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.
Savings Strategy Development
Your CEO wants to know: “Are you executing a strategy for cost savings or are you just ‘winging it?’” Could you respond by producing a top-notch written procurement strategy? If not, our highly personal and interactive online procurement course Savings Strategy Development can help. You will learn a systematic method of establishing a cost savings strategy in your organization. Your plan will be comprehensive. It’ll cover everything from analyzing your spending to strategic sourcing to continually improving cost savings processes. You’ll also understand many nuances of how to write an RFP within the context of a step-by-step sourcing process. Upon completing this course, you will be able to:
- Identify sourcing and savings opportunities by analyzing your spend
- Define and calculate several types of cost savings and cost avoidances
- Identify and take advantage of easy cost savings opportunities
- Achieve cost savings by leveraging existing supplier relationships
- Negotiate savings without straining a supplier relationship
- Manage costs by utilizing the Producers Price Index and developing your own Supplier Price Index
- Apply a proven approach to cost savings by implementing The 10-Phase Approach to World-Class Sourcing
- Track the progress of your sourcing strategy
- Determine a methodology and strategy when writing an RFP
- Write an RFP that is aligned with the final contract
- Write an RFP that achieves the perfect balance of standardization and customization
- Write an RFP that is aligned with evaluation scorecards
- Write an RFP that ensures equitable (“apples-to-apples”) supplier comparisons
- Write an RFP with an optimized supplier response format
- Report cost savings in a way that will be embraced by executive management
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.
Data Analytics for Procurement Professionals
Are you failing to take advantage of Microsoft Excel’s powerful techniques for purchasing? Even if you are an experienced Excel user, you may not be utilizing the tools that can help you conduct expert procurement analysis, make sound purchasing decisions, and deliver top-notch presentations. Our highly personal and interactive online course Data Analytics for Purchasing Professionals will enable you to perform sophisticated spreadsheet tasks through exercises that are based entirely on the situations that you face in your procurement work. Upon completing this course, you will be able to:
- Assess the competitiveness of supplier pricing through developing should cost models
- Assess all elements of supplier capabilities by creating weighted average supplier scorecards
- Apply Excel’s sophisticated decision support features for procurement analysis
- Visually compare bids, analyze spend, and track supplier performance by creating charts
- Use PivotTables, functions, and subtotals to summarize large amounts of purchasing data
- Develop target pricing models for negotiation strategy
- Import data from other systems into Excel for analysis
- Drill down into complex purchasing spreadsheets by using filtering, conditional formatting, VLOOKUP, and more
- Use macros to free up time for strategic purchasing work
You must have access to Microsoft Excel to complete this course.
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.
14 Procurement Best Practices
Quickly and significantly improving your procurement department’s performance is not wishful thinking. With the right guidance and step-by-step instruction, you will soon be implementing the same procurement practices that are used by the world’s top corporations.
Our highly personal and interactive online course, 14 Procurement Best Practices, makes it realistic for you to quickly and significantly improve your performance and the performance of your procurement department. You’ll become a respected procurement leader by following this course’s step-by-step instructions, examples, and exercises, as well as the sample tools and worksheets that are included with your registration. Upon completing this course, you will be able to:
- Strategically measure purchasing performance
- Improve your spend management by implementing a buying plan
- Identify and select the best suppliers by using cross-functional commodity teams, scorecards, and total cost of ownership analysis
- Improve vendor performance through a supplier performance management program
- Optimize supplier relationships
- Improve risk management
- Map and improve processes
- Leverage technology such as eProcurement and Internet Reverse Auctions
- Conduct benchmarking
- Achieve efficiency through the systemization of purchasing operations
- Utilize a strategic plan
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.
