Patricia E. Moody CMC
Author, agent, book developer and editor, management consultant
NEWSLETTERApril 4, 2007AIM & DRIVE® provides companies with a winning methodology to manage and reduce costs through the supply chain. The 21st Century has seen a dramatic change in how companies view the importance of supply chain management. From a rather prosaic, reactive, non-value added function, supply chain organizations are now viewed as strategic, proactive and highly valued by most successful companies. Much emphasis, lately, has been on new technologies including e-auctions, ERP systems and data-base management. While many companies have been carried away by the “wow factor” that comes with these technologies, great companies like IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Texas Instruments, Chevron and others have concentrated their efforts on generating breakthrough ideas from their respective supply chain partners. AIM & DRIVE® is a collaborative strategy building process that is designed to harness the inherent knowledge of a supply chain. The focus of the process will move your company beyond negotiation and generate ideas that bring genuine and permanent savings to the members of a supply chain. This methodology was first introduced at Hewlett-Packard and John Deere in the early nineties. Since then, companies like IBM, Texas Instruments, Kodak, DuPont, Sara Lee, Philips, Motorola, Anglo American and many others around the world, have used the process to save billions of dollars through the implementation of cost management strategies. This book will give the reader a clear description of the process and its implementation. The book is filled with illustrations and real life examples showing how the process has worked at some of the leading companies in various industries around the globe. Who needs this book? If you are in senior management, you’ll want to understand the importance of leveraging ideas to bring about double digit savings. Procurement managers, engineers, cost estimators and accountants will appreciate a clear process that helps them go beyond negotiations to generate breakthrough cost solutions. Suppliers who have participated in AIM & DRIVE sessions have been represented by senior management, sales and marketing, engineering and operations, accounting and finance and by their own procurement people. Many suppliers will choose to engage in this process with their own suppliers to drill down further on cost opportunities from the AIM & DRIVE methodology. FOR MORE INFO, WRITE TRICIA@ April 2, 2007 Here's a quick up-date on my two new major book projects I have nearing their pub dates: Jimmy Anklesaria's Aim & Drive, a Roadmap to Cost Management (AMACOM, NYC), and Mary Gardiner Jones', Breaking Down Walls, One Woman's Triumph (Hamilton Books, Md). First, Mary Jones' book - here's her bio: The last scion of New York's blue blood Gardiner and Jones families, Mary Gardiner Jones grew up living a paradox: outwardly a successful career woman with several "firsts" to her credit, inwardly tormented by self-described "demons." Alarmed by the widening separation between these two conflicting versions of herself, she turned to psychoanalysis for healing and credits it with restoring her personal and professional confidence. Mary Jones lives in Georgetown just three miles from the White House where President Lyndon B. Johnson met with her to inform her of her appointment as the first woman on the Federal Trade Commission. While serving at the FTC she championed consumers' rights and actively sought redress for their concerns. Breaking from the norms of an elitist upbringing that had discouraged countless women from professional careers, Mary Jones graduated from Wellesley College and went on to the Yale Law School where she was the first woman managing editor of Yale's Law Journal. She worked as an attorney in the law firm of General William Donovan, former director of the Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the CIA) and also acted as his special assistant. As a nationally recognized lawyer she has worked in the U.S. Justice Department's Anti-Trust division where she won recognition for winning an international cartel case that broke new law by establishing jurisdiction over foreign watch companies. After her appointment as a full professor in the business and law schools at the University of Illinois, Ms. Jones once again broke the "glass ceiling," becoming a corporate executive with Western Union, their first Consumer Affairs Vice President. Since retiring Mary Jones has continued her advocacy of consumer issues and has won numerous awards for her role as a full-time advocate for the mentally ill, abandoned and abused children and the elderly, and as an outspoken defender of Civil Rights. Ms. Jones is available for interviews. Contact her through tricia@ * * * Oct. 10, 2006 THIS IS A NOTE FROM LT. COL. DAVID REESE, A MEMBER OF 'THE GENE POOL,' ONE OF THE FRIENDS AND BENFICIARIES OF GENE RICHTER'S EXPERTISE. AFTER SEPT. 11, WHEN GENE WANTED TO DO SOMETHING TO HELP OUR COUNTRY, HE CONSULTED GRATIS FOR THE AIR FORCE TO HELP THEM IMPROVE THEIR PROCUREMENT FUNCTION. NATURALLY, CONSOLIDATING AND LEVERAGING THE SPEND WAS A BIG CHALLENGE. I'm happy to say we're pretty much settled in now here at Izmir. It's always an adventure getting settled in overseas for the first few months, and Izmir hasn't been an exception to that rule for sure. But, we've got all the basic essentials finally in working order here, including Internet access at home for the last couple of weeks. Hard to believe we've been here a little over two months already. I pick up our car tomorrow (yea!!), so we'll be fully mobile here shortly. (Thank goodness the public transportation here is plentiful. And thank goodness for buying an iPod before I left...what a cool gadget, especially for my 1-hr commute on the noisy buses!) Izmir is nice and working for NATO is an interesting change. My job here is not in the purchasing realm at all. I'm basically the executive assistant for a Turkish colonel who is one of the division heads here at NATO's southern regional air headquarters. Our division handles all the major military exercises conducted across Europe with our assigned forces, and it also handles all the training issues for the command. Mostly I keep all the paperwork, taskers, and information flowing to/ (I'm reminded daily of a basic reason our US Air Force is the best in the world: individual empowerment. The staffing processes here are certainly more bureaucratic and bottlenecked than ours. For example, I spent all day recently working with my boss and a one-star general to get a correspondence package prepared to go through the command chain to our 3-star for approval/ We're enjoying being back in Turkey though. Although the Western restaurant choices seem to be a little more limited here than in Ankara where we were previously, the Turkish food is still very good. Once we get our car, we'll also be able to explore out & beyond the city too a whole lot more, which will be nice since there are so many historical and beautiful coastal places on this side of Turkey. We have a very comfortable home in a very nice & quiet seaside community on the south side of Izmir. It was a challenge getting the home "broken in" to our American comfort standards :-) but life is pretty much "normalized" now. I ventured onto your website before writing this e-mail also, after reading again your comment about your newsletter in your previous e-mail. I couldn't view the newsletter archives for some reason, but I signed up my e-mail address for future distro and just rec'd the automated e-mail confirmation back. You're also a dollar or two richer (hoping it's at least that much for all your effort) as I ordered "The Big Squeeze" from Barnes & Noble while I was surfing your site also. I'm looking forward to reading it! However frustratingly slow, our AF is making progress toward better consolidation & leverage of our mammoth spend. I've been at the decentralized end of the spectrum for a couple of years since my Pentagon time, so I haven't been able to follow all the progress from the top, but I'll try to find a few of the larger success stories and send them your way if you're interested. While at our mid-level professional development school back in 2004, I wrote a research paper about some of the challenges the AF was facing. Although I wrote the article just to fulfill an academic square (don't judge me too harshly if you read it, especially since the editors of the journal where it was published introduced several errors into the manuscript), it gives pretty good overview of the challenge. It's short on the solution set, but I wrote it more to get some of our senior leadership's attention than anything else. Anyway, the reason I mention it is that if you'll go to the following link (warning it's a big file), on the third page or so of the journal in the prologue just before my paper ("Centralized Purchasing Power: Why Air Force Leadership Should Care")it discusses some of the more recent successes (or at least recent at that time in 2005) the AF had since I wrote the article. http:/ There's still much room for future improvements still, as you can probably imagine, but we'll take whatever forward incremental progress we can get in our large & bulky institution. I was watching the Redskins and Giants play on TV today, and it made me think of Gene Richter again--him being the consummate Redskins fan. Gene's initial efforts in getting our leadership's attention is still paying dividends with our AF today and will for years to come I'm sure. At Hurlburt Field, it was neat to expose my folks to experts like Jimmy Anklesaria, Joe Sandor, and Theresa Metty while I was there. There's so much opportunity even at the "end of the food chain" that hopefully our AF leadership will help us capitalize fully upon someday. Well, as Theresa will attest to you as well, my e-mails aren't always brief. Sorry, but I get rolling sometimes when I'm writing. I took blatant liberty at ignoring your "keep it brief" guidance on your website . . . hoping you wouldn't mind since this was more of a "catching up" personal e-mail rather than a "here's-what-we've-been-doing-at-Chevron" type of e-mail. :-) I hope your summer has gone well for you (your blog makes the area in which you live sound very nice), and look forward to hearing from you again down the road. If by some strange chance you're ever on your way to Turkey in the near future, do let us know. Best Regards, David Lt Col David Reese PSC 88 Box 2183 APO AE 09821 --------------------------------------------------- |
|
||||
