According to Harvard Business Review, under Zero-based budgeting (ZBB), “Expenses must be justified for each new budget period based on demonstrable needs and costs, as opposed to the more common method of using last year’s budget as your starting point, then adjusting up or down. ZBB is a straightforward, intuitively simple way to aggressively strip out costs that cannot be rationally justified.”
Sounds wonderful, right? Well, as this week’s guest (and the HBR article referenced above) point out, there is no such thing as a ‘one-size fits-all’ silver bullet, even when it comes to aggressively cutting costs.
David Ward is the Director of Global Sourcing & Procurement at a global pharmaceutical company, and has held procurement positions at Ford, Rolls Royce, AstraZeneca, and Unilever. During his time at Unilever, he became the ZBB Programme Leader for Marketing and Business Services, and so he has seen the advantages and disadvantages of this budgeting and management method first hand.
In this interview, David explains how ZBB works and whether it is a strategy that procurement should actively consider in the current economic conditions:
The scope of responsibilities associated with enterprise procurement has grown significantly over the last decade, and yet we keep coming back to the ‘good old’ RFP. This one enabling tool often defines our reputation as a function, and not always in a good way. At the same time, no other approach has been able to unseat the RFP, and it remains the best way to evaluate supplier costs and capabilities in a standardized and structured way.
Dave Hulsen, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of RFP360, joined us for an AOP Live session on March 31st. His topic - reclaiming the power of the RFP - clearly struck a chord with the procurement community, because we’ve never had so many excellent questions submitted by audience members before.
There are a lot of very talented people today that suddenly find themselves un- or under- employed by no fault of their own and companies lift with critical vacancies. How can professionals and hiring managers continue to move careers and operations forward under the current business conditions?
Mark Holyoake is the founder of Holyoake Search, a US East-coast based procurement recruitment firm and someone who always has his finger on the pulse of the procurement recruitment market. The landscape for hiring and being hired in procurement has changed dramatically over the past couple of months, so what does that mean for anyone looking for a new role or for executives looking to hire their next rising star?
In this interview, Mark provides Host Philip Ideson with an honest overview of the current state of hiring, interviewing, and career building.
While the challenges of COVID-19 aren’t completely behind us, many organizations are starting to look ahead to what's next. For many procurement teams, that means identifying and defining quick wins from a cost savings or expense reduction perspective.
Brian Seipel is a Consultant and Spend Analysis Lead at Corcentric, where he helps organizations perfect their strategic sourcing abilities, manage supplier relationships, and clear away process roadblocks. We asked him about his advice about getting quick wins (that are actually quick) without alienating suppliers or stakeholders.