Leveraging Indirect Spend in China
Multinational companies have flooded into China with a primary focus on managing the costs of Manufacturing and Direct Material Spend. Indirect Spend was sometimes managed by purchasing and other times by departments outside of Purchasing. As the businesses have matured in China the amount of indirect spend has grown to impact the total cost performance. As purchasing begins to take control of this spend it is important to have a solid understanding of the indirect supply base as a foundation for selecting purchasing strategies, processes, and organization. Tyco Electronics has established templates in supplier assessment for certain categories and continues to work on other potential areas to help us drive strategies, processes and organization to strategic edge. We also established a structured data warehouse and platform for spend capture/analysis globally and spent years to ensure data integrity so as to equip us with tools to address indirect spend. Hopefully we can throw some “bricks” to solicit BDP’s and valuable case study in this forum.

Key points for the agenda (for your reference and facilitation):
Our interest is on the indirect side and knowing how other large companies are dealing with the indirect items and services they need to support their China Operations especially when they have multiple locations throughout China as we do. We hope to solicit active participants who are knowledgeable about the indirect side of the business and willing to share their current business practices and strategic directions.

This would cover
- Supplies:  Office, shop, and printed or published materials
- Equipment; printers and Faxes
- HR, Finance and Legal services, Benefits, training, insurance, risk management
- Facility Services, security, janitorial, safety, landscaping…
- Travel Agencies, air travel, Hotel, and Fleet Leasing.

Discussions would focus on:
- who is managing this spend and strategies used
- the capabilities of the supply base to support the spend on a local vs. country wide basis
- Planned direction for managing both the tactical and strategic sides of this spend.

Please note that this workgroup is strictly reserved to procurement, sourcing managers and directors. Any vendors like bankers, headhunters, 3PLs, freight forwarders, IT/software or consultants are not allowed in this workgroup discussion and will be rejected at the door.
 
Date: August 5, 2008
Time: lunch time, 12:15 noon to pm 2:30 in the afternoon
Venue: to be confirmed. In order to protect the discussion from vendors or consultants interference, registered delegates will be informed on the exact location one day before the event.
Price: Pay what you order, set lunch usually about 100 RMB.

Please register online, no email or phone calls please.