Never before have purchasing professionals had so much control and influence over corporate spending. Never before have their jobs been fraught with so much change, risk, or so many technology options. Purchasing's Global Procurement Conference will speak to the world on best-in-class sourcing, procurement, and supply management practices. Over two days, it will feature a series of Web presentations that focus on ways to create leading sourcing operations.

The Global Procurement Conference highlights smart people talking about important topics. Among procurement-thought leaders on this year's speaking roster are members of P URCHASING magazine's Editorial Advisory Board.

There has been a bigger push to improve purchasing performance over the past three years than in the previous 20. Reason: Economic opportunity combined with new technical capabilities. In this keynote session, the best and the brightest tell how it gets done. Top CPOs on P URCHASING 's Editorial Advisory Board will discuss opportunities presented in the new age of buying. They'll look at:

• Organizational structures that work best
• How to get started
• Policy recommendations
• The roles of outsourcing and global sourcing

Sponsored by PeopleSoft

Reducing costs in the first few years of an agreement with an MRO supplier is relatively easy. It's what happens next that provides MRO buyers with their greatest challenges. By fostering close working relationships with MRO suppliers, purchasing managers can help increase plant uptime and improve the bottom line over the long haul. This session features a panel discussion that demonstrates to attendees how purchasing and its MRO suppliers work together to do just that. Panelists will talk about ways to better manage inventory and maintenance processes and use new techniques to improve maintenance reliability.

Sponsored by 3M

In the old days of purchasing, measuring supplier performance focused on the abilities of suppliers to reduce prices. Today, suppliers are measured on total cost of ownership, not just price. They are also evaluated on:

• Technology development,
• Delivery performance, and
• Responsiveness to changing OEM requirements.

This session will look at the growing importance of measuring supplier performance, especially as more manufacturing and suppliers are moving to Asia where the supply base is in infancy and is suffering growing pains.

Sponsored by ICG Commerce

This session will explore best practices in spend management, covering:

• Spend analysis,
• E-procurement,
• Supplier enablement,
• Contract management, and more.

Hear from companies that are implementing effective spend management strategies and how they're avoiding expensive software installations by obtaining supporting technologies on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Sponsored by Ketera Technologies

The best assets of a sourcing organization are the professionals themselves, and the knowledge they have developed over time. Many sourcing professionals have learned and developed best-practice sourcing processes, and have built category knowledge across most key spend areas. The challenge for these companies is to:

• Ensure consistent use of such processes, and
• Ensure global category knowledge is leveraged for smarter sourcing.

In this session, learn how companies have formalized best-practice sourcing processes to become world class sourcing organizations.

Sponsored by Ariba

Top CPOs on PURCHASING's Editorial Advisory Board will discuss best uses for procurement, sourcing and supply management technology. They'll consider:

• Spend analysis
• Market making
• Ranking & rating
• Process optimization
• Decision support

They will explore best ways for evaluating return on investment (ROI), obtaining funding, plus tips on applying the tools.

Hear from purchasing executives at a major pharmaceuticals maker that has sourced more than $3 billion online and produced dramatic costs savings by implementing a closed loop strategic sourcing program across the enterprise. In this presentation, learn how to:

• Better identify savings opportunities using spend analysis,
• Negotiate more effectively with suppliers to get the best price,
• Determine the optimal supply base allocation through advanced decision support, and
• Ensure that all negotiated savings are captured through contract compliance.

Sponsored by Emptoris

The focus of spend analysis needs to shift to global savings discovery because savings opportunities lie trapped in disparate systems, across business units at many locations. Research suggests that many organizations have taken a myopic approach to spend analysis, focusing on aggregating spend by supplier codes only. Lack of in-depth visibility impairs effective sourcing typically leaving an additional 4-7% savings beyond reach. Also lack of automated infrastructure means there is no way to track. Leaders in supply management have gone beyond service based, one-off spend analyses. They are investing in software tools that enable repeatable spend analysis. Leveraging an automated approach, they are discovering savings and tracking compliance and control initiatives continuously. This session will invite participation from customers, analysts, consultants and suppliers. It will focus on best steps for formulating global spend analysis strategies. The panel will discuss innovative approaches and best practices followed by industry leaders.

Sponsored by Zycus, Spend Data Management

Too often an e-procurement implementation is doomed to failure as a real partnership between Procurement and Finance was never fully developed. This session will demonstrate that, for e-procurement benefits to be achieved, Procurement and Finance cannot independently drive sustainable savings or create an effective cost control system. Success can only be fully realized when clients understand that Procurement has "no teeth" without Finance who can integrate savings into business budgets, enforce compliance, and track realized savings. In this session, you will learn how organizations, such as IBM, have transformed from ones with very few contracts, extremely low adoption rates and a tremendous amount of maverick spend to ones where, once Procurement set up the proper procedures, policies and infrastructure, Finance was able to enforce these projected savings at the departmental budget level and help the company realize real bottom line benefits. When a strategic partnership between Procurement and Finance exists, an organization can truly enable an enterprise-wide cost management transformation.

Sponsored by IBM