We found an interesting post on the progression of the supplier evaluation model, and we thought we should share the most basic supplier evaluation checklist that all companies should have. Before we go into the supplier checklist, let’s quickly summarize the supplier models over the years. Adversarial Model Prior to the 1960′s, the relationship between buyer [...]
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Procurement Solutions: The Influence Model
Procurement woes? Don’t worry, they happen to everyone. My personal favorite is when an order is placed for manufacturing and there is a sudden design change – here we go again, yanking on that supply chain, pulling each chain link towards the desired outcome, and stressing out everyone in the process. Tension in the supply chain [...]
Digital Manufacturing: embrace it or perish.
Digital manufacturing holds the key to unprecedented efficiencies, and yet most companies are dragging their feet when it comes to embracing it. Why is that? We think that a lot of the pushback stems from the fact that it’s something that companies don’t quite understand yet. And not understanding it soon can turn them into [...]
The e-Procurement Process: a quick guide
So, you’ve been tasked with setting up the procurement process for your company, and don’t know where to start. We hope the procurement steps outlined in this article can guide you down the right path. These steps are ideal for today’s e-procurement (electronic/web-based procurement) systems. 1. Identify the needed Product or Service A need for [...]
Designed and Manufactured in the USA – not by Apple.
Google, the 15th largest company in the world (by market cap as of today) has been steadily getting itself into the consumer hardware business. Often-times the move seemed a bit experimental, with products and operating systems being semi-complete or lackluster. But there’s nothing wrong for a company the size of Google to quickly test out [...]
On Procurement. A comic strip.
We thought we’d share our hand-drawn comic strip on procurement woes. Enjoy.
“It’s Halftime in America. And our second half is about to begin.”
We’re super excited to finally ship our procurement platform. We’ve been working hard these last three months, not just writing code, but also building a solid team to move us forward. All our efforts have brought us to this important day. We conceptualized Proqur as a platform to bring the manufacturing sector to new levels of [...]
Lisa Harouni on the future of manufacturing: #WIN
Here at Proqur we love TED talks. We use them as short, yet insightful, breaks to re-energize ourselves and keep moving forward. And when we saw Lisa Harouni’s talk on the future of manufacturing, we were super delighted to be in this industry. Lisa is the CEO of DigitalForming, a “3D software house that proposes to [...]
Efficiency brings strength to US manufacturing
As strong supporters of local manufacturing, it was great to see supporting evidence showing strength in the US manufacturing sector. As outlined in this Forbes article, US manufacturing is close to its all-time high value-added output of $1.8 trillion. Now with all the negative economic news you hear on TV, this does seem like a refreshing [...]
Bringing manufacturing jobs back home – Problems with outsourcing
Over the past two decades, thousands of US companies outsourced all their manufacturing operations overseas to China, resulting in large losses of manufacturing sector jobs, and the required skills associated with them. As the US shifted to a service-based consumer economy, thousands of machine shop owners closed their shops. Today, many machine shop owners are [...]