PSCM

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

Your enemy in negotiations is not who you think it is.  They don’t sit on the other side of the table.  Your enemy is within.  Almost all external negotiations fail because of internal negotiation failure.   Negotiations do not start when you engage suppliers in potential purchase talks.  They start when your end user engages you

There’s a problem in procurement.  The wrong people are getting recognized.  Sure, there’s the people who are nailing their results and moving mountains.  They’re getting promotions and pay raises, which they should.  But then ask yourself, who are the people who are viewed as being veterans.  Savvy.  Able to tackle the toughest situations.  The ones