Yearly Archives: 2009

• Goodbye for now…

  Posted on July 17, 2009 by hudgeon in VendorManagement

  It’s been an exciting few months in my world. Over the past year I’ve been moving out of procurement / vendor management and into shared services more broadly. This has culminated in a couple of promotions and posting to Delhi for a year were I’ll be working out of our Gurgaon office. Given my new [...]

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• E-Sourcing: Destroyer or Doyen of Value

  Posted on April 2, 2009 by hudgeon in VendorManagement

  Tim Cummins from the IACCM has questioned a recent Supply Excellence article on “E-Sourcing Activities & Supplier Relationships: A Match Made in Purchasing Heaven” asking “E-Sourcing: Does it destroy value?” Tim’s objection is that buyers use auctions to impose terms on suppliers rather than engage in dialogue. As a data guy, I’m a big fan [...]

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• Why I hate Procurement!

  Posted on March 6, 2009 by hudgeon in VendorManagement

  I’ve just received a newsletter from a local procurement consultancy that opens with the following …For all the recent grim news and economic forecasts, 2009 is shaping up to be one of those years where anything could happen. The current set of economic conditions provides a huge opportunity for procurement to demonstrate how the function [...]

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  Tree map infographics for spend data

  Posted on February 5, 2009 by hudgeon in VendorManagement

  Thanks to Flowing Data for linking to another great graphic from the New York Times. This type of graphic falls into the category of tree maps which, along with the bubble chart, are my favourite tools in my data analysts toolkit. The tree map and the bubble chart allow the relationships between multi-dimensional data sets [...]

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• The secret of good system design

  Posted on January 25, 2009 by hudgeon in VendorManagement

  Designing a new system? The single most important question to ask is what do I not need? Apple asked how few controls do we really need to operate an mp3 player and the iPod was born. Asus asked what does a user really need to surf the net and the eee pc burst onto the [...]

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  The Medium is not the message

  Posted on January 16, 2009 by hudgeon in VendorManagement

  I love a good infographic (For those who don’t know, ‘infographic’ is essentially a wanky term for ‘chart’). Each year infographic tools get better and publishing gets easier. We use Tableau extensively but a large number of tools exist (A couple of years ago, I predicted MS would have bought Tableau by now, but they [...]

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