-driven parts have either been outsourced, or are so securely locked away in their silos that they have other, bigger problems to solve.
What drives excellence? Is it the relentless drive for customer delight? Is it the fanaticism of engineering to “get it right”? Is it the single-minded pursuit of maximum profitability?
Growth is back on the agenda. Actually, in an increasingly lumpy economy, for many businesses it never went away, despite the vicissitudes of national and regional economies. (“Vicissitudes”? Well, the UK grew robustly in Q4 2014, then posted its slowest GDP gains for three years in Q1 2015…) And with the ongoing prevalence of risk in many markets, we’re in a period where organisations want to expand, but just don’t seem ready to invest, spend and grow in the way that macroeconomic data suggests they should.
Buyers meeting point discuss Proxima's latest research into consumer attitudes towards companies linked to supplier-related failures, and explain what this means for procurement.
A recent Deloitte survey of Chief Procurement Officers suggested that more than 50% of CPOs are optimistic about their role and confident in their department’s abilities, but also raises flags about just how much of that confidence is warranted.
It’s election time. All over the place, actually. General election fever/exhaustion (delete as applicable) is dominating headlines in the UK. And with Hilary Clinton, Marco Rubio and Rand Paul (among others) declaring their 2016 presidential ambitions in the US; and Le Pen family squabbles in the run-up to France’s regional polls, democracy is headline news all over the world.
In this article Spend Matters discuss why change management initiatives can have a huge impact on procurement. Featuring Proxima's research into the current perceptions of indirect procurement, the article offers insight and statistics supporting the need for improvement in change management initiatives.
Spend Matters and Barbara Ardell discuss influencing change in the first of this two part article; addressing the challenges that procurement faces, discussing attitudes towards procurement and featuring Proxima's research into current perceptions of the procurement function.
There is a simple, but very powerful image circulating around social media this week, that really struck a chord with us. So much so, that we thought we would share it with you here:
In our blog and in our ongoing dealings with clients, we continue to advocate the importance of having explicit insights and knowledge into the business practices and ethics of those companies that live within one’s supply chain. We’ve pointed quite extensively to our corporate virtualization research that reveals just how much modern organizations rely on external suppliers for the services and goods necessary to not just run a successful business, but to have one in the first place. The importance of supply chain visibility has grown exponentially in recent times, as has the potential negative impact failures can have on brand and profitability.
Spend Matters feature our very own Richard James, Category Director for Professional Services in their hot topic of procurement outsourcing. We look at what companies should consider when looking for a procurement company to help with outsourcing.
As key indicators of market growth point skywards and business confidence increases, boards are looking to align every aspect of their business to the wider growth agenda. But, for many of these companies, not all of their internal functions are able to shift their sights from defence to offence at the same time (or at all, in some cases). This creates a disconnect between the board’s ambition and the operational reality – a common source of frustration for many senior executives.
LONDON, UK and CHICAGO, IL – February 23, 2015 – Proxima, a leading international procurement services provider, announced today that the company has kicked off the year by securing $40 million in new contracts and has increased its spend under management by a further $1.5 billion. Additionally, the company is turning its attention to growing its procurement consultancy services in response to demand from clients who are continuing to recognize the contributory value of procurement operations to corporate profitability and overall organizational health.
It’s always fashionable to muse on the parlous state of capitalism. Seven years ago, it was all broken: financial services run wild had all-but-destroyed our way of life. Four years ago, the Occupy neo-hippies were camping out to find something – anything – as an alternative to the broken promises of the market. A year-and-a-half ago? Thomas Piketty’s algorithmic tear-down of the balance between capital and economic growth.
It is perhaps unsurprising that more and more FTSE350 companies will start to shake up their auditing process with the new regulations now in place by the Competition and Markets Authority. However, the tender market is still at a teenage stage. While experience is bringing greater sophistication of approach, both in how the auditors are bidding and how they are being hired; companies still have some work to do in recognising what true value looks like and how to drive maximum value from their auditors.
Traditionally the aim for many of us at the beginning of the year is to get fitter; but this doesn’t just mean getting a beach body. Businesses the world over are looking to get into shape for the New Year too. Toning-up processes, cutting slack and beefing-up innovation are priorities that are making their way to the top of the agenda for many leaders for the first quarter of 2015. However, a word of caution, getting your business in shape doesn’t necessarily mean getting “lean”. There are better ways to create fitter, faster, functions for the year ahead.
The notion of “winning hearts and minds” is remarkably recent. The phrase was first used by Vernon Bartlett, a journalist and MP who was reporting on British efforts in the Malayan Emergency in 1954. (It was also a cornerstone of President Johnson’s campaign in Vietnam and an evolution of George Bush’s Iraqi adventure. As a military tactic, it’s never been that successful…)
With new regulations requiring businesses to tender their audit more frequently this offers companies a chance to revisit a key supplier relationship; enabling them to run a tender that will encourage closer relationships, promote best practices and drive additional value.
This year is all about risk. We’re barely into February and the ruble’s collapse looks permanent, the Swiss franc has soared, oil continues its terminal decline and there’s so much conflicting data from the world’s major economies that most strategic planners’ heads are spinning. (And that’s nothing compared to the market analysts…)
Procurement Insights' Jon Hansen looks at how mandatory audit rotation will force procurement professionals to go beyond traditional boundaries.
Getting your processes right is one of the axioms of the industrial (and now digital) economy. People don’t scale well – and if you come up with a great way of working, you need to codify it. If it’s reliant on people, it’s vulnerable. If you have good process, people are (to quote former US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld) “fungible”.
Are companies long-term relationships with their auditors a thing of the past? The Financial Times discusses our research into the UK audit market, and why many more companies are choosing to shop around when it comes to buying audit services.