Earlier this month we reported that the Institute of Credit Management here in the UK had produced a league table aimed at shaming companies putting suppliers at risk through the late payment of invoices.

Now - that ploy clearly didn't work - another company is coming under fire from a number of groups for imposing new terms on suppliers that appear symptomatic of the current credit environment.

Alliance Boots has said that it will pay its suppliers up to 105 days after billing and (if that wasn’t enough) will then charge a 2.5 per cent “settlement fee”. It’s enough to make the eyes water, and despite Alliance Boots claiming that their procurement standards “are in line with those of other groups of similar size and scale”, the news will come as a hammer blow to suppliers who are coming under increasing pressure as times get tough.

A clearly unhappy Phil Orford, the chairman of the Forum of Private Business, said the “practice of large retailers abusing their buying power continues to have a very negative impact on smaller businesses.”

But despite the criticism one thing seems assured -  Alliance Boots won’t be the only large company to put the squeeze on their suppliers in the coming months.

Measuring misery is an imprecise science, but over on his Spendmatters blog Jason Busch has highlighted a handy little tool currently being used across the pond.

The United States misery index charts the mood of the nation by adding together the country’s inflation and unemployment rate - hardly a foolproof method, but one that offers hope to US businesses weighed down by supposed impending financial implosion nonetheless.

According to current calculations the index currently reads 9.18, it’s highest level since October 2005, but still some way behind the 21.98 peak hit in October 1980 when Jimmy Carter walked the corridors of power in Washington.

As far as I know there’s no European equivalent, but if anyone has come across anything similar then I’m all ears.

A recent survey from the Centre for Strategic Supply Research (or CAPS to you and I) found that almost two-thirds of supply chain professionals viewed the procurement of services as being more problematical than just plain old materials and component procurement.

Why so? Well, if the survey’s findings are to be believed, the sheer weight of supplier numbers for the buying of direct services - on average respondents dealt with 105 active suppliers, as opposed to 36 active suppliers for the purchasing of direct materials – dictates that buyers often struggle to develop a proactive management approach.

Couple this with, amongst other factors, the fact that less than 60 per cent of services spending takes place through formal systems and processes and you get an understanding of why this is still an area giving many in procurement a considerable headache.

However, according to CAPS, the comparative neglect of services procurement spend in recent years – and the outsourcing of many other back-office operations – means that greater focus is now being placed on an area that can, the research claims, deliver the kind of cost savings needed at a time when many organisations are doing up their belts just a notch or two tighter.

Some companies are already well ahead of the competition, most notably Bank of America, who claims supply management is involved in 100 per cent of its service purchases. To prove their point they’ve upped their resources in an area that is, typically, short in both numbers and the requisite talent.

This lack of resource was identified by CAPS as being one of the fundamental issues facing services procurement, something that could change if others follow BofA’s example.

Chinese state media yesterday took the unusual step of telling the world that protests in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa had spread to surrounding provinces.

Just how significant this latest upsurge in violence will be remains to be seen but, after speaking to a well-placed source, there appears to be a genuine feeling in China that the unrest in the annexed mountain kingdom could soon spread well beyond Tibetan borders – which could result in potentially serious consequences for those companies sourcing and operating within the country.

Part of China’s attraction over the past decade has been its stability. Despite the relative lack of freedom afforded the Chinese population in everyday life, the country’s government has poured investment into an economy that has, and still is, growing exponentially. A wealthy population is, from the Chinese government’s point of view, a satisfied one. .

Now, however, as unemployment levels in the country rise in line with inflation, that could soon change. Trouble in Tibet and ongoing talk of an Olympic boycott are doubtless giving the Chinese government a headache, but if the unrest spreads to the wider population that could spell serious trouble - not just for those in Beijing, but for an already fragile global economy.

High fuel prices are hitting industries across the board, but the airline industry is bearing the brunt of the soaring cost of oil. As recently reported by ELP, British Airways has already warned that their margins have been decimated by increased fuel expenditure, and now another major airline, Delta, has illustrated the potentially devastating effect the rises seen in the past 12 months have had and, in all likelihood, will continue to have for the foreseeable future.

The third largest carrier in the US has said that it hoped to cut at least 2000 jobs through a voluntary redundancy scheme, after it claimed that its fuel prices had risen a staggering 20 per cent in the past three months (the airline, like many others, bases its jet fuel budget at $90 a barrel levels, figures which are, quite literally, pie in the sky in the current environment).

Coming at a time when customer numbers are on the wane courtesy of the economic slowdown in both the US and Europe, it’s small wonder that airlines, like their passengers, are preparing to tighten their belts in anticipation of further turbulence.

Extreme fluctuations in the value of both the dollar and the euro have hit Franco-German aerospace group EADS harder than most in the past 12 months, so it’s no surprise to hear – after a week in which the company’s CEO Louis Gallois announced results well below analysts’ expectation – that the company is finally preparing to take action to reduce their currency risk.

On Tuesday Gallois told London’s Financial Times that the breaching of the $1.50 mark by the euro could signal a prolonged period of exchange rate pain.

Which goes some way to explaining a statement from the company concerning plans to pay suppliers in US currency in the future.

“The ability to pay in dollars is something we will look on favourably in future when negotiating contracts with suppliers,” a spokesman told the BBC.

Whether the news is greeted with a similar enthusiasm remains to be seen but given the cost to their business of currency fluctuations over the past 12 months, EDS have to grab every advantage they can take.

No company operating out of India needs telling that wages in the country have soared in line with the country's popularity as an offshoring destination, and a new study by Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC) now claims that locations as diverse as China, Morocco and Hungary, are not only keeping pace but threatening to leave it standing.

The report analysed the rolling out of global delivery centres by the UK’s 20 largest IT services suppliers – Accenture, Capgemini, IBM and HP among them - and found that of the 21 centres opened since January 2007, just two were in India. Findings that offer further evidence of the threat to India’s traditional dominance.

However, despite the undoubted problems created by the country’s overheated labour market, India’s position as a global sourcing hub appears safe - for the time being at least.

The report found that BT Global Services, EDS, IBM and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) had all opened sourcing facilities in the country since July 2006.

Now call me a traditionalist but I prefer my wine bottle to be, well, a bottle. However, as I, and a number of other thirsty people have recently found to our cost, soaring energy prices are having a rather unwelcome effect on an industry that has enjoyed almost unparalleled growth in the past decade.

Here in the UK, Waitrose are the latest retailer to be hit by a global shortage of clear glass bottles, meaning that the company is considering joining Sainsbury in selling wine in the kind of plastic bottles usually reserved for beer and soft drinks.

 

But as wine buffs shake their heads in collective disbelief, rising costs mean that this could become a far more common occurrence in the coming months and years.

 

As Nick Rose, wine buyer for Waitrose, told the Financial Times, glass bottles are becoming harder and, crucially, more expensive, to source, with the cost of a bottle now running at 13p, up from 10p in 2007. “Producers have had to stand in line and wait for suppliers,” he said.

 

Despite the bottle shortage, it does, thankfully, look as though wine stocks are holding firm – despite unseasonal weather in many major grape producing countries. So with the wine taking care of itself, lets hope that the bottle situation will resolve itself soon - something that us wine-loving Europeans would undoubtedly raise a glass to.

The endless series of gloomy predictions and poor figures from big players across the pond has already served to lengthen the faces of already strained procurement execs and the latest global PMI figures certainly haven’t served to lighten the mood.

Global factory growth slowed to its lowest level in four-and-a-half years here in the UK, as the JPMorgan Global Purchasing Managers’ Index fell to 51.1 last month (down from 52.3 in January), a downturn reflected in the rest of Europe, with Spain and Italy coming off worst.

In the States, figures from the US Institute for Supply Management showed that PMI had fallen to 48.3 in January – below the magic 50 figure that acts as the increasing thin dividing line between growth and contraction.

The figures caused Ian Shepherdson to claim that the ISM manufacturing index is now in the “no-mans land” between weak growth and recession.

Even factory activity in India and China slowed and despite euro zone inflation holding firm at its current level of 3.2 per cent, price pressures at the factory gate mean that the European Central Bank are likely to give any potential interest rate cuts a short shrift at their monthly meeting on Thursday.