Improving Quality in the Supply Chain
Let’s face it: your organization cannot provide a high-quality product or service if it gets substandard quality products or services from your supply chain. If quality is so strategically important and procurement activity contributes heavily to quality, supply chain quality improvement should be one of your top priorities and core competencies. As a modern procurement professional, you need to quickly get up to speed on quality improvement practices.
Improving Quality in the Supply Chain will teach you the quality assurance practices necessary to interact with quality professionals and engineers in your organization and at suppliers so that your organization can have the quality advantage that it needs to succeed. Upon completing this course, you will be able to:
- Lead your organization through the four phases of a supply chain quality improvement program
- Apply the critical requirements for starting a supply chain quality improvement program
- Calculate the cost of poor quality and use it in your sourcing decisions
- Measure supply chain quality performance, including benchmarks for leading-edge quality
- Observe and interview suppliers to learn about their quality programs
- Evaluate and structure inspection programs, including disadvantages of inspections as a quality assurance method, determining sample sizes, and estimating probabilities of accepting defective goods
- Understand quality assurance terminologies, such as parts per million (ppm), AQL, and more
- Apply quality assurance statistics and process capability indices to evaluate suppliers’ quality capabilities
- Apply Statistical Process Control and control charts in working on quality programs with your suppliers
- Understand what ISO9001 is, what it is not, and why it matters to a supply chain professional like you
- Understand how quality improvement programs like Lean, Six Sigma, and Lean Six Sigma can be used in your supply chain
- Apply quality principles and tools like value stream mapping, the “Five S’s of Lean,” process mapping, Ishikawa/fishbone diagrams, failure mode effect analysis, and Poka-Yoke to supply chain quality improvement programs
This is a self-paced course with no instructor-led forum and you have 60 days from registration to complete all course elements. It should take you approximately 8 hours to review the material and take any quizzes. All readings are provided in the course.
This course has been pre-approved for 8 CEHs.
Finance for Strategic Procurement (Advanced)
Whether you are selecting a supplier, negotiating payment terms, comparing lease and buy options, or making other typical procurement decisions, there are finance-based approaches that CEOs and CFOs will expect you to be following. Finance For Strategic Procurement (Advanced) will help you apply to your procurement decisions the same financial approaches that CFOs will use to evaluate those decisions. As a result, your decisions will be respected and many potential mistakes will be avoided. Upon completing this course, you will be able to:
- Calculate the financial impact of changed payment terms
- Understand the financial implications of using P-cards
- Avoid payment pitfalls, such as those involving approval problems and overpayments
- Understand how purchases are justified by finance executives
- Understand how the time value of money concept should factor into procurement decisions
- Make repair vs. replace decisions
- Make lease vs. buy decisions
- Understand how budgeting works for a procurement department’s internal customers
- Apply costing principles that apply to procurement
- Evaluate suppliers’ financial health using comparative financial statements, ratio analysis, and the Altman Z-Score
- Understand the importance of audited supplier financial statements, including alternatives to auditing
This is a self-paced course with no instructor-led forum and you have 60 days from registration to complete all course elements. It should take you approximately 8 hours to review the material and take any quizzes. All readings are provided in the course.
This course has been pre-approved for 8 CEHs.
Finance for Strategic Procurement (Fundamentals)
Today’s CEOs and CFOs expect procurement professionals to know how their work supports corporate goals and how to communicate in the language of finance. Finance For Strategic Procurement (Fundamentals) will help you understand the ways that executives measure business performance and will help you apply this knowledge specifically to your procurement work.
This online course is part of the two-part Finance For Strategic Procurement Series. Part I focuses on understanding financial statements and measuring and communicating a procurement department’s contribution to the organization. Part II focuses on how financial decisions are made and evaluating supplier health. Upon completing this course, you will be able to:
- Understand the standards that apply to financial reporting
- Create, update, and understand financial statements such as the income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement
- Apply accounting concepts related to inventory, including the goals sought by senior management and how a procurement department can contribute
- Understand how negotiated discounts and freight charges are accounted for
- Understand the difference between direct and indirect expenses
- Understand how buying or selling on credit terms impact financial statements
- Calculate both straight-line and accelerated depreciation
- Understand the financial implications of buying and maintaining capital assets
- Expertly manage working capital and improve cash flow through smart supply chain management
- Select appropriate payment terms, taking various cash cycles into consideration
- Measure a procurement department’s contribution to the organization’s financial performance, including calculating cost savings and reconciling it with changes in expenses as reported on financial statements
- Apply advanced cost savings reporting concepts, including reporting savings for mid-year deals and contracts where the volume and composition of the agreement changes
This is a self-paced course with no instructor-led forum and you have 60 days from registration to complete all course elements. It should take you approximately 8 hours to review the material and take any quizzes. All readings are provided in the course.
This course has been pre-approved for 8 CEHs.
Basics of Smart International Procurement
Buying internationally is much more complex than buying domestically. Buying internationally involves having to expand your knowledge of many aspects of procurement that you don’t have to worry about when buying domestically. Differences in cultures, laws, communications, currencies, and more have to be understood to support international procurement. And if you don’t have a good foundation, your international procurement efforts will have a higher probability of failing. Basics of Smart International Procurement will teach you the critical things every purchasing professional needs to know before buying from foreign suppliers. Upon completing this course, you will be able to:
- Identify seven key characteristics of cultural differences that you need to know to avoid any unpleasant surprises from your suppliers
- Determine whether international suppliers might be withholding bad news from you
- Understand how the importance of contracts will differ among international suppliers
- Apply five critical clauses that should be included in every international procurement contract
- Apply the six principles for writing contract language that is clear and ideally suited for international procurement situations
- Handle communication when you and your supplier have different native languages
- Reducing communication misunderstandings with foreign suppliers, including the use of jokes, hand gestures, and written communications
- Factor exchange rates into international procurement transactions
- Calculate currency conversions
- Identify currency risks associated with international procurement transactions
- Understand how hedging tools like forward contracts and options are used to protect buying organizations from cost increases
- Apply a risk sharing formula that truly distributes risk equally between a buyer and a foreign supplier
This is a self-paced course with no instructor-led forum and you have 60 days from registration to complete all course elements. It should take you approximately 8 hours to review the material and take any quizzes. All readings are provided in the course.
This course has been pre-approved for 8 CEHs.
Executing a Global Sourcing Strategy
Global sourcing is a challenge with many opportunities to fail. Despite those challenges, procurement professionals succeed because they know how to handle all of the situations involving coordinating logistics, dealing with customs, arranging payment, identifying countries for sourcing, finding suppliers, calculating landed cost, assessing risks, and implementing their global contracts. Executing A Global Sourcing Strategy will teach you how to take global sourcing from a concept to a successful reality. Upon completing this course, you will be able to:
- Apply strategy for selecting products, countries, and potential suppliers for your first global sourcing initiative
- Determine global shipment quantities and frequencies
- Ensure smooth customs clearance
- Understand how the various duties, taxes, and fees affect total cost of ownership
- Apply 13 Incoterms to properly allocate the costs and risks of global shipments
- Understand how you may be impacted by the large number of regulations affecting shipments to the United States
- Understand the advantages and disadvantages of the channels for your global sourcing effort, including international procurement offices, supplier’s subsidiaries, and representatives, third-party IPOs, and direct ordering
- Understand the various global payment methods such as letters of credit, wire transfer, and supplier credit
- Apply eight steps for evaluating prospective global suppliers
- Understand terrorism issues related to global supply chain management
- Apply a landed cost model and integrate risk analysis techniques into your global sourcing strategy
This course is most effective if taken in conjunction with Basics of Smart International Procurement, which covers the fundamentals of preparing to buy globally including understanding differences in culture, communications, laws, currencies, and more.
This is a self-paced course with no instructor-led forum and you have 60 days from registration to complete all course elements. It should take you approximately 8 hours to review the material and take any quizzes. All readings are provided in the course.
This course has been pre-approved for 8 CEHs.
Profitable Inventory Management and Control
Bad inventory decisions can kill an organization’s profitability, whittle away at its market share, and generally wreak havoc on the supply chain. If you’re basing your inventory decisions on guesses or informally-learned tactics rather than basing them on time-tested best practices, you are probably setting yourself up for failure. Profitable Inventory Management and Control will give you the skills you need to use inventory as a strategic weapon for boosting profitability and giving your organization a competitive advantage. Upon completing this course, you will be able to:
- Identify the six big inventory risks and how to mitigate them
- Forecast more accurately whether your business is stable, growing, declining, or subject to seasonality
- Set up the inventory replenishment cycle, including setting safety stock levels, reorder points, and economic order quantities (EOQ)
- Measure inventory management performance using metrics such as inventory turnover, fill rate, and various financial ratios
- Integrate desired service levels into inventory management and control decisions
- Conduct inventory analysis, including applying ABC Analysis/Stratification
- Reduce inventory and calculate cost savings related to inventory management and control decisions
- Evaluate the effect of lead time, including transportation considerations, on inventory
- Understand what postponement is and how you might apply it for reducing inventory and waste
- Understand what inventory optimization really is and how you can harness it through technology
This is a self-paced course with no instructor-led forum and you have 60 days from registration to complete all course elements. It should take you approximately 8 hours to review the material and take any quizzes. All readings are provided in the course.
This course has been pre-approved for 8 CEHs.
