Suchergebnisse

In Chapter One it was argued that multinational companies should give adequate emphasis to procurement factors in their corporate planning. While this argument is difficult to refute, many multinational companies do not pay sufficient attention to this aspect of their planning. This article presents some of the conclusions from a study which investigated the extent to which procurement factors were considered in the planning of these firms.

In his textbook entitled A Concept of Corporate Planning, Russell Ackoff states that:

The most significant element in manufacturing costs is materials. To be more precise, manufacturing companies, on average, dispose of more than half the money they receive from sales in purchasing materials, components and services. As one measure of comparison, labour costs represent something over 20 per cent, less than half the proportion attributable to materials. Thus, despite the considerable irritant of fast‐rising wages, at the level of the manufacturing company, materials loomed largest as the most significant contributor to inflation during the period 1973–4.

The case that the industrial buyer is a risk avoider is not difficult to sustain. Every buying organisation, to a greater or lesser degree, demonstrates symptoms of such behaviour every day. Among these symptoms, the most apparent to the observer is the tendency to retain established suppliers even when competitive alternatives are available. Clearly, to take on a new supplier involves some aspect of risk of failure—even if only of a "teething trouble" nature. A second symptom in production organisations is that which is implied in the statement "we must keep the line moving". One consequence of this is the tendency to maintain raw material and component inventory levels which err on the high side. In flow production situations involving expensive capital equipment, for example, it is reasonably easy to defend such behaviour. As one Materials Manager put it: "If I stop the line for one hour it costs this company £x,000. There would need to be remarkable cost savings to interest me in changing our present level of stocks or our major suppliers". Another symptom is a tendency to over‐specify, or to pay "a little more" to ensure that the supplier performs within the required parameters.

The concept of strategy as applied to purchasing has not attracted the attention of many writers in the management field. The reasons are not difficult to find. They reflect the diminished attention paid by top management and management academics to the purchasing field as a whole. The point has been made by Ammer that top management often perceives purchasing as performing a "passive" role: "His (the purchasing manager's) performance is considered to be satisfactory (a) if he operates his department efficiently (as measured by operating costs…) and (b) if he does not antagonise the executives who really do make a direct contribution to company objectives."

The analogy that an organisation structure is like a suit of clothes is apt. Not only does it suggest the necessary individuality of "fit", it also indicates something of the inevitability of change over time. As with a suit, where wear and tear and fashion are relevant indicators of the need for change, so it is with organisations. To those who might query the need to draw this analogy, it is worth pointing out that many organisational problems arise simply because the comparisons are ignored. Just as there are no suits which will fit everybody, so are there no organisation structures which can be applied universally. Then in the same way as the suit bought ten years ago would not meet the buyer's needs today, yesterday's organisation structure is unlikely to meet today's needs.

Many writers have commented on the difficulties associated with the reduction of the myriad of functional objectives within the company to a consistent corporate objective. The author contends that the mechanisms which exist within many companies to attempt this task are out of balance because insufficient attention is paid to source planning. This article illustrates some of the consequences of omitting sourcing data from the base from which the corporate plan is evolved. The author suggests that the interdependence of corporations necessitates careful consideration of external strengths in supply markets as well as in relation to the company's own capabilities.

When David Farmer began his career in purchasing education, "academic" was a word he fought shy of. Now he is recognised as the foremost purchasing "academic" in the UK today. In this article he talks about the transformation that has taken place in attitudes to purchasing education and looks to the future.

In order to know where we are going it's often useful to know where we have been. Accordingly, Dr David Farmer draws on some historical examples to illustrate the growth of procurement as an essential component of industrial development.

Considerable interest has been shown recently in developing the negotiating skills of procurement personnel. This article outlines one approach to such development which has been used in in‐company training programmes. It describes the simulation method which has been used as the core of more than 200 such programmes, presents the results of a research study carried out in 12 of the 70 corporations in Europe which have participated in these training programmes, and sets out some conclusions which have been drawn from the empirical knowledge gained in running the whole series of programmes. It is hoped that this discussion will prove useful to procurement managers, management trainers, business school professors, and others who are concerned with the development of negotiating skills.

Experience in industry has emphasised the importance of supply markets in planning. Those experiences, particularly over shortages, have resulted in many organisations taking supply factors into their corporate plans for the first time. However, in most such cases the motivation for including that planning input has been defensive — most often because:

In the West, at least, monopolies are generally thought to be threatening. An illustration of this concern about the potential consequences of a dominant presence in a market is the fact that most Western countries have introduced anti‐monopoly legislation. Rightly or wrongly, the presence of a monopolist suggests to many that the purchaser of goods or services from such an organisation will not get value for his money. It is often argued that the monopolist will seek to make unnecessarily large profits, or that he will be inefficient and in turn that this will result in his selling prices being higher than they ought. Little attention is usually paid in such discussion to what the economists call "non‐price variables". However, by implication at least, in this respect too, the seller is thought to perform at a lower level than he might under competition (for example, specification, delivery and service).

"How can public administration (P.A.) nudge government to govern fundamentally better in terms of policy? How critical is P.A. contemplation and nudges - prods, shoves or hammer blows - to government-in-context? In this book, David John Farmer argues that government-in-context refers to government-in-totality, to what governs even if not called government and to what constrains government action. Constricting contextual features are infiltration, exfiltration and post-truth, raising questions relating to democracy. Infiltration into government is the action of gaining access that benefits big corporations, their owners and billionaires; findings are that it also mal-nudges government action through such elements as big money, lobbying, tax breaks and embrace of the free market. Reacting to factors like growing income inequality, what is explained as exfiltration occurs for middle- and lower-income people. Post-truth is noted as the Oxford Dictionary's word of the year for 2016, describing people concerned less with truths than with opinions. The book analyzes three practical 'hammer blow' and eighteen 'shove' nudges to contradict the mal-nudges. Beyond Public Administration will be of interest to P.A. scholars and graduate students, more specifically those interested in critical, normative, or interpretive scholarship focused on various aspects of P.A. theory, governance, and practical management"--