Welcome back to another installment of Whitepaper Wednesday here on the Purchasing Certification Blog. Yes, I know it’s Thursday, but I just had to take a second look at today’s whitepaper before I released this review. You’ll know why shortly.
Today, I’ll be reviewing a “research snapshot” (which, for the sake of the occasion, I’ll refer to as a whitepaper) entitled “Insurance Requirements and Certificates for Suppliers” from CAPS Research. When reading the teaser for this whitepaper, I hoped that I would get a good feel for how many companies require their suppliers to maintain larger-than-required-by-law amounts of insurance, how many require suppliers to provide certificates of insurance, and how many do not require suppliers to provide certificates of insurance.
After reading the whitepaper, I don’t feel confident that I learned what I wanted to learn.
There were 24 percentages listed in the whitepaper. Twenty of them were calculated incorrectly!
For example, the whitepaper says that it received responses from 51 manufacturing organizations. In calculating the “percent of organizations that require suppliers to maintain additional types and amounts of insurance beyond the requirements of the state or nation where work is being performed,” the whitepaper indicated that 47 organizations did, but listed the percentage as 85.5%. Forty-seven out of 51 is 92.2%. Forty-seven is 85.5% of 55.
I could forgive CAPS if this was an isolated error. But these errors were made throughout, rendering the whitepaper a shoddy piece of research in my eyes and one not to be trusted. Therefore, I will not even bother writing anything else about this abomination of a whitepaper.
If you would like to download this whitepaper for yourself – maybe, after reading this post, CAPS will fix their math – you can do so from the CAPS Research website (registration required).
To Your Career,
Charles Dominick, SPSM
President & Chief Procurement Officer
Next Level Purchasing, Inc.
Struggling To Find More Good Resources For Procurement Leaders?
Check Out Our Web Site's New Whitepaper Section At
http://www.NextLevelPurchasing.com/WPcharles
Thursday, September 02, 2010
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
US Government B*tch Slaps HP, Sends Tough Procurement Message
Late yesterday, the New York Times reported that the venerable computer maker Hewlett Packard settled a case with the US Government over two procurement-related ethics matters. The settlement involved a payment of $55 million from HP to the government.
The first matter involves an accusation that HP paid "kickbacks to other companies that recommended federal agencies buy its products." The second matter involves a situation where HP "might have failed to provide complete pricing information during contract negotiations."
At a quick glance, I couldn't find too much detail about either of these cases. But it seems to me that the Federal Government's procurement teams did too little to keep themselves on guard against suppliers' common "dirty tricks."
Hopefully, the government will use some of that $55 million on some procurement training for their people. When everyday procurement situations end up with the threat of litigation and eight-figure settlements, it's pretty obvious that they need it.
To Your Career,
Charles Dominick, SPSM
President & Chief Procurement Officer
Next Level Purchasing, Inc.
Struggling To Have A Rewarding Purchasing Career?
Earn Your SPSM® Certification Online At
Next Level Purchasing . com
The first matter involves an accusation that HP paid "kickbacks to other companies that recommended federal agencies buy its products." The second matter involves a situation where HP "might have failed to provide complete pricing information during contract negotiations."
At a quick glance, I couldn't find too much detail about either of these cases. But it seems to me that the Federal Government's procurement teams did too little to keep themselves on guard against suppliers' common "dirty tricks."
Hopefully, the government will use some of that $55 million on some procurement training for their people. When everyday procurement situations end up with the threat of litigation and eight-figure settlements, it's pretty obvious that they need it.
To Your Career,
Charles Dominick, SPSM
President & Chief Procurement Officer
Next Level Purchasing, Inc.
Struggling To Have A Rewarding Purchasing Career?
Earn Your SPSM® Certification Online At
Next Level Purchasing . com
Monday, August 30, 2010
Predictions For The Economy & Offshoring, Part II
In my last blog post, I wrote about how legislation may be the most likely thing to result in a short-term reduction of the unemployment rate in the USA. Today, I’ll talk about two things that are likely to be key elements of the long-term reduction in unemployment.
The first element of restoring previous employment levels is the government putting an end to the endless handouts. With the US government giving 99 weeks of unemployment compensation, it has sapped a lot of ambition from our country. I’ve heard too many people say things like “Why work when I can do nothing and get money for free?” Cutting off the lifeline may propel these individuals into action and give them the ambition to, if not get a job, start a business and return the entrepreneurial spirit back into our country. Our country is falling behind the growth rate of places like China due in part to this lack of ambition.
The second element of restoring previous employment levels is a reduction in the standard of living. Look around. Despite what is supposed to be the worst economic climate since the Great Depression, you’ll see people with iPhones, iPads, hundreds of channels with their cable television subscriptions, new cars, big houses, cell phone plans for very young children, and other things that they don’t consider luxuries but really are. I sometimes get shocked going to kids’ birthday parties and seeing a child receive dozens of $25 toys that everyone knows the child cannot possibly play with and will end up in the trash.
But I think we may be in our last days of this prosperity. We are a global economy. We have come to a point where we are competing with people in multiple countries around the world for scarce jobs. In order to have jobs, we are going to have to be cost-competitive. This means lower wages across the board. And when we work for amounts that have to match those of developing nations, our standard of living will end up matching theirs as well.
Or, perhaps a rapidly declining standard of living will be what it takes to motivate Americans to have the ambition to restore and protect prosperity before it's too late.
To Your Career,
Charles Dominick, SPSM
President & Chief Procurement Officer
Next Level Purchasing, Inc.
Struggling To Have A Rewarding Purchasing Career?
Earn Your SPSM® Certification Online At
Next Level Purchasing . com
The first element of restoring previous employment levels is the government putting an end to the endless handouts. With the US government giving 99 weeks of unemployment compensation, it has sapped a lot of ambition from our country. I’ve heard too many people say things like “Why work when I can do nothing and get money for free?” Cutting off the lifeline may propel these individuals into action and give them the ambition to, if not get a job, start a business and return the entrepreneurial spirit back into our country. Our country is falling behind the growth rate of places like China due in part to this lack of ambition.
The second element of restoring previous employment levels is a reduction in the standard of living. Look around. Despite what is supposed to be the worst economic climate since the Great Depression, you’ll see people with iPhones, iPads, hundreds of channels with their cable television subscriptions, new cars, big houses, cell phone plans for very young children, and other things that they don’t consider luxuries but really are. I sometimes get shocked going to kids’ birthday parties and seeing a child receive dozens of $25 toys that everyone knows the child cannot possibly play with and will end up in the trash.
But I think we may be in our last days of this prosperity. We are a global economy. We have come to a point where we are competing with people in multiple countries around the world for scarce jobs. In order to have jobs, we are going to have to be cost-competitive. This means lower wages across the board. And when we work for amounts that have to match those of developing nations, our standard of living will end up matching theirs as well.
Or, perhaps a rapidly declining standard of living will be what it takes to motivate Americans to have the ambition to restore and protect prosperity before it's too late.
To Your Career,
Charles Dominick, SPSM
President & Chief Procurement Officer
Next Level Purchasing, Inc.
Struggling To Have A Rewarding Purchasing Career?
Earn Your SPSM® Certification Online At
Next Level Purchasing . com
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Predictions For The Economy & Offshoring, Part I
According to a recent article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a Pennsylvania State Senator is preparing legislation that would “prevent large, nonprofit institutions from outsourcing work to foreign countries” with offenders being stripped of their non-profit status. Though this legislation is in its early stages, aimed at non-profits, and isolated to Pennsylvania, I predict that legislating “hiring American” for for-profit companies is going to be an emerging political theme in the months ahead.
Sure, there was opposition to offshoring over the past few years. But when the unemployment rate in the USA is 4% and American consumers are enjoying low prices on the products they buy, the opposition doesn’t have much force. However, in today’s economy, when the unemployment rate has been flirting with double digits for an extended period of time, the argument for bringing millions of offshored jobs back is starting to look more persuasive.
As I see it, there are only a few things that can bring jobs back:
- Legislating more taxes for organizations that offshore
- Legislating tax relief for organizations that bring offshored jobs back to the USA
- An economic recovery where the unemployment rate will drop to historically normal levels
- Voluntary efforts on the part of American employers to restructure their workforces to be composed of a greater percentage of US citizens
Let’s discuss the likelihood of these things happening in reverse order:
- Employers volunteering to hire more Americans? At higher wages? As great as a branding strategy this may be, I don’t foresee employers doing this in today’s uber-cost-competitive environment.
- An economic recovery? What is going to spur that? What is that magic industry that is going to emerge that will suddenly create demand for all of these workers? I don’t see one without some really bad problem to solve (e.g., a terrorist attack, a cyber-crime outbreak, etc.) which would likely kill more jobs than it would create.
- Legislating tax relief? I believe that labor cost arbitrage would still offer more margin than the government would have available to reimburse.
- Legislating more taxes? As unpleasant as that sounds to me as a business owner, it seems the easiest way to make a difference. And politicians seem to prefer things being easy rather than fair.
There are some other implications of the economic situation that I’ll cover tomorrow.
To Your Career,
Charles Dominick, SPSM
President & Chief Procurement Officer
Next Level Purchasing, Inc.
Struggling To Have A Rewarding Purchasing Career?
Earn Your SPSM® Certification Online At
Next Level Purchasing . com
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Whitepaper Wednesday - Inventory Optimization
Welcome back to another installment of Whitepaper Wednesday here on the Purchasing Certification Blog. This week, I’ll be reviewing a whitepaper entitled “Five Inventory Core Competencies That Can Make or Break Your Competitive Advantage” from Logility.
I hadn’t heard much about Logility before, but I was impressed with this whitepaper. I found that it shared a lot of great ideas. The only downside was that – at a mere nine pages – it was too short to go into the “nuts and bolts” of how to implement those ideas.
At the core of the whitepaper, as you may imagine judging by the title, are five techniques for more profitably managing inventory. A brief description of each of those techniques is as follows...
1. Multi-level Inventory Optimization: Different stakeholders within a manufacturing company have different interests with regard to how much inventory to keep on hand, causing a situation where inventory is managed by “separate silos in which one team may be motivated to buy in bulk, another to minimize the number of production set-ups and a third to hold enough [finished goods] to ensure 98% customer service at all costs.” The whitepaper insists that “inventory policy for all three must be coordinated” and explains how strategically increasing raw materials and work in process inventory can decrease finished goods inventory needed and produce significant savings.
2. Synchronize Time-phased Business Cycles: This technique indicates that “inventory optimization should focus on setting the best possible targets for every individual time period of the business cycle, taking into account the change in demand as well as the change in demand uncertainty over the course of the cycle.”
3. SKU Proliferation and Postponement: Changes to products and how they are packaged and promoted often result in many new, discrete items (referred to as stock keeping units, or SKU’s) being added to inventory. According to the whitepaper, the “Postponement” process aggregates inventory and delays the use of some SKU’s to increase flexibility and reduce cost. I would have loved some more detailed explanation of this particular technique.
4. Strategic Outsourcing: As taught in the Next Level Purchasing online class, Executing A Global Sourcing Strategy, it is important to focus on total landed cost when making an offshoring decision. The whitepaper points out that not every supply chain manager does so: “The most difficult part of an outsourcing evaluation is accurately assessing the impact of increased time in the supply chain. When manufacturing shifts to Asia, how does the impact of eight additional weeks of shipping compare to the material cost and production savings?” Not every destination requires eight weeks to ship from Asia, but the point is well-taken. This section also includes some guidance on how to decide which items to offshore and which to keep local.
5. Position Capital for Customer Service: This final section encourages readers to use a different inventory strategy for each “class” of customers. Some customer types are more demanding, but that doesn’t mean that you have to apply the same costly strategies to all of your inventory.
For me, this whitepaper represented a pleasant introduction to Logility. If you would like to get your own copy of this whitepaper to read the additional words of wisdom, you can get one from Logility’s website (registration required).
To Your Career,
Charles Dominick, SPSM
President & Chief Procurement Officer
Next Level Purchasing, Inc.
Struggling To Find More Good Resources For Procurement Leaders?
Check Out Our Web Site's New Whitepaper Section At
http://www.NextLevelPurchasing.com/WPcharles
I hadn’t heard much about Logility before, but I was impressed with this whitepaper. I found that it shared a lot of great ideas. The only downside was that – at a mere nine pages – it was too short to go into the “nuts and bolts” of how to implement those ideas.
At the core of the whitepaper, as you may imagine judging by the title, are five techniques for more profitably managing inventory. A brief description of each of those techniques is as follows...
1. Multi-level Inventory Optimization: Different stakeholders within a manufacturing company have different interests with regard to how much inventory to keep on hand, causing a situation where inventory is managed by “separate silos in which one team may be motivated to buy in bulk, another to minimize the number of production set-ups and a third to hold enough [finished goods] to ensure 98% customer service at all costs.” The whitepaper insists that “inventory policy for all three must be coordinated” and explains how strategically increasing raw materials and work in process inventory can decrease finished goods inventory needed and produce significant savings.
2. Synchronize Time-phased Business Cycles: This technique indicates that “inventory optimization should focus on setting the best possible targets for every individual time period of the business cycle, taking into account the change in demand as well as the change in demand uncertainty over the course of the cycle.”
3. SKU Proliferation and Postponement: Changes to products and how they are packaged and promoted often result in many new, discrete items (referred to as stock keeping units, or SKU’s) being added to inventory. According to the whitepaper, the “Postponement” process aggregates inventory and delays the use of some SKU’s to increase flexibility and reduce cost. I would have loved some more detailed explanation of this particular technique.
4. Strategic Outsourcing: As taught in the Next Level Purchasing online class, Executing A Global Sourcing Strategy, it is important to focus on total landed cost when making an offshoring decision. The whitepaper points out that not every supply chain manager does so: “The most difficult part of an outsourcing evaluation is accurately assessing the impact of increased time in the supply chain. When manufacturing shifts to Asia, how does the impact of eight additional weeks of shipping compare to the material cost and production savings?” Not every destination requires eight weeks to ship from Asia, but the point is well-taken. This section also includes some guidance on how to decide which items to offshore and which to keep local.
5. Position Capital for Customer Service: This final section encourages readers to use a different inventory strategy for each “class” of customers. Some customer types are more demanding, but that doesn’t mean that you have to apply the same costly strategies to all of your inventory.
For me, this whitepaper represented a pleasant introduction to Logility. If you would like to get your own copy of this whitepaper to read the additional words of wisdom, you can get one from Logility’s website (registration required).
To Your Career,
Charles Dominick, SPSM
President & Chief Procurement Officer
Next Level Purchasing, Inc.
Struggling To Find More Good Resources For Procurement Leaders?
Check Out Our Web Site's New Whitepaper Section At
http://www.NextLevelPurchasing.com/WPcharles
Monday, August 23, 2010
Ethical Procurement: How Is Everyone Supposed To Know The Rules?
I hope that you have enjoyed the article "5 Components of Ethical Procurement."
What I am hoping is not done with this article is for a procurement director out there to say "Oh, we have three of those in place. We're good."
It is important to have all of those components in place if you really want anything close to a bulletproof culture of ethics. However, I will admit that one of these components is probably more important than all of the others.
What is that one super-important component of ethical procurement?
The ethics policy.
Without the ethics policy, the utility of all of the other components is lessened. That's because the ethics policy defines the rules. Without well-defined rules, ethics training will be vague, an ombudsman won't have any clear answers, a process with checks and balances won't know what to check for, and audits will only reveal something that "might" be unethical.
The ethics policy provides the standard against which actual behavior is measured. Imagine if this situation happened in your organization...
A manager of an internal customer department wants to purchase consulting services to help his department. This manager has access to the pricing of all consultants used by the organization in the past. The manager suggests getting a quote from his wife's consulting firm, saying that his wife's firm can do the work a lot cheaper. Of course, this departmental manager will have to be the one OK'ing the decision because it's his department that is affected.
There is no ethics policy outlining whether or not doing business with a spouse is acceptable.
The manager has never been told - via training or otherwise - that he cannot buy from his spouse.
There is no ombudsman to turn to for advice.
You are able to place orders or contracts independently, without the requirement of management or supervisory approval.
There have never been audits, so no one in the organization knows if this type of situation has happened before and, if it has, if it was problematic or not.
What would you do?
Would you worry about awarding the contract and, later, being suspected of being "in on the scheme" where others thought that you may have gotten paid off for keeping quiet about it?
Would you confront the manager and risk having a politically powerful employee as an enemy?
It is a tough situation without an ethics policy to support you, isn't it?
To Your Career,
Charles Dominick, SPSM
President & Chief Procurement Officer
Next Level Purchasing, Inc.
Struggling To Have A Rewarding Purchasing Career?
Earn Your SPSM® Certification Online At
Next Level Purchasing . com
What I am hoping is not done with this article is for a procurement director out there to say "Oh, we have three of those in place. We're good."
It is important to have all of those components in place if you really want anything close to a bulletproof culture of ethics. However, I will admit that one of these components is probably more important than all of the others.
What is that one super-important component of ethical procurement?
The ethics policy.
Without the ethics policy, the utility of all of the other components is lessened. That's because the ethics policy defines the rules. Without well-defined rules, ethics training will be vague, an ombudsman won't have any clear answers, a process with checks and balances won't know what to check for, and audits will only reveal something that "might" be unethical.
The ethics policy provides the standard against which actual behavior is measured. Imagine if this situation happened in your organization...
A manager of an internal customer department wants to purchase consulting services to help his department. This manager has access to the pricing of all consultants used by the organization in the past. The manager suggests getting a quote from his wife's consulting firm, saying that his wife's firm can do the work a lot cheaper. Of course, this departmental manager will have to be the one OK'ing the decision because it's his department that is affected.
There is no ethics policy outlining whether or not doing business with a spouse is acceptable.
The manager has never been told - via training or otherwise - that he cannot buy from his spouse.
There is no ombudsman to turn to for advice.
You are able to place orders or contracts independently, without the requirement of management or supervisory approval.
There have never been audits, so no one in the organization knows if this type of situation has happened before and, if it has, if it was problematic or not.
What would you do?
Would you worry about awarding the contract and, later, being suspected of being "in on the scheme" where others thought that you may have gotten paid off for keeping quiet about it?
Would you confront the manager and risk having a politically powerful employee as an enemy?
It is a tough situation without an ethics policy to support you, isn't it?
To Your Career,
Charles Dominick, SPSM
President & Chief Procurement Officer
Next Level Purchasing, Inc.
Struggling To Have A Rewarding Purchasing Career?
Earn Your SPSM® Certification Online At
Next Level Purchasing . com
Friday, August 20, 2010
Caveman Purchasing: Fighting Suppliers Over Old Invoices
Having worked for an organization that received government grant money for projects - and had strict accounting controls for charging purchases against those funds - I can understand the inconvenience caused when a supplier submits an invoice extremely late. However, I respectfully disagree with some of the advice in the blogosphere on how to handle late invoices.
This advice started with a post on the Vendor Management Office blog. The blog began with a very thoughtful citation of a Virginia state law that considers invoices submitted up to five years late to be legally enforceable for payment. Good stuff to know!
Notwithstanding this law, the blog then goes on to provide tactics for purchasing professionals to weasel out of their legal payment obligations. I was a little surprised by some components of this advice, which included threatening to cease doing business with the supplier and taunting the supplier to file a lawsuit, as I consider myself a fan of the author - one of the few individuals in the world I would consider for Next Level Purchasing's open Director of Education position.
Then, Spend Matters dedicated a post of its own to sharing highlights from the Vendor Management Office post, calling the tactics "sage advice." But is it sage advice?
Maybe in the "caveman days of purchasing," where the only performance indicator was cost savings and a forgiven invoice could add a couple hundred bucks to your cost savings total, it was sage advice. The "caveman buyers" of years gone by would wait for a supplier to falter just so they could screw them out of a few pennies to add to that cost savings tally.
But, in today's world where collaborative supplier relationships are more important than ever, is it sage advice to refuse to pay for goods or services that you've received and are legally obligated to pay for?
I think not - unless you want "caveman suppliers" who wait for you to mess up so they can stick it to you.
As a very frank side note, I don’t really think that Jason from Spend Matters considers these tactics to be “sage advice.” Otherwise, he wouldn’t have ended his post by writing “Just please be sure to don't use any of these techniques against any business I'm a part of, now will you!”
Jason doesn’t want or deserve to be cheated out of money he is legally owed and neither do the suppliers who you will certainly someday call at 4:30PM on a Friday afternoon with an emergency order or expediting request. Plus, those of you whose finance departments have recently forced you to unpopularly extend payment terms with your suppliers from a standard of net 30 days to net 60 days or net 90 days or more know that a supplier that submits an invoice late is kind of doing you a favor!
Despite my disagreement with most of the tactics in the Vendor Management Office post, there was actually one brilliant piece of advice saved for the end. It stated:
“As a preventative measure, you can contract around your state laws by including something similar to the following in your contracts with suppliers:
‘Supplier acknowledges that it must submit invoices on a timely basis to Customer so as to avoid any unnecessary business hardship on Customer. Notwithstanding the laws of the state of [insert state here] and Supplier’s rights to collect on debts, Supplier hereby agrees that Customer shall not be required to pay any invoices submitted by Supplier that are submitted by Supplier more than twelve (12) months following the date that the goods or services, as the case may be, were provided by Supplier.’”
This I agree with wholeheartedly and think that you should include this clause in your contract templates and purchase order terms and conditions!
Because, as I alluded to at the beginning of this article, it IS a problem for some organizations to be billed after grants, budgets, etc. have been closed. If a supplier agrees to a prompt billing obligation, agrees to the consequences in advance, and fails, then you aren’t screwing them out of anything because you are not legally obligated to pay them.
If circumstances permit, you should still try to be reasonable and pay them. But, if you can’t, then you know that you are not thumbing your nose at a legal obligation.
Leave the nose-thumbing to the caveman buyers.
To Your Career,
Charles Dominick, SPSM
President & Chief Procurement Officer
Next Level Purchasing, Inc.
Struggling To Have A Rewarding Purchasing Career?
Earn Your SPSM® Certification Online At
Next Level Purchasing . com
This advice started with a post on the Vendor Management Office blog. The blog began with a very thoughtful citation of a Virginia state law that considers invoices submitted up to five years late to be legally enforceable for payment. Good stuff to know!
Notwithstanding this law, the blog then goes on to provide tactics for purchasing professionals to weasel out of their legal payment obligations. I was a little surprised by some components of this advice, which included threatening to cease doing business with the supplier and taunting the supplier to file a lawsuit, as I consider myself a fan of the author - one of the few individuals in the world I would consider for Next Level Purchasing's open Director of Education position.
Then, Spend Matters dedicated a post of its own to sharing highlights from the Vendor Management Office post, calling the tactics "sage advice." But is it sage advice?
Maybe in the "caveman days of purchasing," where the only performance indicator was cost savings and a forgiven invoice could add a couple hundred bucks to your cost savings total, it was sage advice. The "caveman buyers" of years gone by would wait for a supplier to falter just so they could screw them out of a few pennies to add to that cost savings tally.
But, in today's world where collaborative supplier relationships are more important than ever, is it sage advice to refuse to pay for goods or services that you've received and are legally obligated to pay for?
I think not - unless you want "caveman suppliers" who wait for you to mess up so they can stick it to you.
As a very frank side note, I don’t really think that Jason from Spend Matters considers these tactics to be “sage advice.” Otherwise, he wouldn’t have ended his post by writing “Just please be sure to don't use any of these techniques against any business I'm a part of, now will you!”
Jason doesn’t want or deserve to be cheated out of money he is legally owed and neither do the suppliers who you will certainly someday call at 4:30PM on a Friday afternoon with an emergency order or expediting request. Plus, those of you whose finance departments have recently forced you to unpopularly extend payment terms with your suppliers from a standard of net 30 days to net 60 days or net 90 days or more know that a supplier that submits an invoice late is kind of doing you a favor!
Despite my disagreement with most of the tactics in the Vendor Management Office post, there was actually one brilliant piece of advice saved for the end. It stated:
“As a preventative measure, you can contract around your state laws by including something similar to the following in your contracts with suppliers:
‘Supplier acknowledges that it must submit invoices on a timely basis to Customer so as to avoid any unnecessary business hardship on Customer. Notwithstanding the laws of the state of [insert state here] and Supplier’s rights to collect on debts, Supplier hereby agrees that Customer shall not be required to pay any invoices submitted by Supplier that are submitted by Supplier more than twelve (12) months following the date that the goods or services, as the case may be, were provided by Supplier.’”
This I agree with wholeheartedly and think that you should include this clause in your contract templates and purchase order terms and conditions!
Because, as I alluded to at the beginning of this article, it IS a problem for some organizations to be billed after grants, budgets, etc. have been closed. If a supplier agrees to a prompt billing obligation, agrees to the consequences in advance, and fails, then you aren’t screwing them out of anything because you are not legally obligated to pay them.
If circumstances permit, you should still try to be reasonable and pay them. But, if you can’t, then you know that you are not thumbing your nose at a legal obligation.
Leave the nose-thumbing to the caveman buyers.
To Your Career,
Charles Dominick, SPSM
President & Chief Procurement Officer
Next Level Purchasing, Inc.
Struggling To Have A Rewarding Purchasing Career?
Earn Your SPSM® Certification Online At
Next Level Purchasing . com
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