PSCM

Our profession spends so much time focusing on strategies in negotiations.  Tactics, counter tactics, strategies, counter-strategies.  But the most powerful negotiation concept you can employ relates to a deep understanding, recognition, and leveraging of tipping points.  Essentially, you can think of a negotiation like marriage.  There’s the day before marriage and the day after the […]

If you’re in procurement, the people sitting across the negotiation table from you are spending ***10X the amount of time in training that you are.*** Let that sink in.  No, really.  Let that stew for a while.  Yet that’s the reality.  Salespeople have better systems, tools, data, market data, training, and more resources, personnel, and

End users engage us late.  Finance doesn’t recognize soft cost savings.  Executives view us as a cost center instead of as a profit enabling entity.  Business units view us as an impediment. LinkedIn is flooded with memes, grandstanding, and complaints about these issues.  For the first 10 years of my career, I felt the same

We’re operating by the old school rules a bit in procurement.  Of all of our goals and objectives, the one that never changes and is the ultimate measure of our success is Cost Savings. But cost savings is mostly an internal metric.  The rest of the company doesn’t see the same value. Here’s what happens

1. Introduction: The AI Tipping Point in Procurement Negotiation Let this sink in: By 2027, Fortune 500 CPOs will be able to close high-value deals without speaking to a single supplier rep. AI-powered negotiation is no longer a theoretical advancement of the future — it is a reality, here and now. In our previous analysis,

Having spent more than three decades in the procurement profession, working with countless Fortune 500 firms, I’ve witnessed a significant evolution in procurement negotiation strategies. This retrospective highlights key shifts over the past 25 years, focusing on the transition from purely transactional approaches to highly sophisticated, AI-driven, and autonomous procurement methods. Early Years: Transactional and

 Who You Negotiate With Matters. A Lot.

It’s interesting that there is this assumption that suppliers are entitled to determine who it is that you negotiate with on their side. Sure, there is the exception that procurement may insist on a certain level of employee that is sufficiently authorized.  So instead of the Regional Director of Sales, perhaps the Western Region Sales

As a veteran observer of the procurement technology landscape for three decades, I’ve witnessed numerous waves of innovation sweep through the industry.  The advent of AI is perhaps the biggest yet, and changes everything for what is possible in the procurement space. The recent Forrester Wave™ report on Supplier Value Management (SVM) Platforms for Q3