Unless you\u2019ve been living under a rock \u2013 and I mean no disrespect to anyone out there who may actually be living under a rock \u2013 you know about the continuing crisis with the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Eight hundred thousand gallons of oil have been spewed into the water each day since an April 20 explosion on an oil drilling platform.<\/p>\n
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With the catastrophe continuiung and garnering significant attention from everyone from the international news media to the President of the United States, people are looking for someone to blame. And most are pointing their fingers right to the top executive of BP for overseeing a process that has led to such a massive disaster.<\/p>\n
But who is the top executive of BP blaming?<\/p>\n
It sounds like suppliers and the BP team responsible for working with those suppliers.<\/p>\n
In today\u2019s Wall Stret Journal, BP Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward published a letter explaining how BP is trying to curb the crisis in the Gulf. In this letter, he cites three \u201clessons\u201d learned from the crisis. The third lesson is the one that will get procurement professionals\u2019 attention.<\/p>\n
He writes that \u201cthe industry should carefully evaluate its business model. For decades, exploration and production companies have relied on outsourcing work to specialized contractors\u2026But the question after the Deepwater Horizon accident is how all involved parties\u2014including exploration and production companies and drilling contractors\u2014can work even more closely together to better understand and significantly reduce the various risks associated with drilling operations.\u201d<\/p>\n
According to an article on comcast.net, \u201cthe doomed Deepwater Horizon exploration rig\u2026was owned by Transocean Ltd, while Halliburton Co was working to seal the well when the blowout occurred.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hayward appears to be playing the \u201cwhen you look bad, blame the vendor\u201d game that I\u2019ve written about so many times here on this blog. The upside that I see from a procurement standpoint is that Hayward\u2019s statement indicates that depending on suppliers will continue, but that a more collaborative approach can be taken.<\/p>\n
That is a small silver lining in a very dark cloud (or body of water, in this case), but it is better to have procurement practices improve as a result of a catastrophe than to have a catastrophe followed by no changes made in the way things are done.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Unless you\u2019ve been living under a rock \u2013 and I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":4070,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-procurement"],"yoast_head":"\n