Education and Training
Courses 2010
To support the Procurement & Buying Process including Purchasing
of both Supplies & Services Strategic Sourcing, Inbound
Logistics, Cash Management, Supplier Development, and Service
Level Agreements (SLA's)
Our
Training Philosophy and Approach
The following 7 training courses are available
(indexed to details below).
They can be readily tailored to suit individual requirements for in-house workshops.
To discuss your
consulting or training needs with one of our independent consultants
or trainers please
Contact Us.
More Best Practice and
Training Links below
Supplier Interface Course Summaries
P01 Modern Procurement Practices (1
day) (course
schedules), (Request course
details)
Designed for: All the purchasing team
Course Objectives:
Procurement has changed, from a narrow purchasing role,
into a multifaceted role including: Integrating relationships; Design; Buying;
Planning; Inbound Logistics; Commercial Administration; Supplier Performance
Management; and last but not least, managing the process.
This overview course, promoting best procurement practice, will show you how
to provide a low cost means of providing a highly effective
procurement process to really add value to support your business.
Course Highlights & Examples of
course participant's feedback:
This course will help you to:
- Approach purchasing strategically and proactively (strategic
sourcing) rather than responding to the latest crisis
- Establish long term relationships with strategic partners
- Identify categories to improve internal coordination of supply
(category management overview)
- Help to design your products collaboratively in conjunction with
suppliers
- Take a "whole supply chain planning & control view" to improve
overall effectiveness
- Operate Lean / Agile: "pull systems" (customer / supplier) to improve
responsiveness and reduce stock
- Operate a Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) process
- Cyclic reordering / scheduling / call off
- Make sound Make vs. Buy and outsourcing decisions
- Ensure supplier quality (Introduction to Supplier Quality
Management (Supplier Quality Assurance (SQA), self certification, no goods in)
- Ensure supplier capacity Supplier Capacity Assurance (SCA)
- Use more efficient payment methods:
- "Payment on use", "consignment", "back-flushing"
- "Self billing", Cash transfers, Credit card
- Use returnable packing (For demand intelligence or Kanban)
- Buy better:
- Understand your buying criteria and required service better ("SQAIRPAD"
paired comparison)
- Pareto analysis
- Manage supplier service (Overview of P03
Service Level Agreements)
- Measures of Performance / reporting
- Transform the purchasing function from a paper chasing, query
processing, function into a function which adds real value to the
business.
P02
Supplier Development (1
day) (course schedules), (Request course
details)
Designed for: Purchasing and quality control staff new to this topic
Course Objectives:
A supplier is bound to act in, what they perceive to be,
their own best interest. The trick of supplier development is to persuade
suppliers
that providing you with a better service is in their best interests even if, to
them, you are a small customer, and then to motivate them to invest to improve their service for
the benefit of all of their customers.
This detailed course, promoting best practice, and written in conjunction
with P03 Service Level Agreements and
P04 Supplier Assurance (below), will enable you to get better
service from suppliers and engage them in a development process which
helps you and them (A Win-Win situation)
Course Highlights & Examples of
course participant's feedback:
This course will help you to:
- Plan for good performance
- Monitor and control performance efficiently and effectively
- Choose which suppliers you could, and should, try to develop and which
you should forget or exit
- Choose which supplies to focus on
- Choose a suitable method and set up a low cost monitoring process that
measures the correct things
- Understand the advantages & disadvantages of each method
- Persuade reluctant suppliers to develop
- Help suppliers to improve
- Implement a supplier development process
- Manage the process
P03
Service Level Agreements (SLA's) (1 day) (course schedules), (Request course
details)
Designed for: All functional specialists
providing or receiving ongoing services to others, but particularly Purchasing and
Sales staff new to this topic
Course Objectives:
It is no use
couching a service level agreement in legal jargon and if it lands with a thud on
your desk it will only be read when something has gone
wrong.
Good service
requires a commitment to the relationship, an agreed set of
measurable objectives and a management process.
This detailed course, promoting best practice, and written in conjunction
with P02 Supplier Development (above) and
P04 Supplier Assurance (below), shows you how to:
- Develop the relationship
- Define your required performance comprehensively and unambiguously
- Construct an agreement that includes the things you really ought to
consider
- Specify commercial aspects and future-proof the agreement
- Implement and manage an agreement
Course Highlights & Examples of
course participant's feedback:
This course will help you to:
- Understand why you need service level agreements as a customer or
supplier of a service
-
Provide a vehicle for managing 3rd party service
providers or as a supplier to manage customer expectations
2
- Define the required service comprehensively and unambiguously
- Decide if a service level agreement should be a contract or an
agreement
- Decide which contents a service level agreement should
include, exclude and which aspects are optional
1
- Measure supplier performance to improve it
- Implement and operate a service level agreement
- Deal with operational problems and permanently
solve them
Note 1: This course includes a template and checklist for the construction of
your SLA's.
Note 2: When run as a workshop
with both supplier and customer involved, we have found that not only is the
relationship and communication improved, but the resultant agreement is a sound
basis for excellent service!
P04
Supplier Assurance (Getting the Best from Suppliers) (1 day) (course schedules), (Request course
details)
Designed for: Purchasing, planning and quality assurance practitioners
Course Objectives:
Solving supplier problems can only ever be second best to
not having problems in the first place.
This
overview course, promoting the best practices of proactive rather than reactive
procurement and written in conjunction with P02 Supplier
Development and P03 Service Level Agreements
(above), will help you to:
- Ensure good quality supplies & services
- Ensure supplies & services are delivered on time in full,
every time
- Ensure that they are the minimum cost now and
in the future
Course Highlights & Examples of
course participant's feedback:
This course will help you to:
- Supplier Quality Assurance (SQA)
- Understand the 6 steps to near-perfect quality and how to audit
them
- Supplier Capacity Assurance (SCA)
- Understand the key characteristics of capacity management processes
to ensure the correct capacity is available when needed and how to audit
them
- Supplier Productivity Assurance (SPA)
- Understand the real difference between low cost and low selling
price
- Understand the 6 drivers of performance and 5 attributes of
lean and agile resources and how to audit them
- Use benchmarking to motivate suppliers to turn your findings into a
"SMART" action plan
- Provide a low cost way of assuring you will get great service
from suppliers
Note: Includes our unique supplier audit starter pack to get you
started quickly.
P05 Introduction to Procurement (3 days) (course schedules), (Request course
details)
Designed as: An introductory level course for all procurement practitioners and staff new to the role
Course Objectives:
Supplier relationship management requires a spectrum of
roles and processes ranging from researching potential sources to payment
administration. But it also includes being a good supplier of goods and services
and maintaining good relationships with internal consumers of these resources.
This detailed introductory course, is aimed at all procurement / purchasing practitioners and
staff new
to the role, who are primarily purchasing and
managing the supply of services and in a conventional buying role rather than purchasing and
managing materials. (Contains complementary content to
P06 Managing the Supply of Materials Foundation Course
below). It will help you to:
- Buy effectively
- Measure the purchasing function’s effectiveness
- Conduct competitive comparisons
- Contribute to product / service design
- Select suppliers objectively
- Negotiate effectively
- Develop suppliers’ performance
- Establish service level agreements
- Make a financial case for your proposals
Course Highlights & Examples of
course participant's feedback:
The course covers the following topics:
- Day 1:
- Module 1: Introduction
- Module 2: Preparation
- Module 3: Performance Measurement
- Module 4: Supplier Research (understanding what & where to source)
- Module 5: The Design Process (exploiting the suppliers expertise to
improve your products and services)
- Day 2
- Module 6: Supplier Selection (buying criteria & objective competitive
comparison)
- Module 7: Evaluating Proposals (understanding selling tactics)
- Module 8: Contract Negotiation (understanding buying tactics)
- Module 9: Supplier Development (Overview of P02
Supplier Development above)
- Day 3:
P06 Introduction to Managing the Supply of Materials (2 days) (course schedules), (Request course
details)
Designed as: An introductory level course for all purchasing practitioners
handling the supply of materials and staff new to the role
Course Objectives:
Everyone else’s problems and delays, end up in the buying
office. The Purchasing department are at the cusp of where reality
meets the aspirations of product and project delivery. This course aims to
change the question asked by purchasing people of suppliers from "when is the
earliest you can get it here" to "lets discuss an holistic way that we (us and
our suppliers) can mutually help our businesses", and allow you time to
negotiate.
This detailed introductory course, is aimed at all procurement practitioners and
staff new
to the role, and expeditors, who are primarily purchasing and
managing the supply of materials rather than purchasing and
managing services. (Contains complementary content to
P05 Introduction to Procurement above)
If your buying office activity is currently dominated by: paperwork; orders
within lead-time; shortages / expediting; complaints and invoice queries, this
course will show you how to avoid these problems and create a
proactive, high performance, procurement service to your
internal customers, encompassing an introduction to all of the 8 procurement
roles needed for efficient and effective procurement of materials, namely.
- Integrating relationships
- Design
- Buying
- Planning
- Inbound Logistics
- Commercial Administration
- Supplier Performance Management
- Managing the process
Course Highlights & Examples of
course participant's feedback:
This course will show you how to:
- Manage your time
- Organise procurement and create proactive rather than
reactive processes
- Communicate effectively with suppliers
- Contribute effectively to the product design process and
coordinate product changes
- Take out product cost
- Minimise a product recall
- Make better Make vs. Buy decisions
- Plan accurately in a timely way to coordinate materials supply Just
In Time and minimise expediting
- Manage sub-contractors
- Preserve cash
- Attack lead-time
- Develop an Inventory Strategy to minimise inventory whilst
maximising customer service
- Calculate Max / Min stock levels correctly
- Manage seasonal demand
- Minimise inbound logistics and payment administration costs
- Improve stock accuracy
- Specify your buying criteria objectively
- Conduct competitive comparisons between suppliers
- Manage supplier performance and drive improvement
- Create your Personal Action Plan
- Implement your proposals
Note: Contains introductory content from a number of our courses.
___________________________________________________________
And from our supply chain management page:
SSC01 Tools Techniques and
Modern Trends in Supply Chain Management
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To discuss your
consulting or training needs with one of our independent consultants
or trainers please
Contact Us.
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© SM Thacker & Associates
(Consultancy and Training Specialists) Version 1:
April 2000. Version 14: April 2010
