It’s estimated that the hospitality industry in the UK employs about 6% of the total working population, some 1.7m people, and accounts for £55-60bn pa. Just under a half of that figure ~£25bn relates to restaurants, ~56,000 of them if the latest estimates are true. It’s an industry sector that we all probably encounter more…
I’m sure you’ll all have picked up the recent stories around Amazon and Google relating to delivery drones and driverless taxis. Whilst it’s too early to tell whether these are pure fantasy or will one day be a normal part of life, it does raise an interesting topic from an online retail business model perspective.…
The process of making a cup of coffee is about as simple as a task gets. That’s not to say producing the perfect crema doesn’t have its fair share of innovation, science and technique, but ultimately it’s a repeatable, mechanistic process. It’s a market which from the last available research, which was for 2012, grew…
Increasingly we live in a society where we expect everything to be available instantly, 24/7/365. Yet often we take for granted the time and effort that it has taken to achieve this for each individual product or service. On another axis the world is becoming increasingly interconnected and therefore more complex. How many of us…
Whether you like it or not we are all contributors and users of crowdsourced data on a daily basis. Examples are all around us, whether it’s: voting on TV talent shows; product ratings on Amazon; or traffic on Google Maps; or mobile phone coverage maps collated by RootMetrics from user supplied data. Whilst the first…
We’re increasingly used to seeing articles in the press about the importance of cyber security. Thanks in part to some high profile cases, company boards are slowly waking up to the issue as a topic that they have to be involved in. However, a recent FT survey showed that only 3 in 20 said the…
In so many areas of life, being successful is about continually improving versus your previous best. The baseline is key. Outsourcing is no different, without a robust baseline it’s difficult to measure performance and apportion risk and reward in a sustainable and balanced way. The competition to take over the procurement of defence equipment for…
In one of my sessions at the recent IACCM EMEA conference which looked at contracting skills I posed the question that whilst we would rarely let a product get to market without some form of testing or prototyping, how many commercial or contract management professionals consider testing their contracting structures or agreements? If we look…
When most people hear the words ‘hacker’ or ‘hack’ they probably conjure up an image of a teenager trying to hack into a government mainframe or a hardened criminal trying to get into a banks computer network. Such an image is of course only one interpretation of those words and over the weekend TechCrunch hosted the Disrupt…
Competition is acknowledged as a core tool for procurement and whilst suppliers often decry it there are even upsides for them. Often the fact that a buyer is running a competition shows intent to purchase, gives a finishing line to aim for, and boundaries to work within. A well run competition, through focus and by…