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.

This new discussion will explore the possibility for the group to initiate some benchamrking in spends and overhead. Its an area where most would not see competitive advantage/conflict and enables either a validation of current performance or a quick win.

This is typically not a simple topic to tackle but a couple of easy ones are travel and comm's. In this workgroup, companies would introduce each other and then talk some specifics on travel and comm's such as:

1.  Spend per ticket
2.  Flights per employee
3.  % of discount tickets v full fare
4.  Hotel cost per night
5.  Travel policy
6.  Mobile phone call cost per employee
7.  Mobile phone policy
8.  Overhead per $ spend for Indirects ex media

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: October 24, 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.