Professional Services (Melb)

This is the fourth Professional Services Round Table - all members welcome.

The Category-based round-tables provide an opportunity for peers to come together to explore their specific challenges, to share tactics, strategies and market intelligence. and to benchmark their own category performance. While many of the sessions will address specific issues raised by members, the following issues will be discussed through the ongoing programme;

Q1. How do we define the category? What are we including? 

Q2. What are the principal challenges in managing the category?

Q3. Where are the opportunities to drive greater value from the category?

Q4. Where do we obtain market intelligence/benchmarking for the category?

Q5. How can we best use the following spend levers to extract savings or deliver greater value?

• Pay less: the typical tactics of commodity management
• Buy less: manage consumption to reduce demand
• Buy cheaper: influencing and managing buying behaviour
• Reduce process costs: driving internal and external process efficiencies

Q6. Stakeholder management – who are they, their issues, how do we manage them? How do we drive change?

Q7. Supplier management - How do we measure supplier performance? What SLA’s and KPI’s are people using for specific areas of spend?

More detailed prompts will be provided for each of these questions in the final agenda. And of course there will be additional specific issues raised by participants before or during sessions. Please add any issues you have for inclusion in the agenda when registering.