Career procurement professional turned author Peter Smith, MA, FCIPS, FRSA, recently joined the Sourcing Industry Landscape Podcast to lift the lid on some of the worst procurement scams in history, offers practical advice on avoiding embarrassing mistakes, and shares how to make sound, strategic procurement decisions.
If you're going back to 2019 is when you wrote the book, can you share some of their global disasters or the big stories that you included in the book back then?
When it comes to procurement failures, there are many areas, and some of them do not really understand what you're buying. And that can be something very simple, like the printing equipment the Irish government bought that didn't actually fit into the building they were putting it in. Or much more complex technology failures and so on.
But then, there are some interesting areas we perhaps don't think about so much in supply chain procurement, and I believe getting incentives wrong is a fascinating one. So, how do you incentivize suppliers to do the right thing?
And some of the failures there are clearly failures, but when you ask the question, "Well, how would you have done it, so it wasn't a failure?" those answers are not simple. Just something as straightforward as, "How do you get the incentives right for somebody running an outsourced call center for you? They're handling customer queries, doing inquiries or complaints. How do you incentivize them to work efficiently but give excellent customer service to the people calling in?
Paul Polizzotto is the CEO and Founder of Givewith, a Service-as-a-Software solution that generates social impact funding opportunities for nonprofits that can be embedded into transactions between buyers and suppliers. As a social entrepreneur, he brings his expertise as the former founder of EcoMedia, which directed more than $100 million in funding and resources to environmental, education and community health and wellness programs across the country, improving the quality of life for more than 60 million people. Here he talks about the role of ESG scores on a company's bottom line and ways that sourcing and procurement can initiate cultural change in their organizations.
Givewith is a social impact technology platform – what does that mean and how does it work?
Givewith is a social enterprise creating innovative solutions that bring together companies and nonprofits to generate real, measurable impact – while simultaneously driving unprecedented business value. Givewith Enterprise is a SaaS solution that generates business-relevant social impact funding opportunities that can be seamlessly embedded into any transaction between a buyer and a supplier.
Here’s how it works:
Our platform analyzes companies’ sustainability and CSR performance based on robust data that’s important to their customer base and the investor community – enabling their company to amplify its strengths and improve weaknesses. The Givewith algorithm aggregates these insights and identifies the most effective nonprofit programs, which the buyer can easily add into any of their RFPs.
An Exposé from Procurement Insider Peter Smith
Career procurement professional turned author Peter Smith, MA, FCIPS, FRSA, recently joined the Sourcing Industry Landscape Podcast to lift the lid on some of the worst procurement scams in history, offers practical advice on avoiding embarrassing mistakes, and shares how to make sound, strategic procurement decisions.
If you're going back to 2019 is when you wrote the book, can you share some of their global disasters or the big stories that you included in the book back then?
When it comes to procurement failures, there are many areas, and some of them do not really understand what you're buying. And that can be something very simple, like the printing equipment the Irish government bought that didn't actually fit into the building they were putting it in. Or much more complex technology failures and so on.
But then, there are some interesting areas we perhaps don't think about so much in supply chain procurement, and I believe getting incentives wrong is a fascinating one. So, how do you incentivize suppliers to do the right thing?
And some of the failures there are clearly failures, but when you ask the question, "Well, how would you have done it, so it wasn't a failure?" those answers are not simple. Just something as straightforward as, "How do you get the incentives right for somebody running an outsourced call center for you? They're handling customer queries, doing inquiries or complaints. How do you incentivize them to work efficiently but give excellent customer service to the people calling in?