Tweaking the Kraljic Model

More than 25 years ago Peter Kraljic published his seminal “portfolio purchasing model,” which has been both a widely critiqued and widely accepted method for assessing procurement demand, risk and profit factors for supply chains. The model distinguishes among four product categories: leverage items, strategic items, noncritical items, and bottleneck items. My take on the [...]

Logistics Quarterly, Nov 2010

In their article “Playing to Win“, Kate Vitasek and Mike Ledyard outline what it takes to build stronger relationships and gain greater value from your outsourcing relationships. In a nutshell, Kate and Mike explain how best companies WIN at the game of outsourcing their supply chain.

Vested Outsourcing: Only the Resilient Survive

Vested Outsourcing’s message of true collaboration and partnership to achieve desired outcomes and increase the pie for everyone works over the long term in good times and bad, maybe more so during the latter. We know that supply chains need to be flexible, agile, collaborative, transparent, fairly priced, efficient and sustainable – both financially and [...]

Drilling Down on Collaboration

Collaboration, and the need to get serious about it at all levels of the supply chain, was a key word heard frequently in the meeting rooms and hallways at last week’s CSCMP conference in San Diego. For the second straight year I joined Dan Gilmore, the editor of Supply Chain Digest, as a “guest contributor” [...]

Supply Chain Europe, May/June 2010

Want to know how Vested Outsourcing works? For two companies, Jaguar and Unipart Logistics, Vested Outsourcing has worked for two decades and continues to work for them. Read about “The Five Golden Rules To Transforming Outsourcing Partnerships” that Jaguar and Unipart Logistics has been following.

Logistics Viewpoints, Feb 2010

Adrian Gonzalez, Director of Logistics Viewpoints, makes the case for software vendors to transform their business models from selling their product to selling supply chain outcomes. In his post titled “Buying Supply Chain Outcomes, Not Software“, Adrian argues the case for software vendors to move to performance based models, such as Vested Outsourcing.

Is it Better to Leave Money on the Table?

If it seems like I’m a little stuck lately on Oliver Williamson’s Nobel Prize-winning research on Transaction Cost Economics (TCE), and specifically how he has tied outsourcing contracts and supply chain dynamics to his TCE research, it’s because I am. Stuck may not be the right word actually, it’s more like really impressed and fascinated [...]

Wall Street Journal Online Group

Rob Guerriere, an active member of the WSJ Online Group “Global Trade Best Practices”, recently wrote a blog post on how Vested Outsourcing can create a Supply Chain Competitive Advantage.