Purchasing Management & Market Analysis Articles by Paulo
Do raw materials have a major impact on your company costs? If so, any of your business colleagues worth their salt will want to know ASAP when their raw materials undergo a price increase. Of course, for raw materials with big spend dollars and high variable-cost impact, purchasing usually informs its internal clients about changes […]
Several articles and white papers have been written about spend management and spend analytics. Let’s use Wikipedia to define each one: Spend analysis is the process of collecting, cleansing, classifying and analyzing expenditure data. Spend management is the way in which companies control and optimize the money they spend. Companies have invested money and resources in spend […]
Every single year all companies face the budget planning cycle. At company level, this is defined as the revenue target, the costs and expenses to run the company, and, the profitability for the following year. In a perfect world this process should be two-way street where the corporate leadership defines the targets with functions and […]
Wikipedia explains that the term benchmarking was first used by shoemakers to measure people’s feet. They would place someone’s foot on a “bench” and mark it out to make the pattern for the shoes. Today’s definition of benchmarking: “It is the process of comparing one’s business processes and performance metrics to industry’s best practices”. In my last […]
A 19th century quotation from Lord Kelvin, who was an Irish-born British engineer, is still valid today: “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it”. Metrics are developed in each field in order to help measure performace of a current situation. The metrics are the key elements of KPI – Key Performance Indicator. This is […]
According to Warren Buffet: “Risk comes from not knowing what you are doing”. A good example of knowing what they are doing comes from the Insurance industry. They measure and track all kinds of risks they may have before defining a premium for an insurance policy. We have good references from American National Standard for […]