Proactive Procurement

Resource added for the Business Management program 101023.

Details the latest innovations in purchasing and supply management, and the trend in purchasing departments from reactive to proactive status. Case studies show how to add value at the four key stages, how to determine what to buy, and how to integrate the purchasing function with TQM. Contains numerous appendices on methods of contract pricing and cost estimation, design of experiments, and two survey/questionnaires. For purchasing and supply professionals. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This book presents a range of cutting edge perspectives on subjects which are central to improving purchasing performance, including supply chain management, outsourcing and partnership, professional development, IT and e-commerce, and performance evaluation.

"This book will be of interest to a wide audience including professionals and academics working in the area of infrastructure / construction procurement and management."--BOOK JACKET.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and its practical applications. In addition to the structured procedure with definitions and CSR approaches, functions within the value chain are described in comprehensive manner with reference to business practice. Business trends in special sectors such as innovation management and hospitality management are also covered. Numerous practical examples and country-specific recommendations for decisions in practical situations are also offered.

After twenty-five years of preparation, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Geneva, is finally running its intensive scientific experiments into high-energy particle physics. These experiments, which have so captured the public's imagination, take the world of physics to a new energy level, the terascale, at which elementary particles are accelerated to one millionth of a percent of the speed of light and made to smash into each other with a combined energy of around fourteen trillion electron-volts. What new world opens up at the terascale? No one really knows, but the confident expectation is that radically new phenomena will come into view. The kind of 'big science' being pursued at CERN, however, is becoming ever more uncertain and costly. Do the anticipated benefits justify the efforts and the costs? This book aims to give a broad organizational and strategic understanding of the nature of 'big science' by analyzing one of the major experiments that uses the Large Hadron Collider, the ATLAS Collaboration. It examines such issues as: the flow of 'interlaced' knowledge between specialist teams; the intra- and inter-organizational dynamics of 'big science'; the new knowledge capital being created for the workings of the experiment by individual researchers, suppliers, and e-science and ICTs; the leadership implications of a collaboration of nearly three thousand members; and the benefits for the wider societal setting. This book aims to examine how, in the face of high levels of uncertainty and risk, ambitious scientific aims can be achieved by complex organizational networks characterized by cultural diversity, informality, and trust - and where 'big science' can head next.

This Handbook provides the knowledge needed to design and deploy proactive construction project procurement and delivery systems based on essentials while addressing emerging construction industry imperatives in order to boost overall performance. Section 1 of the Handbook provides an overview, while Section 2 provides the fundamentals with fresh insights into the building blocks and trends in performance-linked procurement and delivery, including procurement strategies and commercial priorities, project briefs and management plans, design management, stakeholder management, risk management, ethics and professionalism, team building, information and knowledge management, digital aids, conflict, claims and dispute management, collaborative contracting, relationship-based teamworking and linking to built asset management. Section 3 explores and expands on specific trends, including sub-contractor selection, Building Information Modelling (BIM) in project cost management; off-site and modern methods of construction; 4IR/5IR technologies; and constructing for the circular economy, supply chain resilience and social value imperatives in this domain. While other books describe standard processes or focus on specific strategies such as design and build, target cost contracting or integrated project delivery, this Handbook presents the fundamentals of such processes and protocols together with invited specialist insights into growing trends and imperatives in holistic procurement and delivery. Those who could benefit from this Handbook include academics, researchers, postgraduate students, policy makers and administrators, managers in both public and private sectors involved with planning and overseeing construction project procurement and/or delivery and undergraduates looking for a balanced introduction and useful insights into what is critical to the success of construction projects, organisations and the industry itself.