CPSM Blog

The link between corporate plans,business plans and profit goals

Here is a section that the "leader" in you should enjoy. It explains how corporate goals need to mesh with business plans and operational tactics. These days budget cuts are being announced all around. While lay-offs form part of the action organizations are taking (the purview of HR) - Supply Management is being asked to help with reaching the targeted budget cut rate. The organizational budget cut is the corporate goal while a less expensive outsourcing contract is an example of an operational goal. Thinking through some of these things in your own organization and asking questions like:

• What are some of our company's goals?
• What is supply management doing to help achieve these goals?
• Can we measure supply managements' contribution qualitatively and quantitatively?

will help you understand the key message of this section.

You "represent" the supply profession in your organization

The important point to understand in this section (3-A-1 also in the Bridge Exam) is that as a supply management professional you represent the profession in your organization. The more you are able to create,project and expand the role of supply management- the more will be the respect for the profession in your organization.

A first step towards this is to have a Supply Management Department mission that is closely aligned to the mission of the organization. A good example is from South West Airlines.

This section also explores the need for supply managers to lead by being pro-active. The pro-activeness involves being alert to the needs and requirements of both your "internal" customers and also being aware of trends with "external" customers of your organization. Simply waiting for requirements is not enough - you need to reach out to internal users. If you do, you will be well regarded and will avoid situations where users by-pass supply management and simply buy on their own. The latter is called "backdoor buying".

Leadership in Supply Management

Once I starting going through the posts in this blog - I realized that I actually had the most detailed content for Exam 1 (Foundations of Supply Management) where I had written on each sub-content area. So you'll see 1A-1 and so on. For the content of Exam 2 I have broad coverage of each content area like (2A-) but not the sub content area. That's when I guess I was running short of time! Finally, there are no postings on Exam 3 content.

It's kind of an interesting coincidence that I figured this out on President's day which sets a kind of nice tone to the whole question of leadership.

Given our rather difficult times this content is particularly important for all supply managers - whether or not they are taking the CPSM exam. This portion covers three broad sections Leadership ( From 3-A-1 to 3-A-18), Risk and Compliance (from 3-B-1 to 3-B-8) and Strategic Sourcing (3-C-1 to 3-C-6).

Naturally, these are topics you'll see that the CPO is interested in because the CEO and Board are interested as well. You'll also see lots of seminars/workshops on these topics in the programming of your local ISM affiliate or the national ISM events. Let's get a sense of what the content is of these topics and hope you will be able to connect the concept to your own organization and thereby get your arms around each concept. Once you do this, the exam questions will be fairly easy to deal with....

Increased interest in the CPSM exam- need to improve reading comprehension skills

I have not been writing on this blog for a while but given the increasing interest in the CPSM - I thought I should re-start posting more regularly on this blog. I find that many people check this blog as they want to find out more about the CPSM exam and look for ways to better prepare for it.

Generally, as you can see from the posts in this blog I was very regular with the Exam I topics and generally slowed down (ran out of time before the exam !) with Exam 2 and 3. I think I will start with topics of the Exam 2 but first a quick bit of advise for prepping for the exam.

For those of you, who have done a case based degree like MBA's that have lots of case studies - you need to brush up your (quick) reading skills. If you can read small cases fast and understand the issues quickly, you'll at least be able to deal with the questions. That is, quick reading is a primary requirement. If you have kids with SAT and GRE/GMAT prep guides - no harm in trying out the comprehension passages and questions in some of these guides. Maybe your kids will wonder but this will help your general reading comprehension skills ! More on the subject matter of the
exam on  a more regular basis..