The talk by Jim Bergman on Tuesday at CAPM turned out to be great. Jim gave folks a heads up on IACCM and the real need for the buy-sell and legal side of companies to speak to each other instead of remaining in their silos.Organizations tend to, for example, not really understand their customer warranty requirements and then seek similar warranty requirements from suppliers. Instead, marketing and sales gives out warranties to customers without Procurement and Supply managers trying to transfer the risk upstream. For example, a supplier might offer a 2 year warranty as standard and procurement managers accept this as a bonus without working for a lower price since their onward customer warranty might be just one year and they are needlessly paying for warranty that is neither needed nor ever used.
The fun part of Jim’s presentation was the acronym LOL which you might think is "Laughing out Loud." Not so. LOL is "Limitation of Liability" and it is the most negotiated clause in buyer seller negotiations according to IACCM suveys, year after year. I felt that the audience was both energized and intrigued by this finding particularly because no one could disagree, nor like to admit it! All in all a very nice event as was the venue the il Monteicello restaurant.