Today I am joined on the show by Shawn Burton.  Shawn is General Counsel of Business & General Aviation and Integrated Systems at GE.

Shawn was connected to me via a former AOP guest Nick Seiersen and has recently published an article in Harvard Business Review on the virtues of plain language contracting.

While we did discuss plain language contracting, and the change and disruption underway in the legal profession – which I thought was a great way to be able to better understand and empathize with our peers in Legal – the main focus of our conversation was a home-grown platform that GE Aviation has built that allows them to be for more strategic in their contract negotiations by assigning a monetary value to each clause they negotiate.

This week on the show, the tables are turned! AOP alumni and Negotiations Ninja host Mark Raffan just interviewed me for an episode of his podcast on the topic of procurement cost savings. I enjoyed the conversation with Mark, and so we decided to simultaneously publish both on Art of Procurement and Negotiations Ninja.

In our conversation, Mark dug into that omnipresent procurement metric of cost savings.  I share details of how I have seen most organizations calculate savings, and what is typically off limits. Mark also asks if there are any ways to easily save money – the low hanging fruit – that any procurement function just starting on their maturity journey should focus on. 

I really enjoyed our conversation – and the challenge that comes with being on the other side of the microphone!

I spent a couple of days on the road last week at the Coupa Inspire 2018 conference in San Francisco.  Inspire is an event I always try and make – to get insights into Coupa’s latest offerings, to catch up with peers, friends and clients, and to be inspired by fantastic keynote speakers which this year included Alison Levine and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

While on site, I had the opportunity to sit down and record today’s podcast with Coupa CEO, and AOP alumni, Rob Bernshteyn.  Over the past couple of months, I have observed Coupa using the term “Community Intelligence” more and more, and it was a key feature of Rob’s keynote. I am very bullish on the impact that we can have in procurement by combining our collective insights end experiences - in fact, it is a key driving force behind AOP. I was interested to learn how Coupa is harnessing the opportunity that community intelligence brings, and how we as procurement professionals can apply this concept to our day to day work.

Over the course of the last 15 years, Tom Beaty has grown Insight Sourcing Group (ISG) from a one-man operation to one of the leading procurement and sourcing consulting firms. Ranked by Inc Magazine among the fastest-growing private companies in America for the last 10 years, ISG is regularly recognized as one of the nation’s best boutique consulting firms to work for.

In today’s episode, recorded live at the SIG Spring Summit, I start by asking Tom what he is seeing in the field today in terms of the key challenges that CPO’s are facing, and some of the ways that they are working to solve those challenges.  We then focus on the topic of “what comes after sourcing”. We explore the startling statistic that only 60% of “addressed” spend is actually spent with the contracted supplier, and specifically, how can procurement professionals address and mitigate the risk of the savings leakage that occurs as a result.