Boeing's announcement that it has been forced to acquire the South Carolina plant of Vought Aircraft Industries from private equity powerhouse Carlyle Group, reminds me of a story I heard recently about the problems of having private equity-owned suppliers in the supply chain.

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Depending on who you speak to, increasing supplier payment terms is either an excellent - and ultimately rather easy - way to free up cash, or it's a morally-indefensible practice used by bullyboy, large corporates.

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Many business leaders are nervous about operating in the Far East due to concerns over the loss of intellectual property. And rightly so, stories of cars being copied almost to perfection and sold on the open market within weeks of the official launch are all-too-common. In fact, IP theft in China is so embedded in the culture of the economy that many have given up trying to fight it.

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If there's one thing that has resisted the impact of procurement's influence more than most over the past few years, it's marketing spend. Still an intangible spend area in many businesses, marketing directors also enjoy a position of power, as well as a certain influence over most CEOs.

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A blog I wrote yesterday about how Taiwan Semiconductor Company has established a formal Open Innovation Platform with its customers has had me thinking all night (dangerous, I know). While the cynical could legitimately argue that there's nothing new here - rather, it's a formalised version of relationships that have existed for some time - the problem comes when you try to analyse the ownership of the work that is being done in these loosely organised "networks".

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There's an excellent blog over on the Financial Times website which talks about Taiwan Semiconductors' launch of an Open Innovation Platform - a new model which promotes the development of next generation chip technology.

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Well, perhaps not quite the big screen, but a recent appearance by Mark Perera, CEO of the newly-launched Procurement Intelligence Unit proves that this profession is now firmly in the business spotlight.

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A short while ago, we ran a Big Debate on whether procurement should refer to other business units as internal customers, the argument being that it immediately sets expectations of our profession being subservient to the rest of the organisation.

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The last Big Debate on whether or not procurement professionals should be awarded commission for successful cost savings and negotiations sparked a huge amount of debate. It seems that there is a fair amount of support for both sides of the argument. Here, Scott Forest, director of procurement at Kuehne & Nagel, puts his own arguments across.

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I attended an Accenture-organised roundtable in London yesterday, held at the Tate Modern on London's South Bank - a suitable environment to discuss the challenges that face modern procurement organisations. Afterall, the gallery is built in a former power station, and procurement, in my view, is the engine room of large organisations...

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