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The business landscape continues to evolve at an increasingly rapid pace each and every year. As a supplier, you’re tasked with keeping up with this pace of change and responding to bid opportunities, inbound inquiries, and hitting your quarterly targets. This means building relationships with buyers is of the utmost importance when trying to win business. Otherwise, you’re crossing your fingers and hoping that just being the lowest-priced supplier in the market will get it done. Buyers know that the best price doesn’t always carry across the life of the project and frequently use total cost of ownership analysis to calculate the best value outcome when making award decisions. 

There are many buzzwords regularly tossed around in this age of tech-based startups and digital transformation. Two such phrases are “Automation” and “Artificial Intelligence” (AI). It’s common to mix up the two, lump them together, or otherwise muddy the water of what is already a complex relationship between the terms. You’ve heard it, you think (or know) you need it, but you may not fully understand it. The great news? We’ve all been there.

Toilet paper is a hot commodity during a pandemic. Once COVID-19 was announced, people flocked to the stores, panic-buying toilet paper, bleach, and any assortment of hygienic products they could get their hands on. Empty aisles are still not an uncommon sight in major retailers today.

During times of global turbulence, new supply chains emerge rapidly to respond to urgent demands. In the US, the COVID-19 pandemic has created a massive new demand and subsequent shortage for personal protective equipment (PPE), a shortage which puts healthcare workers at risk. A recent editorial in the respected medical journal JAMA titled “Sourcing Personal Protective Equipment During the COVID-19 Pandemic” notes that “PPE, formerly ubiquitous and disposable in the hospital environment, is now a scarce and precious commodity in many locations when it is needed most to care for highly infectious patients. An increase in PPE supply in response to this new demand will require a large increase in PPE manufacturing, a process that will take time many health care systems do not have, given the rapid increase in ill COVID-19 patients.” The article notes that the need for PPE in many hospitals dealing with COVID patience is now so acute that hospitals are being advised to conserve PPE using the following approaches: Reclaim (masks from any non-hospital laboratory or clean room), Reuse (same mask over and over), Repurpose (the article mentions “snorkel and scuba, 3D printed, welder’s, civilian military grade gas masks, ski buffs”), Create Supply (by sewing or leveraging coffee filters and HVAC masks), and Extend Supply (supplementing N95 masks with plastic face shields, Ziploc bags and other barriers).

COVID-19 is impacting supply chains globally, and as a procurement leader, you may feel pressured to make critical shifts in your approach to prioritizing projects and examining risks in supplier relationships.

This week we interviewed Brian Gunia, Associate Professor at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School and author of the recently-released The Bartering Mindset: A Mostly Forgotten Framework for Mastering Your Next Negotiation.

The following is a transcript from the Future of Public Procurement Panel, which took places taking place during the 2018 NIGP Forum in Nashville, Tennessee. This transcript has been edited for readability.