For various reasons, upon receiving a supplier’s invoice, customers might decide to remit less than the invoiced amount and withhold part of the payment. Those amounts withheld are called deductions. A supplier that doesn’t agree with deductions applied to an invoice will request clarification and may eventually create a claim requesting the reversal of the deduction and the repayment of the invoice. Those claims are routinely routed throughout the customer organization for due diligence and the process can take a huge toll on resources, on both sides. Although applying deductions is a common business practice, it is more widespread in the Retail industry and its distribution channels. Continue reading
How Category Managers Can Become More Strategic
It is certainly not easy to act as a strategic thinker when you are constantly attacked by competing priorities. Even if you have the wisdom and know-how to pursue impactful initiatives, you might still become entangled in a whirlpool of low value-added activities and time traps that keep pushing you in different, unfocused directions.
So, how can category managers prioritize tasks to assist their organizations in finding that so elusive pot of gold at the rainbow’s end? Well, there are no easy answers but here are some pointers:
Nudging continuous improvement leaders in the right direction with procurement transformations.
People in the supply chain industry agree that procurement transformation can create and deliver great strategic advantage to organizations. However, it’s been said that the most common type of transformation is usually focused on small continuous improvements – that is, quick-to-deploy, generalized and canned processes that deliver a very compartmentalized outcome, with limited efficiency gains.
Enterprises need to recognize that a long-term commitment is definitely needed if they want to achieve higher levels of operational performance and efficiency.
But how does one reach such distinguished levels?
