Summary
1) The MIT Tech Review, “Prepare to be tracked…” provides insight into actions that companies are taking to reopen and protect employees and the business. The debate on safety vs privacy is certain to be a major topic as companies form and implement their policies.
2) The second article is an update on significant changes that UPS, FedEx and Amazon are making in order to manage the tremendous demand swings while meeting customer expectations during and post CV-19.
3) The third is a continuation of the series on expense management. This time the focus is on tactics, demand management, and category management.
As before, if you have not already provided input, I’d appreciate your insight on what expense management challenges you are experiencing. As an incentive, after you submit your comments, you will receive the “Expense Management / Cheat Sheet” (courtesey of Art of Procurement), which includes 24 expense control tactics. Use it to spot check your expense control action plans. Thanks in advance for taking the time.
Here’s a bonus for the week. This is a cool graphic created by Shippeo to monitor European supply chain capacity trends by industry. It’s constantly updating, based on realtime tracking, and it includes country specific CV-19 lockdown information.
Top Links
“Prepare to be tracked and tested as you return to work“ MIT Technology Review, May 22 (6 min read)
A look at how companies are approaching reopening,
- Autodesk and Salesforce said that employees can continue to work from home for the reminder of the year
- Salesforce will require answering a pre-arrival questionaire and then assign 30 minute arrival windows for employees
- Recent trade group surveys found ~25% of employers are considering onsite testing WSJ
- Companies are spacing out desks, plucking out conference room chairs, installing antimicrobial surfaces, adding thermal scanners, altering air-conditioning systems, putting down floor markings, and mandating rigorous cleaning protocols
- The radically redesigned workplaces will also raise concerns about employee privacy and may pose legal liabilities when workers do become seriously ill despite the precautions
Amazon, FedEx, And UPS Prepare For The Post COVID World Forbes, May 21 (6 min read)
- All are managing demand to maintain delivery commitments
- Amazon is expanding it’s fleet of trucks and planes, prioritizing essential deliveries, and developing a virus killing robot
- Fed-Ex cancelled Amazon Cloud and is partnering with Microsoft Cloud on IoT tracking to predict potential disruptions and reroute deliveries
- UPS is allowing users to manage their delivery schedules by rerouting or rescheduling deliveries, get estimated and confirmed delivery windows, tracking and managing multiple packages at once, receiving real-time alerts, following deliveries on a map, leaving instructions for the driver, and routing packages to a UPS Access Point instead of home delivery
Building an Expense Management Program – Parts 3 and 4 with Philip Ideson, AoP Podcast Tactics, Demand and Category Management
Tactics with current suppliers (Part 3, 315) 12 min
- Renegotiate / restructure existing contracts
- Reduce the cost to serve (e.g. less aggressive metrics)
- Direct purchasing, value analysis / value engineering
- Reduce scope of work
- Negotiate with tier 2 suppliers
- Inventory reduction and reassignment
- Conduct an e-auction for commodity items
- Go to market with an RFP for contracts within 12 months of expiration
Savings through demand and category management (Part 4, 316) 12 min
- Tighten approval authority levels
- Standardize product and service specifications
- Reuse of products and services e.g. procured data and research
- Controls to stop duplicate purchases
- Spend by supplier consolidation
- Adjust volume mix across multiple suppliers
- Substitute products and services
- Bottom-up review of critical and non-critical spend
- Local sourcing to reduce total cost of ownership
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Best regards,
Don
Don K Brown
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