Or should that be make-versus-spend? An interesting call with a CPO of a European vehicle manufacturer this week brought the question to the fore and led to an even larger one. So just why aren’t procurement and manufacturing best friends for life if there are savings to be made?

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As success stories go, there are those in procurement that have had a highly effective supply chain management system in place (wasn’t that long ago Toyota might have been the example!), and there are those who have fundamentally improved what they’ve been given. Which brings us to ITV.

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“Companies are still overlooking their main opportunity to streamline further without impacting headcount”, says Guy Stafford, client director at procurement specialists BuyingTeam. If that hasn’t got your attention, then you’re probably in the minority that are comfortable with their services procurement spend.

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For Swiss-based travel operator, Kuoni, working in Swiss francs has always made sense. But at a time when the currencies of its biggest markets – namely, the UK, Sweden and India – were hit hard, the group has suffered massively. According to its CEO Peter Rothwell, who was speaking to the Financial Times, the currency volatility was responsible for wiping out a third of its revenues.

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As chief executive of procurement technology company Emptoris, Patrick Quirk has had a manic time since joining the organisation on 1 October this year. Central to his vision is to put his customers at the centre of its growth and development plan, so true to his word, Quirk has been out on the road meeting his customers and discussing their needs. 120 of them. In 85 days.

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The UK's public sector is a funny old beast. With departments like the NHS, the Department of Justice and the MoD having budgets that put much private-sector expenditure in the shade, one would have thought that procurement would be as good as you would find anywhere.

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2010 may still seem like a long way away, but already the predictions and forecasts are beginning to come in. Perhaps it's because it's budget time that people tend to start looking forward rather than back.

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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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Demand management is a well-known part of the wider procurement skillset - afterall, influencing how much of something is used is probably a more effective way of cutting overall cost than managing price itself. So why, in that case, is a term needed to describe it? Surely, demand management is just good procurement.

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This afternoon's session at the Procurement Leaders Network Members' Day focused on the subject of demand management - it was a lively session with huge amounts of value gained all round.

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