Online Training courses

I have run quite a few online training courses recently, and now feel happy enough about the process to offer online training programmes to in-house clients.

Topics are of course for mutual agreement (the advantage of bespoke rather than off the shelf training), but training courses more or less ready to go are;

Reconnecting your Supply Chain
Public Sector Procurement
Procurement and Supply Chain Management
Managing Procurement Teams
Introduction to Contracts

If any are of interest, get in touch and we can have a chat.

Webinar: Advanced Purchasing Management and Restarting your Supply Chain

The webinar I recorded for EuroMaTech is now online if you are interested.  It lasts about an hour an includes material from two courses, which I have melded together into something I hope is useful. The attendees seemed to like it.

The webinar is available here.

You will see that there are more webinars planned, which you can sign up to in the same place.

The Courses are;
Advanced Purchasing Management 21/22 June 2020
and Restarting International Supply Chains on 14/15 June 2020
http://www.euromatech.com/seminars/restarting-international-supply-chains

(Yes, I know that seems the wrong way round.  I can assure you it will work fine).

I hope to see you then.

Webinar - Advanced Purchasing and Covid-19 27 May 2020

I am running a webinar for EuroMaTech on Wednesday 27th May 2020, at 9:30am UK (12:30 Dubai).  Details are here.  This is a brief taster for two courses we are running in June - Restarting your Supply Chain, and Advanced Purchasing Management.  I have re-worked some of the sample content so that it works as a standalone (I hope).

I may be biased but having tried the webinar software today, I like it.  Same sort of flexibility as Adobe Connect, but much simpler to use.

Hope you can join us.

cash

One thing that just occurred to me is that thanks to the Covid-19 crisis, I haven't touched a coin for maybe two months.  When I shop I use contactless cards (my wife uses Applepay and is quite annoyed when stores don't accept it).  I DO use bank notes - these are handed to my son to go and buy odds and ends from the shops.  Oddly enough there never seems to be any change...

So, we have been getting used to the concept of a cashless society for half a decade.  Sweden is often seen as being at the front of that trend (see picture).  I just wonder if this crisis is going to accelerate that process?  

Now there are advantages and disadvantages of a cashless society (is it a good or bad thing that all of your spending can be tracked?), but as is often the case - there may be no going back.

Advanced Purchasing Management - EuroMaTech online 18/19 May 2020

We have scheduled one of our most popular courses for the EuroMaTech group as an on-line programme on 18/19 May 2020.  This has been running and been continually adapted for a decade.

The face to face programme is 5 days of content, and obviously we are having to trim a few bits of content and move fast to get it done in 2 days.  But on the positive side, it is available wherever you are, and we will cover most of the material - but not with many exercises or breakout sessions which I know are appreciated by delegates.  As indeed are our excellent training facilities around the world.  But at least you will be able to guarantee your favourite beverages and snacks if you are providing them yourself.  And it is cheaper.

The course will run from 8:30 am Dubai time (5:30am UK time).  I'm getting up early, so I hope that you will join us.

Full details and booking form are here.

a final post on oil

The folks at @tankertrackers (who ever they are) provide the above illustration of where the full oil tankers are at the end of April 2020.  Not quite as many as some illustrations have shown.  It is pretty nice though to be able to SEE the supply chains.  All of those ships are going somewhere - or hanging around storing oil until it is worth selling.

They also provide a nice illustration gif of who the major oil producing nations are.  Many people immediately think of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.  Actually, they are third.  Second is Russia, and top of the list is the USA.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1252265633674399744

Oh, and WTI is now round about $ 20/barrel.  Low but not negative.

Quality and Price are not necessarily linked.

The School of Life is basically about the philosophy of living.  Now, you might think that many of us are too busy to even think about that - they have thoughts on that too.

I just came across an article of theirs that touches on that old problem for procurement - things that are more expensive are not necessarily better than things that are cheap.  My wittering about oil the past few days is a good example - the "free" oil is not inferior to the oil that was being sold for $70/barrel earlier in the year.

We do tend though to imbue more expensive things with more value, and value of course is often subjective rather than objective.

It is often difficult to work with our colleagues and make sure that we are getting the right specification, and not just using price as a proxy for Quality.

Anyway, the article is here - part of a much longer series.