Building Capability in Procurement and Supply Chain

By Erika Hakala

The official kick-off for the collaboration between CIPS and DILF (Danish Purchasing and Logistics Forum) was held in the Tivoli hotel in Copenhagen this week. The speaker at the event was Torben Soll, Manager in the Quality Assurance and Professionalisation unit and Officer-in-Charge of the United Nations Development Programme's (UNDP) Procurement Support Office in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Torben not only spoke about procurement in the UNDP but also about their 6 year partnership with CIPS and how the UNDP uses the CIPS certifications to educate, improve and motivate their staff.

Spend Analysis, The Next Generation: A Blend of Ideas, Innovation and Data

By Josh Goodman

On Wednesday 11^th March, we held our debut briefing in the 2015 Real World Sourcing Series. The event saw Peter Smith, Managing Director of Spend Matters UK/Europe, present a forward-focused briefing to a packed room of procurement professionals from a variety of industries and sectors.

Adoption: Asking the Right Questions

By John Ryan Shaw, Sr. Director, Adoption Services

Quantifying the value of project activities such as communications, training, coaching and building a sponsor network can be difficult. Most professionals intuitively appreciate that these are valuable activities that can help make the implementation of a new process or tool more successful.   

In practice though, many project leaders struggle to determine how important they are and when they should be allocating their limited budgets to those activities. This is natural and understandable because the value of these activities varies from project to project.

Inspirational Role Models for the Procurement Profession

By Sarah Clarke

I was fortunate enough to be invited to join a table at Wednesday night’s CIPS Annual Dinner, and even though I felt a little weary from a fascinating BravoSolution Real World Sourcing Series briefing that I’d attended during the daytime, I’m very pleased that I drank an emergency Red Bull and made my way to the Hilton on Park Lane for the event.

Customer Service with a smile, the very least I would expect...

By Jennifer Whelan, Principal Consultant

On Monday last I returned from work to find that the engineer that had come to service the boiler had actually broken it. I entered the kitchen to find this engineer sitting at my kitchen table finishing his paperwork. He greeted me with the words “my dear your boiler is broken” to which I replied, “Well it wasn't this morning, what happened?” He then started to explain that it was working but as soon as he took the cover off to service it, it stopped working. “Oh” was my reply which was obviously the wrong thing to say as he then proceeded to explain that if I needed someone to blame then  it was his fault, he broke it. Followed by “there wasn't enough air getting to the boiler which was impacting the circuit board” and so on... He said he’d be back on Thursday to fix it. I had asked why he couldn't fix it that evening to which he replied “time”.