“I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” Wayne Gretzky’s infamous line has never been more applicable to procurement than in today’s environment. An environment when many supplier and buyer industries continue to undergo fundamental structural changes—such as with new global competitors, innovative distribution channels, disruptive technology and rapidly...

As someone who covers the supply chain and an armchair historian, I’m naturally intrigued by wartime logistics. It was Napoleon who said, “Armies march on their stomachs.” In the Oxford Companion to World War II, Charles Messenger wrote, “Before the coming of the railway and invention of the internal combustion engine, armies subsisted largely by foraging, both for food and fuel, the...

New Year. New topics. For some, even new beginnings. Whether 2013 sparked a need for change within your personal relationships or business aspects, now’s the time to identify what your goals are for the year ahead and execute them. For some in the supply chain, this could mean re-evaluating your memberships to the professional organizations and associations in your industry. Have you...

There’s a long line of economists and academics stretching past Adam Smith’s time that helps us understand the emergence and necessity of modern outsourcing. One of the most prominent in that line is the Nobel laureate John Nash. If you are familiar with the movie “A Beautiful Mind,” which is loosely based on the life of Nash, there’s a brief scene in it that captures his great...