Devoted to purchasing, purchasing agents, and all things related

There are many effective methods for facilitating the purchasing and selling of goods and services. SellMyTimeshareNOW.com is a company that has shown how it can successfully use the Internet to connect buyers with sellers. A recent press release highlights the way the company has taken the timeshare industry by storm, with incredible website traffic and revenue growth.

Can Purchasing professionals watch videos on YouTube during the work day and legitimately claim that the videos are work related?

Thanks to Next Level Purchasing, the answer is yes.  I have just previewed the first in their series of video podcasts which will be released to the public on Tuesday, October 17th both on YouTube and on the Next Level Purchasing site.

In this first installment, Charles and the host discuss the importance of ongoing contract management to ensure that savings numbers and other points gained during the negotiations process are upheld throughout the life of the contract.

This first video was well done and interesting.  Charles's insight and comments about the process are exactly right.  They are worth hearing as an introduction if you are new to Purchasing or a great reminder if you have years of experience.

On a side note, Next Level Purchasing recently received the Innovative Business of the Year Award from the Pittsburgh Airport Area Chamber of Commerce.  Congratulations to Charles and his staff.

The various types of office equipment in a large corporation would completely amaze you if you stopped to think about it.  Off the top of your head, you can quickly mention printers, copiers, and fax machines.  Maybe you even thought of the postage meter in the mailroom.  Did you think of the specialized check printer in Accounts Payable, the automatic coin sorters and bill counters anywhere cash is involved, or the myriad of other machines specific to different industries?

Here are 7 things I learned about managing equipment repair:

1. Repair/service company names and phone numbers and instructions should be posted on the machines.  This won't eliminate calls, but it will cut down on them.

2. Maintenance contracts are almost never worth it for the first year, but many companies won't let you start one later if the item was not covered from day one.  Negotiate a year or two of free maintenance into the contract.

3. PM or Preventative Maintenance is a good thing that is never done.  Be careful that the vendor doesn't suddenly decide to do five a year on each machine.  Insist on the vendor keeping track of this service by machine serial number.

4. No matter how hard you try, you will never keep track of EVERY machine in your corporation.  Even RFID asset tags won't get you to perfection.

5. Establish criteria for when a machine is so badly broken that is should be replaced rather than repaired.  You can't always rely on the repair vendor's opinion since the vendor makes money by repairing broken machines.

6. Establish a service level agreement (SLA) with the vendor that includes emergency services because machines usually break when their absence will cause the largest crisis.

7. Make sure time and materials rates are competitive for the industry and the geographic area. 

Have you managed equipment repair during your Procurement career?  What was your favorite (or least favorite) commodity to manage?  Send your Top 7 List to PurchaseRealm@ComprehensiveAdvice.com and I will share it with my readers.

I have often wondered why we don't hear more about the companies that manufacture computers such as Dell Inc. (DELL) or Hewlett-Packard Company (HPQ) also being running recycling programs.  If you know of any they run, please comment on this entry.

I learned of a service today offered by IBM called IBM Asset Recovery Solutions.  The service assists customers with proper disposal of unwanted IT equipment.

Part of the service is a buy-back system.  There is even a list online of items with market value and an online tool designed to help you get an instant quote on the items.  I also noticed a customer service box with a toll free number, the opportunity to have someone from IBM call you, or a live chat icon.

I wish this service had been around years ago when I inherited the responsibility for a roomful of old computer equipment!

"Custom items" in this case refers to promotional items, which are the branded merchandise (aka schwag) given away to advertise business to new prospects or to keep the business fresh in existing customers' minds.

Here are 7 things I learned about buying custom promotional items:

Custom samples are expensive.  Companies will gladly provide free samples of their items; you have to pay for prototypes of items with your branding.

Lead time is often very long in this industry.  Users tend to decide they want promotional merchandise a couple days before an event.  This is one case in which expedited shipping isn't going to be enough.  You need to have appropriate lead time expectations established with your users.

No matter how good they look, someone in authority will say, "Oh, those are OK, but I thought they were going to look like…"

Keep records of all orders indefinitely.  It's best to have a vendor that does as well because users will remember something the company ordered years earlier and want that exact same thing again, but there will be no specs and no samples left from which to work.

If you are unhappy with you promotional merchandise company, there are many from which to choose, both national and local.  You will end up with a lot of catalogs or this sort of stuff.

The best promotional items are things that recipients will actually use such as key chains with flashlights, tee shirts, or mugs.  (The latter two are better because other people see the logo too.)  Cheaper pens aren't a good choice because they get thrown in a drawer or penholder with a dozen others.  If you want to emblazon pens with your logo, make them the fanciest pen offered.  Users will love them and everyone who sees it on the user's desk will ask about it.

Vendors get the blanks from the same places so base merchandise is probably pf equal quality equal or of very similar quality.  Service and quality of personalization are the factors to consider when comparing prices.

I like to read different sales blogs from time to time such as Landing The Deal, Dan Tudor's blog here on Know More Media because I like to get the sales perspective on the Purchasing process.  After all, it is essential in battle to know thy enemy.  (Just kidding there, Dan.  It is so easy to get him all riled up!)

Anyway, I came across this product for salespeople called SalesGenuis.  A description from manufacturer's website is below.

"SalesGenius lets individual Sales Professionals track how prospects respond to your e-mails...you simply send e-mail, and the Genius Tracker™ alerts you when your e-mail is opened and when your prospects visit the web site. SalesGenius shows exactly which pages each prospect visited, so you know what he/she is interested in, before the first call."

It sounds kind of Big Brotherish, (from the novel 1984, not the TV show on CBS) but interesting.  At the very least it should help salespeople use their time efficiently to focus on those prospects (we Buyers) who are showing some interest or curiosity in the product or service as opposed to e-mails that just get deleted.

If it would prevent a sales call from someone representing something I have no interest in or time to deal with, then it would be worth it from my point of view.  I would be happy to hear from salespeople selling products or services for which I am in the market at that particular time.

What do you think?

As List Week continues here at Know More Media, I'm pleased to announce that I received the first (of many. I hope) reader submitted Top 7 List to supplement my observations.

Thank you to Nikos Cratimenos, Procurement Director at Fourlis Group, all the way from Athens, Greece for submitting this excellent Top 7 List for managing office supplies focused on the RFP/cost savings part of the process.

Yesterday's post titled Top 7 Things I Learned About Managing Wirleess Services barely scratched the surface of the topic so here are 7 more insights into the experience:

1. Departments will pay for inactive, unused devices (cell phones, pagers, Blackberries, Treos, etc.) for months or years when the devices have been lost or thrown in drawers and forgotten.  They don't keep track of them.

2. Let users choose among three or four phone models.  It is best to distribute them in a "vendor fair" type atmosphere so users can handle the demo models and ask the vendor rep questions.

3. Generating cost savings reports for wireless services is a nightmare.  The manner of billing is the same as for your home cell phone in that on one month's bill, service is billed in advance for the next month, usage in billed in arrears for the previous month, and neither of those time periods are the same when you actually get the bill.  Confused, much?

4. Users who call foreign countries for hours on end when they are not at work and their jobs doesn't require it will eventually get noticed by Accounts Payable.  Saying they "lost the phone" won't cut it either if that is not true since the carrier can pinpoint from where calls originated if necessary.

5. Purchasing, or whoever is managing the customer service aspect of the commodity on a day-to-day basis, should have many spare phones on hand.  Users will not want to wait for the phones to be replaced when they are lost or damaged.

6. Upgrades are problematic.  As soon as one person in a department gets the latest model, everyone else calls to ask when they get it too.  (Yes, really.)  Your vendor is not going to give you hundreds or thousands of free phones for all users every time a new model comes out. 

7. Every company, whether it is ATT/Cingular (Google Finance Cingular), Sprint/Nextel (S), Verizon (VZ), T-Mobile (Google Finance T-Mobile), or any other, has its fans among the user base and on the selection team.  Choosing one as the ultimate RFP winner as you would do in most commodities is probably a mistake.  A primary one and a secondary one seem like more work, but are less trouble in the long run.

Have you managed wireless services in your Procurement career?  Send your Top 7 List to PurchaseRealm@ComprehensiveAdvice.com and I will share it with my readers.

Print services, or document services as the category may be called mean the printing of forms, envelopes, catalogs, brochures, etc.  Copy services and machines from companies like X I C may also be included in this category, especially during a cost containment/vendor consolidation exercise.

Here are 7 things I learned about buying print services:

1. Be careful of overage charges in copy machines lease contracts.  Employees use a significantly larger number of copies than they estimate they will.

2. Catalog printers will insist on a clause in the contract severely limiting their responsibility for printing errors.  This may be a tough area of negotiation.

3. It is a tough call whether you should let your printer buy the paper or use a paper broker.  Printers and brokers have a very antagonistic relationship so it is hard to get reliable information from one about the other.  Consider your options carefully.  I tend to lean towards not using a paper broker since that is adding a middleman to the process and another layer of bureaucracy

4. Your catalog printer should be able to advise you about saving money on mailing.  Co-mailing (mailing your catalog with another of compatible size printed at the same time) could save you a bundle.

5. A cost per catalog difference of a cent or two might seem insignificant, but consider how many catalogs will be printed over the life of the contract. 

6. If you negotiate anything unusual in the contract price-wise, check the invoices carefully to make sure accounts receivable was made aware of your special pricing.

7. Believe it or not, end user training on new copy machines is as necessary as it is with any other commodity.

If you've been following my entries here for List Week on Know More Media, then you'll notice I changed the titled of this entry to "buying" rather than "managing" because I have not officially been a software commodity manager, but I have created RFP's for software and saw the RFP process through from conception to contract execution and maintenance.

Here are 7 thing I learned about buying software:

1. Software sales reps are the most aggressive I have seen in any commodity.

2. Sales reps will impose proposal expiration dates for the pricing.  Buyers should not accept these dates as they are based solely on the reps' sales booking periods.  Software prices are not at the mercy of market fluctuations as corrugated or chemicals pricing are.

3. Employees who will actually be using the software, not just executive decision makers,  should be part of the vendor selection team.

4. Many users have no problem saying they don't like the current software, but can't articulate what they would like to see different from a new system.

5. Training details should be spelled out in the contract including, who will perform training, where will it take place, and who will bear the expense.

6. Buyers should get the "sure, it can do that..." promise in writing and confirmed by a technical contact from the vendor.  The sales rep's word is not good enough.

7. The RFP should take into account not only the current needs of the company, but the projected business goals and volume for the next couple years.  A software package that can expand as the business does is most desirable.

Have you bought software during your Procurement career?  Send your Top 7 List to PurchaseRealm@ComprehensiveAdvice.com and I will share it with my readers.