Firstly let us start with a warning that anyone who is baffled by procurement phraseology should look away now.

Supply Chain Digest last week featured a story on comments by General Motors’ vice president of global procurement and supply chain operations – the immaculately coiffered Bo Andersson.

Speaking at an i2 user conference across the pond, Andersson enthusiastically trumpeted a new creation, known (bafflingly) as “Centralised Decentralisation”.

Despite the name, the concept is remarkably simple, and works on the basic premise, to paraphrase SCD, of “centralising the purchasing of individual materials and components to leverage buying power and scale.” Nothing too ground breaking in that, except that, at the current time, GM is doing this for different components across the world, not just out of its central headquarters.

Under the banner of centralised decentralisation (we’re sure that a more catchy name will replace this rather cumbersome phrase in the near future), Andersson argues that sourcing technology will allow his teams to operate at their optimum, wherever they are in the world, and whatever they are buying.

“One day, I decided to just do it,” he said. “We were buying seat belts in a number of locations around the world. We had some people in Mexico who were very good at buying seat belts, so one day I just decided I would have them buy seat belts for all of GM. That’s how I made it happen.

“I told all of our seat belt suppliers worldwide, ‘If you want to sell seat belts to GM, starting now you need to go to Mexico.’”

“In the past, it always seemed to turn out that local buyers for some reason found it necessary to source from local suppliers. Now, buyers and suppliers must take a global view.”