Thanks to Next Level Purchasing, the answer is yes.  I have just previewed the first in their series of video podcasts which will be released to the public on Tuesday, October 17th both on YouTube and on the Next Level Purchasing site.

In this first installment, Charles and the host discuss the importance of ongoing contract management to ensure that savings numbers and other points gained during the negotiations process are upheld throughout the life of the contract.

This first video was well done and interesting.  Charles's insight and comments about the process are exactly right.  They are worth hearing as an introduction if you are new to Purchasing or a great reminder if you have years of experience.

On a side note, Next Level Purchasing recently received the Innovative Business of the Year Award from the Pittsburgh Airport Area Chamber of Commerce.  Congratulations to Charles and his staff.

Here are 7 things I learned about managing equipment repair:

1. Repair/service company names and phone numbers and instructions should be posted on the machines.  This won't eliminate calls, but it will cut down on them.

2. Maintenance contracts are almost never worth it for the first year, but many companies won't let you start one later if the item was not covered from day one.  Negotiate a year or two of free maintenance into the contract.

3. PM or Preventative Maintenance is a good thing that is never done.  Be careful that the vendor doesn't suddenly decide to do five a year on each machine.  Insist on the vendor keeping track of this service by machine serial number.

4. No matter how hard you try, you will never keep track of EVERY machine in your corporation.  Even RFID asset tags won't get you to perfection.

5. Establish criteria for when a machine is so badly broken that is should be replaced rather than repaired.  You can't always rely on the repair vendor's opinion since the vendor makes money by repairing broken machines.

6. Establish a service level agreement (SLA) with the vendor that includes emergency services because machines usually break when their absence will cause the largest crisis.

7. Make sure time and materials rates are competitive for the industry and the geographic area. 

Have you managed equipment repair during your Procurement career?  What was your favorite (or least favorite) commodity to manage?  Send your Top 7 List to PurchaseRealm@ComprehensiveAdvice.com and I will share it with my readers.

I learned of a service today offered by IBM called IBM Asset Recovery Solutions.  The service assists customers with proper disposal of unwanted IT equipment.

Part of the service is a buy-back system.  There is even a list online of items with market value and an online tool designed to help you get an instant quote on the items.  I also noticed a customer service box with a toll free number, the opportunity to have someone from IBM call you, or a live chat icon.

I wish this service had been around years ago when I inherited the responsibility for a roomful of old computer equipment!

Here are 7 things I learned about buying custom promotional items:

Custom samples are expensive.  Companies will gladly provide free samples of their items; you have to pay for prototypes of items with your branding.

Lead time is often very long in this industry.  Users tend to decide they want promotional merchandise a couple days before an event.  This is one case in which expedited shipping isn't going to be enough.  You need to have appropriate lead time expectations established with your users.

No matter how good they look, someone in authority will say, "Oh, those are OK, but I thought they were going to look like…"

Keep records of all orders indefinitely.  It's best to have a vendor that does as well because users will remember something the company ordered years earlier and want that exact same thing again, but there will be no specs and no samples left from which to work.

If you are unhappy with you promotional merchandise company, there are many from which to choose, both national and local.  You will end up with a lot of catalogs or this sort of stuff.

The best promotional items are things that recipients will actually use such as key chains with flashlights, tee shirts, or mugs.  (The latter two are better because other people see the logo too.)  Cheaper pens aren't a good choice because they get thrown in a drawer or penholder with a dozen others.  If you want to emblazon pens with your logo, make them the fanciest pen offered.  Users will love them and everyone who sees it on the user's desk will ask about it.

Vendors get the blanks from the same places so base merchandise is probably pf equal quality equal or of very similar quality.  Service and quality of personalization are the factors to consider when comparing prices.

Anyway, I came across this product for salespeople called SalesGenuis.  A description from manufacturer's website is below.

"SalesGenius lets individual Sales Professionals track how prospects respond to your e-mails...you simply send e-mail, and the Genius Tracker™ alerts you when your e-mail is opened and when your prospects visit the web site. SalesGenius shows exactly which pages each prospect visited, so you know what he/she is interested in, before the first call."

It sounds kind of Big Brotherish, (from the novel 1984, not the TV show on CBS) but interesting.  At the very least it should help salespeople use their time efficiently to focus on those prospects (we Buyers) who are showing some interest or curiosity in the product or service as opposed to e-mails that just get deleted.

If it would prevent a sales call from someone representing something I have no interest in or time to deal with, then it would be worth it from my point of view.  I would be happy to hear from salespeople selling products or services for which I am in the market at that particular time.

What do you think?

Thank you to Nikos Cratimenos, Procurement Director at Fourlis Group, all the way from Athens, Greece for submitting this excellent Top 7 List for managing office supplies focused on the RFP/cost savings part of the process.

1. Departments will pay for inactive, unused devices (cell phones, pagers, Blackberries, Treos, etc.) for months or years when the devices have been lost or thrown in drawers and forgotten.  They don't keep track of them.

2. Let users choose among three or four phone models.  It is best to distribute them in a "vendor fair" type atmosphere so users can handle the demo models and ask the vendor rep questions.

3. Generating cost savings reports for wireless services is a nightmare.  The manner of billing is the same as for your home cell phone in that on one month's bill, service is billed in advance for the next month, usage in billed in arrears for the previous month, and neither of those time periods are the same when you actually get the bill.  Confused, much?

4. Users who call foreign countries for hours on end when they are not at work and their jobs doesn't require it will eventually get noticed by Accounts Payable.  Saying they "lost the phone" won't cut it either if that is not true since the carrier can pinpoint from where calls originated if necessary.

5. Purchasing, or whoever is managing the customer service aspect of the commodity on a day-to-day basis, should have many spare phones on hand.  Users will not want to wait for the phones to be replaced when they are lost or damaged.

6. Upgrades are problematic.  As soon as one person in a department gets the latest model, everyone else calls to ask when they get it too.  (Yes, really.)  Your vendor is not going to give you hundreds or thousands of free phones for all users every time a new model comes out. 

7. Every company, whether it is ATT/Cingular (Google Finance Cingular), Sprint/Nextel (S), Verizon (VZ), T-Mobile (Google Finance T-Mobile), or any other, has its fans among the user base and on the selection team.  Choosing one as the ultimate RFP winner as you would do in most commodities is probably a mistake.  A primary one and a secondary one seem like more work, but are less trouble in the long run.

Have you managed wireless services in your Procurement career?  Send your Top 7 List to PurchaseRealm@ComprehensiveAdvice.com and I will share it with my readers.

Here are 7 things I learned about buying print services:

1. Be careful of overage charges in copy machines lease contracts.  Employees use a significantly larger number of copies than they estimate they will.

2. Catalog printers will insist on a clause in the contract severely limiting their responsibility for printing errors.  This may be a tough area of negotiation.

3. It is a tough call whether you should let your printer buy the paper or use a paper broker.  Printers and brokers have a very antagonistic relationship so it is hard to get reliable information from one about the other.  Consider your options carefully.  I tend to lean towards not using a paper broker since that is adding a middleman to the process and another layer of bureaucracy

4. Your catalog printer should be able to advise you about saving money on mailing.  Co-mailing (mailing your catalog with another of compatible size printed at the same time) could save you a bundle.

5. A cost per catalog difference of a cent or two might seem insignificant, but consider how many catalogs will be printed over the life of the contract. 

6. If you negotiate anything unusual in the contract price-wise, check the invoices carefully to make sure accounts receivable was made aware of your special pricing.

7. Believe it or not, end user training on new copy machines is as necessary as it is with any other commodity.

Here are 7 thing I learned about buying software:

1. Software sales reps are the most aggressive I have seen in any commodity.

2. Sales reps will impose proposal expiration dates for the pricing.  Buyers should not accept these dates as they are based solely on the reps' sales booking periods.  Software prices are not at the mercy of market fluctuations as corrugated or chemicals pricing are.

3. Employees who will actually be using the software, not just executive decision makers,  should be part of the vendor selection team.

4. Many users have no problem saying they don't like the current software, but can't articulate what they would like to see different from a new system.

5. Training details should be spelled out in the contract including, who will perform training, where will it take place, and who will bear the expense.

6. Buyers should get the "sure, it can do that..." promise in writing and confirmed by a technical contact from the vendor.  The sales rep's word is not good enough.

7. The RFP should take into account not only the current needs of the company, but the projected business goals and volume for the next couple years.  A software package that can expand as the business does is most desirable.

Have you bought software during your Procurement career?  Send your Top 7 List to PurchaseRealm@ComprehensiveAdvice.com and I will share it with my readers.

Here are 7 things I learned about managing call center services:

1. Companies have special lines they can use to monitor their phones calls being taken at outsourced call centers.  More of them should use them.

2. Call center sales reps emphasize regional "strengths" aka stereotypes during sales meetings such as claiming that people are nice in the South and more educated in the Northeast.

3. Training for agents must be specified carefully in the contract for issues such as who is responsible for providing it and paying for the reps' time at the outsourced call center.

4. Many outsourcing call centers have minimum volume levels (much higher than you might expect) that you must project or they will not even bid on your business.

5. If a call center offers to credit you for calls that contain errors (including typing mistakes) in the cal documentation, you can believe they have strict quality standards.

6. Call centers can help a smaller business expand its customer service to 24 hour/7 day a week availability.  This somewhat intangible benefit should be factored into decisions.

7. A good way to wade through the large number of call center prospects for the RFP process is to call the corporate office of companies whose service impresses you and talk to their Purchasing Department to find out what call center they use.

Have you managed call center services in your Procurement career?  Send your Top 7 List to PurchaseRealm@ComprehensiveAdvice.com and I will share it with my readers.

Here are 7 things I learned about managing water services:

1. Contrary to what you may think, more water is actually consumed in the winter than in the summer.  Company reps say that the warm, dry inside air in the winter is what drives it.

2. If everyone in a department starts a Weight Watchers International, Inc. (WTW) diet plan at the same time, the department will run out of water within two days.

3. Computerized auto delivery schedules can constantly adjust the amount of water delivered each time by tracking dates and consumed.

4. Those large plastic bottles have an admittedly limited life expectancy; they will start to leak after 5-10 re-uses.  The factory tries to catch the worn out bottles, but several leakage incidents are likely to occur each year in a given account.

5. A cracking bottle can leak its entire 5-gallon contents onto a carpet before anyone notices.  You may have to push, but the water company should pay for carpet cleaning or repair.

6. Bottle deposits can be negotiated out of the agreement.

7. There is a difference between spring water and filtered water.  Make sure you know what your contract states. 

Here are the top 7 things I learned about managing packaging services:

1. Nobody thinks about specific sizes of boxes - until they run out of them. 

2. The volatile paper market causes the price of corrugated to fluctuate frequently.  A good packaging company can help ease the pain and save you money adjusting their own inventory in response to market fluctuations.

3. There is a tremendous amount of cost savings here if one knows where to look.  A good vendor rep is indispensable and will guide you to alternatives such as air pillows.  

4. Your packaging vendor can custom make any size box for any size item your company sells.  You will need to order a sizable amount, though, to get a reasonable price.

5. Cardboard boxes may be about as low-tech as items can be and some packaging companies have barely changed in years.  However, there are modern dynamic packaging companies using online packaging, electronic invoicing/billing, and sophisticated computerized inventory management.  Switch to one of them and you will be amazed at the difference.

6. I can't say enough positive things about the customer service at Uline, Inc (Uline Google Finance), which we used as supplement to our contracted vendor.  Over a 2 year period, I was amazed that every single time I called the Uline 800 number to place an order or ask a question, their customer service was consistently perfect.  Can you say that about the call center of any company with which you work on a regular basis?  Also, delivery time was amazing.  We never once encountered an out of stock situation. 

7. Giant, industrial size bubble wrap is much better for popping than the smaller sizes available in regular stores.

Have you managed packaging services in your Procurement career?  Send your Top 7 List to PurchaseRealm@ComprehensiveAdvice.com and I will share it with my readers.

Here are 7 things I learned about managing wireless services:

1.  No matter which company wins the bid, whether it is ATT/Cingular (Google Finance Cingular), Sprint/Nextel (S), Verizon (VZ), T-Mobile (Google Finance T-Mobile), or any other, the service will have dead spots and one of them is guaranteed to be at a top executive's house.

2. Telling users not to use their corporate cell phones for personal calls is like trying to teach the proverbial pig how to sing - you will waste your time and it only annoys the pig.

3. Having a dedicated rep (one assigned exclusively to your company and preferably on site 5 days a week.) from the wireless company should be negotiated into your contract.  You certainly won't get it later no matter how badly you need or want it.

4. During the RFP stage, each bidder should, with members of the selection team) test EVERY crucial area of every building for reception.

5. There is such a thing as a mini-cell site or cell tower that can be installed at a location to provide service where none would otherwise exist.  They are very expensive and should be part of the RFP right from the beginning.

6. Signal enhancers or signal boosters can be installed in semi-isolated areas that have weak reception.  Examples of such locations would be in elevators or in basements.

7. Cell phones will get lost and ruined in all of the following ways:  (These are not made up examples, these are all reports I actually received.)

• Dropped in the toilet
• Fell overboard on a boat (just the phone, not the end user)
• Dropped in the street and run over by a truck (just the phone, not the user)
• Lost on vacation on a tropical island (yeah, I feel bad for you)
• Lost by a kid while he was playing with the phone

Have you managed wireless services in your Procurement career?  Send your Top 7 List to PurchaseRealm@ComprehensiveAdvice.com and I will share it with my readers.

Nobody had mentioned rebates before so I asked the supervisor who said, "Purchasing doesn't do rebates."  He explained that the time it would take to gather, fill out, and send the paperwork, receipts, and UPC as well track the check and get it to Accounts Payable wasn't worth it to us.  Of course, I had the task of attempting to explain this to the end user and tell her that we were going to order her item - minus the twenty-dollar rebate from our established vendor.  She said "Well, do whatever you have to, as long as I get my item," and then muttered something about Purchasing making no sense and hung up the phone.

How do we make end users understand that we really do know what we're doing and that we look at the big picture, not just at individual purchases?

It is a constant challenge.  The truth is that Purchasing will never win an isolated battle like this.  Our long-term reputation and the perception of our department in the company is what will win the war.  If other departments perceive us as being professionals, employees will not require explanations.  We wouldn't go Accounts Payable and start telling them how to book ledger entries and we wouldn't call the advertising department offering critiques of currently airing commercials.  We need to attain the same level of professional reputation that other departments have.

Just for the record - Purchasing does sometimes get rebates from contract vendors - and they can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on sales volume!