Fragmentation in the healthcare industry's supply chain inhibits the ability to evaluate clinical efficacy of purchased supplies, as well as identify opportunities to improve efficiency.

As director of sales and operations planning with Radisys Corp., Lisa Aleman has multiple responsibilities for managing the company's supply chain. She underscores the importance of having oversight of both supply and demand.

SciQuest Inc., a provider of cloud-based applications for automating spend management, has released version 15.1 of its spend-automation suite.

When assessing areas of risk facing their departments, nearly half (45 percent) of chief procurement officers named supplier risk as a top concern, according to a survey by Consero Group, which creates invitation-only events for senior executives. The results were reported as part of the 2015 Global Procurement & Strategic Sourcing Data Survey.

Lee Young, director of supplier quality at Thermo Fisher Scientific, explains the company's approach risk management, and how it copes with issues such as sole sourcing and supplier qualification.

Applying leverage in negotiations results in a zero-sum outcome where one side wins and the other side loses. This typically means that the winner ends up with somewhat more than 50 percent of their hoped-for result and the loser gets somewhat less than 50 percent since, just as in sports competitions where the potential results are win-lose, lose-win and tie, the use of leverage doesn't allow for combined outcomes above 100 percent. Zero-sum outcomes not only create a relational imbalance, they create hard feelings. People who lose in one negotiation often do their best to turn the tables the next time such that they win - and you lose.

Why is sole-supplier sourcing a potential problem for supply chains, and what should companies do to mitigate the risk? Jillian Alexander, managing director of Conduit Consulting LLC, provides some answers.

A decade or so ago, companies in industrial manufacturing and other process industries did not need to focus on resource productivity. If they gave any attention to the topic, it was to undertake small, incremental measures with the hope of generating marginal improvements. That period is over. Today, there is no debate: resource productivity must be among the top priorities - if not the top priority - of industrial manufacturers around the world.