Monthly Top 5 - September 2023

Hi all,

115 of you subscribed in the last 7 days… Wow. I was not expecting that… Thank you and welcome to Pure Procurement 🙏

Given the end of September pretty much lined up with the usual Sunday Night Note, I opted to send you the Monthly Top 5 as the Sunday Night Note this week. We’ll be back to regularly scheduled programming next week.

Articles featured this month will help you wrangle with how to tame the expanding role of Procurement and ensure you have a high performing supply chain recruiting process.

If you find any of the stories featured this month valuable, give this post a ‘like’ by clicking the heart at the top of bottom of the post (♥). It helps me a lot!

Thanks again for reading and have a great week ahead!

Best,

Joël

P.S. The following post made a lot of noise on LinkedIn this week. Head over if you are looking for your next Procurement read and haven’t seen the list yet:

21 Must-Read Books for Procurement Professionals

Thanks again to everyone who contributed. Go give them a follow if you don’t already follow them. If I asked them for a book recommendation, it’s because they have valuable opinions!

Top 5 Source-to-Pay Articles - September 2023

#1 - The “Panama Canal Story” is Just Beginning…

In July 2021, the Ever Given - one of the world’s largest container ships, got stuck in the Suez Canal for 6 days, freezing nearly $10 billion in trade for every one of those days… The spectacle produced this amazing picture which has been the source of a multitude of “too much work” memes ever since… An inconvenient, yet sort of hilarious one off event… Story over.

This year, the Panama Canal is in the news but for much different reasons. This engineering marvel is dependent on rainfall into freshwater lakes to operate. Panama is experiencing historical droughts this year… Therefore, they are having to limit the number and weight of each ship coming through the canal to enable operation… This could very well happen again in coming years.

Why is this important?

The Panama Canal is one of the core arteries in our maritime supply chain’s heart. As an example, 40% of all U.S. container traffic travels through the canal every year (or about $270 billion in cargo).

Even if the panama canal isn’t directly part of your supply chain, goods that were destined for the canal but end up traveling by other means will put pressure on other transportation networks (truck, rail and air). Everyone in Supply Chain should be monitoring the Panama Canal situation very closely to determine how they may be impacted going forward.

This 10-min video does a great job of summarizing the situation.

How the Panama Canal’s Drought Is Threatening Global Supply Chains (Video)by Wall Street Journal

#2 - Is Artificial Intelligence a “Skill Leveler”?

There’s a fascinating collaborative paper out this month that studied the performance of 758 BCG consultants with and without AI tools in their work to to draw some empirical conclusions on the impact of AI on workforce.

The most interesting finding, in my opinion:

Ethan’s summary does a great job of pulling out the key findings for those of us who don’t have access to the paper.

Centaurs and Cyborgs on the Jagged Frontierby Ethan Mollick at One Useful Thing

#3 - Interviewing for Critical Thinking Skills

As Procurement’s role in the organization keeps expanding, having team members with sharp critical thinking skills is increasingly valuable.

In my opinion, Critical Thinking comes down to being curious/alert, asking good questions and being able to triangulate the truth and the appropriate next steps based on the answers you harvest.

In the following article, HBR outlines a great exercise you can use to assess exactly this.

Bookmarked!

How to Evaluate a Job Candidate’s Critical Thinking Skills in an Interviewby HBR

#4 - A Health Check for Supply Chain Recruiting

In another article on recruiting, Conrad outlines a 9-point checklist to ensure your Supply Chain recruitment process is optimized to its potential. If you’re having trouble recruiting, getting ‘beat’ by competitors, this is a good list to review.

For the last point (Understand and act on employee priorities), I would argue you should also be doing this constantly with your current employees. An employee at 25 may prioritize higher pay. At 35, they may prioritize time with a young family. At 45, it may be a title. Etc. It will be different for everyone and will evolve over time. The only way to ‘crack the code’ is to keep your finger on the pulse by building trust and transparency, asking every single person for their real answers and acting on them at the individual level.

9 Ways to Recruit Top Procurement Talent in Today’s Competitive Marketby Conrad Snover at Supply Chain Management Review

#5 - ‘Purchasing’ Must Become Supply Management

In a call back to Peter Kraljic’s seminal 1983 HBR article where he defined the Kraljic Matrix, Felix reviews how the points apply to today’s landscape.

Essentially, the core message is still the same 40 years later but we are pushing it to a new level, your whole supply chain… Increasingly, organizations need to understand the details of purchases made by all the players in their supply chains to factually report on things like sustainability, carbon emissions, respect of labor standards, etc.

I suspect we will still be having this conversation in 40 years but on a much more granular level… “What year was that fish you are eating born….? Is it old enough for you to be eating it?”

Analyst Eye on How Purchasing Must Really Become Supply Managementby Felix Behr at Spend Matters