Thomas Global is closing its virtual doors in 2010 according to the latest news to come out of the supplier directory world. According to a source close to Thomas that I traded notes with this earlier this afternoon, “the site will be up until 2010 to honor advertising contracts, but most of the staff is gone.” In addition, Thomas closed IEN, a magazine it published since the Great Depression era, this spring. In the words, of my source: “another sign of the times.”

What led Thomas Global to close its doors? The above-linked article cites “the unprecedented global economic downturn and the decline in marketing investment worldwide” as reasons for the shutdown. But I suspect there is more to it than that. Ironically, a couple weeks ago, I had a series of briefings with the Thomas team. But when I challenged their PR firm on a separate call that I had heard revenue had been declining over the years, they responded, “there was no way I could know that because Thomas was a private organization” and regardless, such rumors were "not true". So much for not knowing, I suppose.

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I've been hearing this week through the grapevine that software companies, including Ariba and Emptoris, had a challenging time closing deals at the end of the second quarter, but I haven't wanted to pull the trigger on saying anything about it.

Just now, though, I got a copy of one of David Dobrin's newsletters.

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Earlier this week, Next Level Purchasing announced their latest certification: the SPSM2. Billed as a follow-on course of study to the SPSM certification, the SPSM2 builds on the curriculum of the previous designation but is not meant as a replacement for it. I’ll spare rehashing all of the details about it for you because Supply Excellence already did a good job capturing the essence of the certification noting that “the new coursework focuses on ‘processes that are becoming more significant in the purchasing field -- international procurement, advanced negotiation, and managerial skills.’ In other words, NLP hopes to help procurement professionals keep up with an increasingly global, risky, complex supply chain at a time when they’re being asked to do more with less (headcount and/or budget).”

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When the Obama administration projected the budgetary impact of the stimulus package it assumed that unemployment would not go above the 8 per cent mark. Unfortunately, the unemployment numbers that came out recently put unemployment at 9.4 percent with many economists now predicting that it will go over ten percent before long. The President's economic team clearly overestimated the effect of the stimulus plan on the supply of jobs in the economy. They may be making exactly the same mistake in their planning for universal healthcare. Here's why.

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If you missed the first two columns in this series about Fieldglass, you can read them here and here. In this post, I'll focus on Fieldglass' solution elements and outlook. And in a final one in the coming weeks, I'll share a few customer views as well.

Fieldglass, like other VMS providers, enables a range of capabilities that support the entire lifecycle of services procurement. While much of this process depends on a core set of capabilities that enable sourcing and talent requisitioning, rate benchmarking and management, RFx and comparison tools (for statements of work), skills analysis, administrative supplier on-boarding and off-boarding, compliance (corporate and regulatory), supplier performance management, and invoicing and payment, it also requires a strong analytics and reporting competency. Years ago, AMR Research suggested in a brief on the broader talent management space (including contingent labor) that companies need to put analytics at the front and center of their process, starting first with "predictive analytics when acquiring talent" and progressing through to the "total cost management" of labor and projects (not to mention full-time hires).

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Flightblogger has the scoop that Boeing will shortly announce that it is buying a facility from one of its key suppliers for the 787 program. According to the post, “Boeing is set to announce its intention to acquire the 787 operations currently run by Vought Aircraft Industries in North Charleston, SC in a major shake up of the supply chain for its new flagship product.” The blog entry suggests that those close to the deal are hinting that the move might signal either that Boeing is attempting to gain greater control over its supply chain or that it is trying to secure an additional facility for 787 production (or both). The Wall Street Journal coverage of the rumor confirms the same, noting that that “The move would represent another admission by Boeing that it needs to take a more direct role in the manufacturing process of its marquee product … [and] The move also potentially paves the way for a second 787 assembly line once Boeing is able to ramp up production.”

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In the past couple of months, I've felt that much closer to closing up Spend Matters and living off of my wife and her business partner, Stuart Burns (just kidding on the closing up Spend Matters part, but it would be great to sip pinot all afternoon and leave the money making only to my better half). Problem is, they've not begun to monetize their site just yet, even though average monthly traffic has surpassed 17,000 unique visits of late (more than doubling in the past six months). Lisa has told me their traffic has surpassed Metal Center News and numerous other metal industry publications already -- in just about 18 months since launching. For those who don't know MetalMiner well, the site focuses on providing actionable sourcing and trading intelligence for global metals markets, including both a quantitative metals pricing index and original commentary and content. I happen to believe that MetalMiner's combination of proprietary data, reporting and opinion represents the future of analysis for many commodity sectors.

Why? Because MetalMiner's two main authors approach metals sourcing and trading from a practitioner -- versus a producer -- perspective. All of the other trade publications in the sector live and die off their cozy advertising relationships with producers. But metals buyers are increasingly looking for analysis from a vantage point that matches their own. Given Lisa's and Stuart's background as consultants and traders -- not to mention Lisa's original academic training in journalism and investigative reporting -- I think the site is beginning to stand alone in the metals world as a beacon of non-producer truth and insight.

If you're interested in getting in on the sponsorship ground floor of MetalMiner and reaching an audience of metals buyers that are hungry not only for metals reporting, but analysis, insight and category intelligence, I'd strongly suggest reaching out to them quickly (they list contact details on the right of the site). I suspect that in the next year as mining companies, producers and distributors wake up to how their customers are getting information from new sources like MetalMiner, that the prime advertising and sponsorship slots will be taken.

- Jason Busch

Years of annual double and high single digit premium increases have created an ever growing chorus of complaints that these costs are making U.S. companies non-competitive in their markets. Wouldn't public funded healthcare make U.S. companies more competitive in the global economy? The surface answer is affirmative. But the real answer is definitely not. Here is why. Governments do not create wealth. They simply take the wealth made in the private sector through the collection of taxes. In order to provide for a public option the government needs money to pay for it. It can get it from one of three sources: taxes, borrowing and printing money. And the last two require more taxes to pay them back. The result will be that the very same companies that complained about the high cost of health care will be no more competitive because their decrease in health care costs will be more than offset by higher -- and perhaps significantly higher -- taxes. They could end up less competitive with much worse health care for their employees.

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In late June, Trade Extensions, a provider previously focused exclusively on the sourcing optimization market, unveiled an integrated data acquisition and spend analysis capability that directly interfaces with its core platform. In the press release announcing the news, Trade Extensions claims that "Unlike other spend management solutions where data has to be exported and imported at each stage, Trade Extensions' spend analysis is inherently compatible with the sourcing and bid analysis application so users can switch instantly between the data sets and make comparisons". Earlier this week, I had the chance to take a look at the demonstration of the application and here's what I found.

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It would seem that the current practice of enhancing spend visibility and price benchmarking wherever possible in the corporate arena has been slow to permeate consumer consciousness. While we are all seeking to save a buck on everything we buy, the manner by which we pursue this effort is, for the most part, lacking a cohesive strategy. Many retail merchants, on the other hand, are going to great lengths to exploit our naivety. Yesterday's Wall Street Journal published an account of how a rug dealer in Dallas Texas applied his knowledge of how American's buy to the extreme.

In the article "In Texas, There's No Business Like 'Going Out of Business'" the WSJ reported that "When Cyrus Hassankola moved to Dallas a couple of years ago, after successfully going out of business in several locales, he decided to settle down and go out of business permanently ... Customers rooting through the stacks of oriental rugs in the store he opened on a busy road in North Dallas would sometimes say how sorry they were that he was going out of business. 'We're not,' Mr. Hassankola told them. 'It's just the name of the store'." Thanks to the Texas Attorney General's office "Mr. Hassankola -- for a limited time only -- has stopped going out of business".

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