| Month | YoY Change |
|---|---|
| May-14 | 7.1% |
| Jun-14 | 6.3% |
| Jul-14 | 5.6% |
| Aug-14 | 5.1% |
| Sep-14 | 4.8% |
| Oct-14 | 4.7% |
| Nov-14 | 4.7% |
| Dec-14 | 4.6% |
| Jan-15 | 4.4% |
| Feb-15 | 4.3% |
| Mar-15 | 4.2% |
| Apr-15 | 4.2% |
Both Composites and the National index showed slightly lower year-over-year gains compared to last month. The 10-City Composite gained 4.6% year-over-year, while the 20-City Composite gained 4.9% year-over-year. The S&P/Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price Index, covering all nine U.S. census divisions, recorded a 4.2% annual gain in April 2015 versus a 4.3% increase in March 2015.
...
Before seasonal adjustment, the National index increased 1.1% in April and the 10-City and 20-City Composites posted gains of 1.0% and 1.1% month-over-month. After seasonal adjustment, the National index was unchanged; the 10- and 20-city composites were up 0.3% and 0.4%. All 20 cities reported increases in April before seasonal adjustment; after seasonal adjustment, 12 were up and eight were down.
emphasis added
For many years, spend analytics software has been helping procurement departments to identify where cost savings can be made. But now we’re at a turning point where the technology is coming of age and reaching new levels of sophistication.
In this guest post, Procurement Leaders invites Tungsten Networks’ Stefan Foryszewski to give some insight into where technology will change the quality of decision-making in the procurement function.
Getting bang for your buck is one of the biggest priorities in procurement today, especially when supplier numbers grow ever larger. For many years, spend analytics software has been helping procurement departments to identify where cost savings can be made. But now we’re at a turning point where the technology is coming of age and reaching new levels of sophistication.
With the rise of e-Invoicing and e-Procurement, the amount and accuracy of data available to procurement teams is growing. When staff are based across multiple locations and in different departments it’s easy for duplications to occur. This means that teams can miss crucial opportunities to negotiate on consistent pricing and economies of scale, which could add up to hundreds of thousands of pounds. To give one example, recent analysis of UK’s NHS spending identified that while some trusts paid less than £4 for a box of needles, others paid £31.68. Clearly, if this was identified sooner, huge sums could be saved to the public purse.
We see spend analytics as a crucial area to reduce spend and improve efficiencies in procurement. As a result, we have recently partnered with Goldsmiths University in London to launch the Tungsten Centre for Intelligent Data Analytics. A dedicated team of academics will be charged with researching and developing our spend analysis technology, Tungsten Analytics, to enter the next realm and crucially, use state of the art artificial intelligence to do it.
Artificial intelligence
The term artificial intelligence conjures up associations with science fiction films, but in the next generation of spend analytics technology, it will help to solve a number of very contemporary problems.
Firstly, helping computers to understand and interpret written text. Machines can’t read so they need to find a way to identify semantics. For example, if two product descriptions are written in slightly different ways, – say ‘50ml syringe’ versus ‘syringe 50ml’ – how do they identify them?
Next, spend analytics will be further developed to learn functional equivalence. To use a car analogy, a human would know that a Ford and a Nissan are both brands of vehicle, but a computer wouldn’t necessarily. The next generation of spend analytics will see computers programmed to learn these subtle differences, so that better comparisons can be made.
Finally, we can expect the technology to evolve to achieve greater levels of trend analysis, using financial modelling to predict future pricing patterns and to assess supply chain risks.
Benefits for business
Intelligent computing and data analysis have uses across the business world and major global firms are sitting up and taking notice. Google and Facebook are investing heavily in research and development in these areas, while Amazon Web Services has set up a dedicated Machine Learning team. This is a growing industry that is being realised by business as a highly lucrative area.
But spend analysis is not just for big business. While large firms have more data to analyse, there is often more potential with small and medium sized businesses, which don’t already have efficient purchasing processes in place. When businesses grow rapidly, they can have a tendency to pull in suppliers from multiple directions and it can often take years for consolidation to take place.
Equally, for big businesses, even small cost savings add up to a big figure and significant benefits can be reaped from closely analysing spend. Identifying these cost savings is one of the biggest challenges facing procurement teams today, but with technology developing quickly to assist with these decisions, help is at hand.
Stefan Foryszewski is executive vice president at Tungsten Network.
This contributed article has been written by a guest writer at the invitation of Procurement Leaders. Procurement Leaders received no payment directly connected with the publishing of this content.
The burden of regulation is unlikely, almost certain not actually, to get any lighter. The real question is: how do procurement organisations in UK-regulated firms align approaches to third-party risk with the regulators’ fuzzy interpretation of concepts like ‘relationships’ and ‘criticality’?
The burden of regulation is unlikely, to say the least, to get any lighter. The real question is: how do procurement organisations in UK-regulated firms align approaches to third-party risk with the regulators’ fuzzy interpretation of concepts like ‘relationships’ and ‘criticality’?
It was this dilemma which framed much of last week’s debate, in which representatives form the UK-based financial services procurement community gathered in the heart of London’s City to talk about third-party risk. The event, hosted in partnership with Ariba, was engaging, revealing and, perhaps unsurprisingly, regulatory uncertainty was a dominant theme.
So, how many tiers in any one category’s supply chain does the regulator look, for instance, when determining where accountability starts and stops with the firm? And how far does a supplier-relationship have to penetrate the organisation before it is deemed critical, and is this different across the various categories of spend?
What financial institutions under the supervision of regulators the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) must come to terms with, experienced attendees reflected, is that these questions will never be answered in any definitive way.
Firms are now well aware that when an operation is outsourced, the responsibility for the safety and soundness of that operation is not. The challenge for UK-regulated institutions arises out of the guidance, or principles-based, approach adopted by the official bodies. Effectively, what this approach means is that firms looking for targeted, prescriptive advice from the regulators are going to be disappointed.
Officials work on whatever they saw last and if it trumps what they saw before, it then becomes best-in-class. You can imagine how frustrating a field that is in which to play, and there is a feeling, certainly one that was expressed in these discussions in London, that being told exactly what compliant looks like would be advantageous.
The obvious question, then, is how do you then go about demonstrating compliance? It clearly creates a challenge.
One approach beginning to be used by financial companies with global operations is to take US regulator the Office for the Comptroller of the Currency’s (OCC) standards - understood to be far more explicit than UK or other international equivalents - as a baseline for global entities - a kind of common denominator approach.
Under the rules, among other things, firms are enjoined to:
The Industry Intelligence Channel for financial services is a new intelligence and collaboration service dedicated to your unique, sector-specific procurement challenges. This new channel provides deep category and strategy expertise, market intelligence and analysis designed to inform planning and best practice for those in the FS sector.
For existing Procurement Leaders members interested in this service, contact Joanna Nightingale at: j.nightingale@procurementleaders.com
For non-Procurement Leaders members, contact Andrew Deakin at: a.deakin@procurementleaders.com
This article is a piece of independent writing by a member of Procurement Leaders’ content team.
Federal Reserve policymakers just can't catch a break lately. Riding on the back of strong data in the second half of last year, they were positioning themselves to declare victory and begin the process of policy normalization, AKA "raising interest rates." Then the bottom fell out. Data in the first half of the year turned sloppy. Although policymakers on average - and Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen in particular - could reasonably believe the underlying momentum of the economy had not changed, that the data reflected largely temporary factors, the case for a rate hike by mid-year evaporated all the same. The risk of being wrong was simply more than they were willing to bear in the absence of clear inflation pressures.
The story was clearly shifting by the end of June. Key data on jobs and the consumer firmed as expected, raising the possibility that September was in play. ...
But then came Greece. Greece - will it never end? Financial markets were roiled as Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras abandoned the latest round of bailout negotiations with the EU, IMF, and ECB and instead pursued a national referendum on the last version of the bailout proposal. Most of you know the story from that point on - run on Greek banks, the ECB ends further ELA extensions, a bank holiday is declared, likely missing a payment to the IMF etc., etc.
At this juncture, everything in Greece is now in flux. ...
Bottom Line: The Fed was already approaching the first rate hike cautiously, wary of even dipping their toes in the water. The crisis in Greece will make them even more cautious. Like their response to the first quarter data, until they see a clear path, they will be on the sidelines. That said, given the plethora of warnings not to underestimate the global impact of the crisis in Greece, one should be watching the opposite side of the story. Solid data and limited Greece impact would leave December at a minimum, and even September, in play.
Today, the Data and Analytics division of Black Knight Financial Services, Inc. (NYSE: BKFS) released its latest Home Price Index (HPI) report, based on April 2015 residential real estate transactions. The Black Knight HPI combines the company’s extensive property and loan-level databases to produce a repeat sales analysis of home prices as of their transaction dates every month for each of more than 18,500 U.S. ZIP codes. The Black Knight HPI represents the price of non-distressed sales by taking into account price discounts for REO and short sales.The Black Knight HPI increased 1.0% percent in April, and is off 7.6% from the peak in June 2006 (not adjusted for inflation).
For a more in-depth review of this month’s home price trends, including detailed looks at the 20 largest states and 40 largest metros, please download the full Black Knight HPI Report.
Let’s face it: As one CPO at a recent Procurement Leaders Roundtable commented, “few outsiders like us.” No wonder some in the function get a little defensive at times.
"They make us perform tasks we dislike."
"They prevent us from doing what we want."
"They focus too much on administrivia."
Do these sound familiar? They should. The words and sentiments could have come from any formal or even informal gripe session about procurement.
Or, how about this: “They can’t communicate with other groups.” You may have heard your peers say that about your staff.
Let’s face it: As one CPO at a recent Procurement Leaders Roundtable commented, “few outsiders like us.” No wonder some in the function get a little defensive at times.
But here’s the thing: Except for the quote from the roundtable, none of those other statements refer to procurement. The first three–about unpleasant tasks, roadblocks to performance, and administrative trivia–reflect complaints business people make about Human Resources.
The comment about lack of communications skills: That came from a study about attitudes toward accounting and finance professionals.
Yes, there are plenty of misconceptions about procurement, and, let’s be honest, a few complaints that are valid. As Carlos Alvarenga of Ernst & Young has written on this website, there are people in the function that are focused solely on price and consider other factors meaningless.
But procurement is not alone in coming under fire from others in the organization. There are misconceptions about other functions too. Interestingly, the way to correct the misconceptions are often the same for all functions.
For example, among the recommendations for HR offered by Peter Cappelli of the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School: Show why the issues you address matter to the business, and demonstrate that you actually understand the business. As for finance, Kathy Hoffelder of CFO Magazine, suggests accountants and others focus on developing the soft skills required for getting their message across.
Cappelli and Hoffelder could just as well be making their recommendations to procurement.
There are, of course, many other traits that procurement professionals will have to develop to raise the recognition of their value. One is to understand that proving value may well be a constant battle. That’s why Laks Natarajan, CPO at Marsh & McLennan, suggests that procurement professionals be tenacious, but know how to manage their boundaries so they can challenge the status quo in a respectable way. That’s advice well worth taking.
Puerto Rico’s governor, saying he needs to pull the island out of a “death spiral,” has concluded that the commonwealth cannot pay its roughly $72 billion in debts, an admission that will probably have wide-reaching financial repercussions.And from the WSJ: Greece Orders Banks Closed, Imposes Capital Controls to Stem Deposit Flight
Greece shut down its banking system, ordering lenders to stay closed for six days starting Monday, and its central bank moved to impose controls to prevent money from flooding out of the country.I hope Greece is ready with the Drachma (It seemed there was no way out four months ago).
| Orange County Historical Gas Price Charts Provided by GasBuddy.com |
In this guest post, Procurement Leaders invites Coupa’s Adam Alphin to look at the future of supplier enablement. Alphin will be on the panel on the upcoming webinar ’eInvoicing and suppliers: Visibility, control & trust’ on Tuesday 30th June. You can register here to take part in the broadcast.
You can also register for a free e-book on Enabling The Supply Base here.
In the last 15 years there has been much digital ink spilled on how best to enable suppliers on leading S2P platforms. Here’s why: it was hard.
In the first wave of solutions, providers couldn’t get past the monetization potential of all those suppliers. So they charged suppliers to participate under the guise of ‘creating value for suppliers too!’ This created cost and contract hurdles their customers had to get over on top of all the change management, communication, and supplier training that needed to happen. The net result was enabling 20-30% of suppliers. They may have represented 70-80% of spend, but only 20% of the real process cost of doing business with their supply base. The most successful supplier enablement projects were led by the world’s largest companies that didn’t mind enforcing enablement mandates. That works with the culture of some very large companies, but for many it does not.
Good news – it doesn’t have to be so hard any more. Companies like Coupa are executing very quickly on a different worldview. We see a world where suppliers have choices for how they collaborate and transact with their customers. One where they can align those options with the way they do business. If suppliers want to use a web portal – great – here’s a web portal tool for you. You don’t want to bother with a portal? OK – acknowledge, comment on, or flip into an invoice right from the PO email. Prefer to just email in your invoices right from your invoicing system? OK – send it to a central email address, we’ll read it and ask you to confirm we got it right. We call it the Coupa Open Business Network and we have a big goal: Borderless Commerce and meaningful collaboration for all our customer’s trading partners on day 1 with our platform.
And our customers are beginning to see some fascinating ‘collateral benefits’ to this approach. Simply put, it’s injected trust into a conversation that previously felt like buyers were cornering or holding hostage their supply base. This trust has resulted in higher engagement, much higher participation in e-invoicing, and get this…suppliers becoming change agents within our customers organizations! We believe the conversation must change from “Here is a web portal that you’ll be charged to use, you’re now required to use it to be our supplier” to “Here are our business objectives we think are in both of our best interest, here are a series of tools we’re providing (for free!) so we can help each other achieve those objectives.”
That transparency has developed trust. That trust is beginning to recruit large groups of suppliers who are interacting with our customers end-users every day and helping spread the word on their business objectives. So with this new world order in mind, here’s what we’re seeing as best practices for supplier engagement:
This may seem overly simple – but you’d be surprised how many companies start an implementation or supplier enablement project with no clear success metrics. What are you really trying to do? Measure it. Be specific. Some common ones:
You’d be surprised how few Fortune 500 companies have good, transaction-appropriate email addresses in their Vendor master. There are many BPO providers that can help you go acquire these email addresses, and it’s worth every penny. One of our major design principles is to embrace email as a common denominator for transactional collaboration. Getting the correct supplier email address is like rocket fuel for your supplier enablement efforts.
Tell them what you’re trying to do and how you need them to help you get there. You’re their customer; if they’re good suppliers they’ll help you get there. And they may have some good ideas that you didn’t think about. At our recent Coupa Inspire event I listened to a fascinating panel discussion about how Suppliers are an important source of innovation that can help push procurement from a tactical function to a strategic function. It’s true! Your suppliers are full of bright people who are interacting with all of your end-users every day. They can and will help you achieve your goals, let them.
5. Manage any communication campaign with modern email marketing tools
There are fantastic freemium tools out there that can help you manage a communication campaign. These allow you to:
Ever heard of the wave approach? We don’t believe in it. To be fair – that may not be the total truth. We believe in segmenting your suppliers and making recommendations on how they’ll transact and collaborate, and tailoring your communications to them, but gone are the days that you only have your fully integrated suppliers connected at Go-Live. You may need to break the communication and training down into groups, but gone are the days of trying to force thousands of suppliers into a portal-only strategy. In this new world an email is all you need to begin transacting both POs and Invoices and engaging in meaningful collaboration.
So take a look at this new world order, and consider some of these tips to leverage the growing trust in the marketplace. And imagine a world where borderless commerce and meaningful collaboration for all your trading partners really does happen on day one.
It’s not very far off…trust me.
Adam Alphin is director, supplier enablement services, Coupa.
This contributed article has been written by a guest writer at the invitation of Procurement Leaders. This is published in support of the Enabling The Supply Base Campaign, published in partnership with Coupa.
Travel on all roads and streets changed by 3.9% (10.2 billion vehicle miles) for April 2015 as compared with April 2014.The following graph shows the rolling 12 month total vehicle miles driven to remove the seasonal factors.
Travel for the month is estimated to be 267.9 billion vehicle miles.
The seasonally adjusted vehicle miles traveled for April 2015 is 262.4 billion miles, a 3.7% (9.5 billion vehicle miles) increase over April 2014.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City released the June Manufacturing Survey today. According to Chad Wilkerson, vice president and economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, the survey revealed that Tenth District manufacturing activity declined at a slightly slower pace, and producers’ expectations improved modestly.Some of this recent decline in the Kansas City region has been due to lower oil prices.
“Regional factory conditions continued to decline in June, especially in energy-producing areas,” said Wilkerson. “However, firms continue to expect some stabilization in the months ahead and for orders to rise by the end of the year.”
...
Tenth District manufacturing activity declined at a slightly slower pace than the previous month, and producers’ expectations improved modestly. Most price indexes continued to rise, particularly for raw materials.
The month-over-month composite index was -9 in June, up from -13 in May but down from -7 in April ... On the other hand, although still negative, the new orders, order backlog, employment, and new orders for export indexes edged higher.
emphasis added
“Activebidder.com is an eprocurement website that runs Riverside/Irvine California and perhaps a few others . . .
They just announced the switch from NIGP to NAICS. Makes sense for smaller epro services like activebidder to strategically shift from NIGP after perfect commerce?” – anonymous source
In my most recent post (New NIGP Revelations: A Story of Burnt Bridges and Promises of A Day of Reckoning), I suggested that my coverage of the #CodeGate scandal to this point represents the tip of the iceberg. My reasoning behind reaching this conclusion, is due to the type of information that is now coming in, as well as the sources from which these new insights are originating.
Based on what I am receiving now in the way of feedback, it appears that the real talking in terms of industry response to the revelations about the NIGP and how it conducts itself – in particular the Missouri bid involving Perfect Commerce – is beginning to manifest itself in a number of ways.
“I only started paying attention in December after you focused on the matter. In the moment, though, it seems like dependency on NIGP is waning . . . I wonder what other companies in public eprocurement will use as a code backbone. In light of the threat of Perfect Commerce, it would make sense from a business perspective to move away from the NIGP.” – anonymous source
To start, I believe that similar to aftershocks, the consequences of what happened in Missouri are ultimately going to reverberate by way of a likely exodus – over time – from the NIGP Code. While the shift will not occur with great fanfare, its erosive inevitability – based on what I am hearing, is hard to ignore.
Of course a Code exodus is not the only factor to consider.
Beyond demonstrating the conflict of interest relationship between the NIGP and Periscope, and its related risks relative to the stewardship of the Code, Missouri also opened the doors of awareness to other serious problems within the non-profit organization. In short, the NIGP is a muddled cocktail of what appears to be oligarchic self-serving interests that offers little value in a dramatically changing industry.
Specifically, it appears that the NIGP’s way of doing business does not align with the values that will define our profession in the years ahead. Or as one person put it, when they think of the NIGP in the context of today’s more worldly and socially conscientious procurement professional, images of Fred Flintstone and the Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes immediately come to mind. The recent accolades for NIGP CEO Rick Grimm by Donald Buffum and CIPS, does little to challenge this view. Or to put it another way, the days of backroom deals and secret handshakes are over.
In the end, and I did not fully grasp this truth until recently, the NIGP’s ultimate fate has already been decided. How it will play out over time will likely reflect the words of General Macarthur who, in a speech to Congress said, “Old soldiers never die they just fade away.”
30
Personal income increased $79.0 billion, or 0.5 percent ... in May, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Personal consumption expenditures (PCE) increased $105.9 billion, or 0.9 percent.The following graph shows real Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) through May 2015 (2009 dollars). Note that the y-axis doesn't start at zero to better show the change.
...
Real PCE -- PCE adjusted to remove price changes -- increased 0.6 percent in May, compared with an increase of less than 0.1 percent in April. ... The price index for PCE increased 0.3 percent in May, compared with an increase of less than 0.1 percent in April. The PCE price index, excluding food and energy, increased 0.1 percent in May, the same increase as in April.
The May price index for PCE increased 0.2 percent from May a year ago. The May PCE price index, excluding food and energy, increased 1.2 percent from May a year ago.
Contact centres of the past used to belong to the company’s support division and provide answers to the customers’ questions, whenever available and at the expense of the customers’ patience. Nowadays, the business decisions belong to the customers.
Contact centres of the past used to belong to the company’s support division and provide answers to the customers’ questions, whenever available and at the expense of the customers’ patience. Nowadays, though customers are more empowered to make decisions than ever, contact centres are often wrongly seen as an unhelpful cost.
The ’era of the customer’ was reached through fierce competition and constant modernisation and it stands that businesses that are serious about their customers invest in resources to answer their questions. Innovative ideas and quality products shape the strategy of the market but how do companies differentiate themselves in a room full of achievers? How do they get their piece of the pie when the stakes are that high? Through quality customer service! That is where Customer Relationship Management (CRM) specialists come in.
CRMs provide customer support whenever possible and at the expense of the client. The former is not even an option anymore – 24/7 service is a quality standard, ‘business hours only’ can be afforded only by the most confident of the players. The expenses, however, have become the main differentiator of the contact centres.
How to win more clients without losing a strategic profit margin? One of the most well-recognised routes is outsourcing. Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) professionals save money on the difference in salary levels between different countries. The Philippines and India, both having educated English-speaking population in abundance, are still well below American and European salaries, despite rapid development. However, many businesses have found that outsourcing their CRM can result in a loss of value, if their service providers aren’t able to maintain the customer experience they are after.
Another idea is to provide the pricing strategy that would benefit both clients and suppliers. For example, if you need to find a contact centre for your new smartphone users but want to pay just a fixed hourly rate, then your CRM provider would be disappointed. Smartphones tend to be upgraded, new apps tend to be released and marketing campaigns usually kick in a few months later to remind us about the latest offers; who wants to adapt to all these changes for free? Instead, CRMs would ask you to include a clause that increases their fee in line with your customers’ calls.
Or, imagine, a client wants to improve their customer service but they’re only paying a pay-per-transaction rate. It would mean the contact centre will get more money with every answered call. High quality service would be hard to achieve if agents are on a time quota. That’s when minimum required CSat (Customer Satisfaction) level would be handy.
Technology and innovation can play a big role in saving contact centres some money, as cloud-based infrastructure and homeworking allow less spending on the offices and more on efficiency. Social networks, web chats and emails are another way of minimising costs and supporting the customers in the most convenient fashion.
Mobile technologies are on the rise, so why the customer service should be left behind? Omni-channel approach, or providing service whenever, wherever and across all platforms, is becoming a benchmark of the contact centre industry. And don’t forget employee satisfaction. Staff is the key element of any contact centre, so when they’re happy the customers are happy. And that is the ultimate goal.
To find out more about the procurement of CRM services, please click here to download a snapshot of the latest Procurement Leaders Contact Centres report.
| Short Sales Share | Foreclosure Sales Share | Total "Distressed" Share | All Cash Share | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| May-15 | May-14 | May-15 | May-14 | May-15 | May-14 | May-15 | May-14 | |
| Las Vegas | 7.3% | 7.9% | 8.0% | 9.1% | 15.3% | 17.0% | 21.9% | 40.2% |
| Reno** | 5.0% | 11.0% | 4.0% | 6.0% | 9.0% | 17.0% | ||
| Phoenix | 2.8% | 3.9% | 3.2% | 6.7% | 6.0% | 10.7% | 24.0% | 29.5% |
| Sacramento | 4.7% | 7.0% | 5.4% | 8.3% | 10.1% | 15.3% | 17.4% | 20.5% |
| Minneapolis | 2.4% | 3.9% | 6.6% | 10.0% | 9.0% | 13.9% | ||
| Mid-Atlantic | 3.4% | 5.2% | 10.4% | 8.1% | 13.8% | 13.3% | 16.2% | 17.2% |
| Baltimore MSA**** | 3.6% | 5.8% | 16.3% | 11.9% | 19.8% | 17.6% | ||
| Orlando | 3.9% | 9.2% | 22.8% | 24.7% | 26.7% | 34.0% | 33.9% | 43.8% |
| Florida SF | 5.3% | 9.6% | 25.7% | 24.6% | 31.0% | 34.2% | 43.4% | 48.9% |
| Florida C/TH | 3.2% | 7.6% | 20.6% | 19.7% | 23.9% | 27.3% | 69.5% | 72.1% |
| Miami MSA SF | 6.2% | 9.6% | 16.1% | 16.4% | 22.3% | 26.0% | 34.9% | 42.6% |
| Miami MSA C/TH | 3.2% | 5.9% | 17.6% | 17.9% | 20.8% | 23.7% | 65.8% | 70.1% |
| Tampa MSA SF | 4.3% | 7.1% | 20.0% | 22.1% | 24.3% | 29.2% | 35.3% | 40.6% |
| Tampa MSA C/TH | 3.0% | 4.9% | 13.6% | 18.6% | 16.6% | 23.5% | 57.5% | 62.7% |
| Northeast Florida | 26.7% | 36.8% | ||||||
| Chicago (city) | 16.2% | 21.6% | ||||||
| Hampton Roads | 17.4% | 21.3% | ||||||
| Spokane | 12.8% | 17.0% | ||||||
| Hampton Roads | 17.4% | 21.3% | ||||||
| Spokane | 12.8% | 17.0% | ||||||
| Richmond VA MSA | 8.5% | 13.9% | 14.9% | 19.4% | ||||
| Memphis | 14.3% | 15.6% | 28.3% | 31.6% | ||||
| Springfield IL** | 5.4% | 8.7% | ||||||
| Tucson | 25.6% | 31.3% | ||||||
| Toledo | 26.1% | 36.6% | ||||||
| Des Moines | 14.0% | 17.5% | ||||||
| Peoria | 17.9% | 19.6% | ||||||
| Georgia*** | 20.3% | 26.0% | ||||||
| Omaha | 15.9% | 19.4% | ||||||
| Pensacola | 31.3% | 32.6% | ||||||
| Knoxville | 20.5% | 22.9% | ||||||
| *share of existing home sales, based on property records **Single Family Only ***GAMLS ****Baltimore is included in the Mid-Atlantic region, but is shown separately here |
||||||||
Real gross domestic product -- the value of the production of goods and services in the United States, adjusted for price changes -- decreased at an annual rate of 0.2 percent in the first quarter of 2015, according to the "third" estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the fourth quarter, real GDP increased 2.2 percent.Here is a Comparison of Third and Second Estimates. PCE growth was revised up from 1.8% to 2.1%. Residential investment was revised up from 5.0% to 6.5%.
The GDP estimate released today is based on more complete source data than were available for the "second" estimate issued last month. In the second estimate, the decrease in real GDP was 0.7 percent. With the third estimate for the first quarter, exports decreased less than previously estimated, and personal consumption expenditures (PCE) and imports increased more ...
emphasis added
The rewards for procurement professionals that successfully leverage IoT are significant. If companies can effectively identify and manage their costs and mitigate risk they will be able to build corporate resilience.
Arguably the most hyped technology around, the Internet of Things (IoT) is set to bring revolutionary change spanning every possible industry and the opportunities will be endless, especially for the healthcare industry.
But what exactly is IoT? Put simply it is a network of device connections, capturing and sharing real-time data via a cloud based platform through the use of sensors. However the concept is not a new one, the long anticipated IoT revolution is already underway.
IoT has huge potential to radically improve the health of the global population, proving very promising for the industry in terms of how healthcare is delivered and priced.
Although, the healthcare industry has been relatively slow at adopting the possibilities of IoT, some real-life developments are already in action;
The popularity and demand for this type of technology is rapidly increasing as healthcare providers, insurers and buyers collaborate and look for solutions to provide affordable and accessible healthcare whilst reducing unsustainably high costs.
Benefits for healthcare insurance providers
IoT is set to impact the way health insurers operate. Insurers could offer financial incentives to policyholders when using IoT devices which monitor the policyholder’s health, meaning more active wearers could receive lower premiums.
Demographic changes impact the underwriting process, therefore IoT will ultimately redefine existing underwriting processes and pricing mechanisms as more personalised risk assessment will be enabled, meaning premiums could eventually fluctuate similar to utility bills.
Benefits for procurement
As an employer, employee health benefits are often a substantial cost component alongside salaries. Under government and compliance regulations such as the Affordable Care Act, employers are being forced into re-examining the way they provide employees with healthcare cover. As a result employers are seeking innovative solutions to help them control costs.
Buyers will be more able to negotiate insurance deals and avoid increase in long term medical insurance premiums as insurance providers will offer more flexible and more personalised cover.
The challenges
Expanding popularity of IoT techonology within the healthcare industry comes with its own risks and challenges and as health data becomes more accessible; data privacy and protection needs to be top priority for those wishing to take advantage of IoT.
In many ways effectively utilising IoT is a win-win for all parties involved. IoT technology has the potential to enable faster, more efficient and more profitable healthcare.
The rewards for procurement professionals that successfully leverage IoT are significant. If companies can effectively identify and manage their costs and mitigate risk they will be able to build corporate resilience. It can be guaranteed that companies who fail to utilise the combination of IoT with healthcare will risk falling behind their competition.
To find out more about procurement of healthcare, please click here to download a snapshot of the latest Procurement Leaders Healthcare report.
“I have been following Virginia since 2000 – 15 years ago. To be connected with Virginia and to implement Ariba in SCC, we are going to have a huge imprint in the US. I used Jon Hansen’s articles to do my research to further justify the right eProcurement strategy for the County. And now I am going to be connected with him directly.” – Jenti Vandertuig, Director of Procurement, County of Santa Clara
One of the most exciting yet frustrating aspects of covering Virginia over the years – specifically their highly successful eVA program – has been the challenge of scalability.
I am not talking about scalability in the traditional sense relating to technology. What I am talking about is the ability for outsiders to look beyond the technology, to see the vision and core values behind eVA.
Far too often, organizations in both the public and private sectors have placed too much emphasis on the technological functionality of a vendor’s solution, in the hope that it would in and of itself lead to success. With more than 80 percent of all eProcurement initiatives failing to achieve the expected outcomes – sometimes at a cost of tens of millions of dollars – the ineffectiveness of this approach speaks for itself.
This is also one of the reasons why I have been somewhat critical of those covering the industry, be it analysts or journalists. At the end of the day the technology, as I would write in a 2005 paper, is “largely irrelevant” when given the seat of priority over all else.
For example, eVA would have been a success regardless of the vendor application. The reason being is that the Commonwealth took the implementation lead, as opposed to abdicating control to the vendor and/or consultant with whom they worked.
Unfortunately, the Virginia approach was the exception. Usually end user clients ceded responsibility for the roll-out to providers who, often times, had a questionable track record. In some cases, such as with Hewlett-Packard’s attempt to implement an SAP solution for their own supply chain needs, it was a do as I say, not as I do proposition.
In the following excerpt from our soon to be released book, both Kelly Barner and I noted the following with regard to the Hewlett-Packard failure:
As RedMonk analyst James Governor put it, “HP is trying to build an application management business to rival IBM’s. What better case study in proving your R/3 and Netweaver capability” . . . by showing “everyone how to merge two SAP systems.”
The analyst concluded by saying “Who would want to go to HP now for large scale SAP integration? The CEO just publicly said HP can’t effectively manage such a project.”
The fact remains that success- especially with the move to cloud-based SaaS solutions – is dependent on the client’s ability to take the implementation wheel and drive the project themselves.
This is what Virginia did with eVA, and it is also what the County of Santa Clara is doing with their initiative.
Over the coming months I will, with a great deal of interest, be following the Santa Clara initiative closely, so stay tuned. We may just be witnessing the dawn of a new beginning with regard to public sector procurement.
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U.S. house prices rose in April, up 0.3 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis from the previous month, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) monthly House Price Index (HPI). The previously reported 0.3 percent change in March remains unchanged.
The FHFA HPI is calculated using home sales price information from mortgages sold to or guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. From April 2014 to April 2015, house prices were up 5.3 percent. The U.S. index is 2.3 percent below its March 2007 peak and is roughly the same as the February 2006 index level.
For the nine census divisions, seasonally adjusted monthly price changes from March 2015 to April 2015 ranged from -0.8 percent in the East North Central division to +1.4 percent in the West North Central division. The 12-month changes were all positive, ranging from +2.3 percent in the Middle Atlantic division to +7.5 percent in the Pacific division.
emphasis added
