Strategic Sourcing

Procurement Doesn’t Manage Indirect Spend – Suppliers and Stakeholders Do

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Spend Matters

One of the toughest challenges for procurement organizations tasked with managing indirect spend is that they don’t do it – their suppliers and stakeholders do. Consider the sometimes limited visibility procurement has into demand, pricing, contracts and related areas for indirect spend, especially those that are managed and/or negotiated at a decentralized level in the business. In addition, procurement often lacks the same level of understanding of the physical and financial supply chain flow for indirect material that they do for direct. …

Small Package Freight

The USPS is Trying to Raise Rates – Let’s Hope It Does

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Spend Matters

Spend Matters welcomes this guest post by Jim Haller, program director, Transportation Services, at NPI, a spend management consultancy, focused on eliminating overspending on IT, telecom and shipping.
Believe it or not, not every carrier rate increase is bad news and such may be the case for the USPS. Recently, the Postal Service filed a request with the Postal Regulatory Commission to raise rates for a few of its small parcel delivery services – most notably its Parcel Select offerings, which would increase by 8% (domestic Priority Mail rates will go unchanged).

The Parcel Select service is most commonly known as “the other half” of the hybrid, last-mile shipping services offered by UPS, FedEx and DHL. If you’ve ever used UPS SurePost or FedEx SmartPost to ship goods, then Parcel Select is the service that’s…