How do you create a podcast? What is the production process? How do you select guests? How do I get on the show? What is the “business” of Art of Procurement and what are your revenue streams?

These are all questions that I am often asked, whether it be at a conference, when talking to potential guests and partners, or just during my day to day conversations with procurement professionals around the world.

And so today we go behind the scenes of Art of Procurement as I attempt to answer as many of these questions as possible and give you the inside information on what goes into creating and producing a weekly procurement podcast.

What can we do to protect ourselves against tariffs, and what options do we have when tariffs are levied on the products or materials that I buy?

These are two questions that I have received regularly from listeners over the past couple of months, against the backdrop both of increasing trade tensions, and the ongoing uncertainty around Brexit.

And so to help answer those questions, I reached out to Bill Michels.

Bill is a recognized expert in Purchasing and Supply Chain Management and has worked in procurement across a wide spectrum of industries and countries transforming Procurement and the Supply Chain.

Until recently, Bill was the CEO and founder of Aripart Consulting after more than 23 years at ADR North America. Under his leadership, ADR North America became a leading niche specialty consulting firm and has won several recognitions and awards. Bill recently joined CIPS as Vice President of Operations - Americas, and so I also took the opportunity to ask Bill to share some of CIPS' plans for the US market.

Today I welcome onto the show Ted Olshefski.  Ted is responsible for Direct Procurement at Panasonic North America.

I’ve come to know Ted well over the past 18 months or so, and I’m delighted to finally be able to welcome him to the show!

I had the opportunity to sit down with Ted in preparation for his upcoming presentation at ProcureCon Direct 2018 in San Diego on the topic of single source suppliers. Our discussion turned into an introduction to some of the considerations at play when developing risk mitigation strategies for scenarios where you have a single source supplier - either because they enjoy a monopolistic position, or because of our own business decisions.

Gordon Donovan is one of the leading thinkers in procurement on the topic of skill and behavior development, and I’m also honored to call him a good friend!  In today's podcast, we continue our recent theme of procurement capability development with a focus on how we can actually scale the behaviors that we want to drive in our teams.

We start by talking more broadly about capability development, before arrowing in on capability frameworks. A good capability framework is as much of an art than a science, they can be too simplistic, but more often than not get way too complex to be actionable. In our discussion, we explore how to create an effective capability framework that is integrated into the employee assessment process and mapped into the job roles across your procurement group.