Today’s post is from our  SafeSourcing Archives

In 2013, William Muir published a study on the social behavior of chickens^[1] and measuring their productivity based on how the groups were configured. They thought that if they bred selecting for all the most productive chickens, putting those chickens into one group should only scale up that productivity into one “super-chicken” flock. To their surprise, they found that the “average” chicken flocks repeatedly out-produced the super-chicken flocks, because the latter group had pecked many of the other birds to death. The parallels in experiences between human and chicken team-building became immediately obvious, and so MIT started experimenting to try to understand how collective intelligence works, and can be optimized in humans^[2].

Experiments were performed where individuals of varying intelligence profiles were put together in groups, and given an assortment of problems to solve as a group. What the researchers found was that individual intelligence or productivity was not the leading indicator of team success. The three traits associated with the best group performance were:

• High ability to read other people’s emotions
• Giving everyone a chance to talk, and
• High number of women in the group

What they found with the groups of “super-stars” was that while intelligent/productive individuals may do well solving problems on their own, if they don’t have the social intelligence to interact with others well they will only bring the group performance down. This should be obvious for anyone who has had to work with team members that may look good on paper or to external management, but then internal to the group, is a terrible leader. Intelligence and raw talent are great attributes, but putting together the high-producers that don’t play nice with others can end up creating a team that pecks itself to death. There are online tests that measure your ability to read people’s facial expressions^[3], and some experimental tests for measuring a team’s collective intelligence. But at the moment, the most effective and inexpensive test is seeing how teams perform together, and of course simply asking the team who they would follow, and who they feel “pecked” by. For all the experimental procedures with chickens confirming what we already intuitively know about human nature, it’s usually pretty easy to spot who inspires cooperation, and who inspires in-fighting just by asking around.

For more information on how SafeSourcing can assist your team with this process or on our “Risk Free” trial program, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Service Representative. We have an entire customer services team waiting to assist you today.

^[1] Grandin, Temple, and Mark J Deesing. Genetics and the behavior of domestic animals. Temple Grandin & Mark J Deesing. Academic press, 2013.

^[2] “Measuring Collective Intelligence – MIT Center for Collective …” 2014. 15 Feb. 2016 <http://cci.mit.edu/mciresearchpage.html>

^[3] “Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test – Question Writer Tracker.” 2013. 15 Feb. 2016 <https://www.questionwritertracker.com/quiz/61/Z4MK3TKB.html>

Today’s post is by Ashley Riviello, Account Manager at SafeSourcing, Inc.

To recap fairly quickly with some key points from my blog last month, I stressed the importance of cyber security. We probably hear something or read something about breaches happening every day. In this blog, I would like to focus on the three main principles of cyber security: confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Before I explain each principle, understanding the role of cyber security is very important. Per Transunion, anything that relies on the internet for communication, or is connected to a computer, or other smart device can be affected by a breach in security. This includes, but is not limited to, government databases like social security numbers, educational systems like grades and reports cards and transportation systems like traffic control and airplane navigation systems. Any of these can be hacked or breached.

Again the three main principles behind cyber security: confidentiality, integrity and availability. Per Transunion here are their explanations for all three:

• Confidentiality involves any information that is sensitive and should only be shared with a limited number of people. If your credit card information, for example, was shared with a few criminals, your credit rating and your reputation could suffer very quickly.
• Integrity involves keeping information from being altered. When malware hits a hospital’s computer systems, it can scramble patient records, lab results and can prevent staff from accessing a patient’s allergy or drug information.
• Availability involves ensuring those who rely on accurate information are able to access it. Availability is often related to integrity, but can also involve things like a cyber attack preventing people from accessing specific computers, or from accessing the internet.

Here are some tips to help protect you from hackers, viruses and malware:

• If you receive an email that you do not recognize, do not open it. Certain links can cause your computer to be infected with a virus.
• When you receive warnings on your computer that are unfamiliar to you, do not click on these. They are known as scareware. They also can cause your computer to become infected with a virus. These can be sent through email or can be pop ups on in your browser windows.
• Always make sure you have the most updated antivirus and anti-malware.
• Never give out any personal information to anyone that you do not know or websites that are unfamiliar to you. People can use it to hack your personal information and steal your bank info or any other personal info that you have.

I hope this at least helps one person be more aware of the information you put out there. Here at SafeSourcing, we take this very seriously and never give out any data or personal information with any of our clients or vendors that we work with on a daily basis.

For more information on how SafeSourcing can help in your procurement efforts, or on our Risk Free trial program, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Service Representative. We have an entire team ready to assist you today.

Today’s post is our SafeSourcing Archives

Mark Zuckerberg once famously said “A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa”. Along those same lines, Eric Schmidt of Google fame proclaimed “The power of individual targeting—the technology will be so good it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them”. Often times statements like these disquiet our fears of artificial intelligence, or of Google powered robots taking over the world. But I think there’s a much bigger, and more immediate cost to what is being described above.

Have you ever noticed how many of the news feeds, search results, and advertisements that you don’t have a choice in seeing are often customized to your interests? What kind of long term effects do you think this will have on a society, especially one that is only getting more and more embedded into online networks of all types? Some believe it will necessarily lead to us only seeing the information we agree with, and that can be a dangerous thing.

This is why Eli Pariser, executive director of moveon.org, believes that opinions are becoming both more polarized, and more narrow minded. One way this problem seems to be manifesting itself is through the increasing polarization of opinions in topics ranging from global warming, gun control, ISIS, and vaccines. The claims of both sides of any argument seem to get more extreme and certain of their views, and rarely ever less. This is because the algorithms that review our history and populate our search results, also tailor our information feeds to what we want to see. But how then will we learn things we need to know, without being limited to the things we want to know?

Right now, the options are limited. All of your Facebook and Google results go through algorithms that customize their outputs to your activity. Google gives some tips for how to prevent that in PC browser searches by deactivating your history^[1], but that option is not available for mobile browsing. Don’t forget, these companies are advertising revenue based, so they’re incentivized right off the bat to give you output that will sell ad space, which is more effective with personalized marketing. In this case, although there doesn’t seem to be a black and white answer, age old advice seems to be the most useful: Never stop learning, listen to opinions different than yours, be humble, and never assume you are right without considering the alternatives.

For more information on how SafeSourcing can assist your team with this process or on our “Risk Free” trial program, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Service Representative.  We have an entire customer services team waiting to assist you today.

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^[1] “Search and browse privately – the Google Help Center.” 2014. 14 Dec. 2015 <https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/4540094?hl=en>

Today’s blog is from our SafeSourcing Archives

Depending on your political leanings, the government might not be your first choice of where to get guidance on integrity. I would suggest, however, that the government guidelines may not be the end-all source for all of your policy development, but it may be a great starting point. When experts speak about business ethics, they usually talk ethics as a spectrum of more ethical and less ethical, not as an on/off switch. The starting point of that threshold for most ethicists is the law. So even though you may want to go above and beyond the law for determining how you conduct your business, the law is where you would start for ensuring your policies are compliant, and you may want to begin with the government’s procurement integrity policies when developing your own.

The purpose of the Procurement Integrity Act is to prevent the award of contracts based on corporate espionage or bribery. The intention is for this act to encourage contracts that provide the best value to the government and, by proxy, its citizens. Below we will summarize a few key concepts from the Procurement Integrity Act for you to consider:

Communication must be much more regulated after a formal request for proposal has been released: It is expected that before the release of an RFP, a government procurement representative will be conducting industry research that may involve direct communication with the vendor community. However, after the release, communication must be well documented and must not include information that would give advantage to any one vendor over another.

Conflicts of interest: If you are advising the government in a procurement project and yourself, a family member, or company you are involved with have a financial interest in the project, criminal law may prevent you from working on the project. This policy applies to both giving AND receiving gifts between the purchaser and the vendor, applicable to gifts and other “perks” as well.

If you think it would be inappropriate for you to be involved on a project, speak with an agency ethics officer: Not many private companies have an ethics officer, but it should be within your policy to have the ability to notify a supervisor and self-identify any reasons why an employee shouldn’t be involved on a project when warranted.

Obligate participating vendors to minimize exposure to competitor information: It should be within your terms of participation that a company should never knowingly obtain confidential competitor information, and if ever erroneously receiving such information, they agree to minimize that exposure. In other words, the error should be immediately disclosed and information destroyed, not further disseminated. It does not benefit the purchasing party to have any one vendor have an informational advantage over another.
For more details, we recommend further study of the resources available at the website for the Office of Government Ethics at: http://www.oge.gov/

For more information on how SafeSourcing can assist your team in this process, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Service Representative.  We have an entire customer services team waiting to assist you today.

We look forward to your comments.

Today’s post is from our SafeSourcing Archives.

In a previous issue Fortune Magazine published the top multinational companies to work for to compliment the top 100 US companies list they release every January.  Some of the highlights included donating money on behalf of their employees, offering extra money and vacation at long term anniversary, providing on-site childcare, and free breakfast buffet and game rooms.  You may be wondering what this has to do with your company.  The answer is everything.  When your suppliers are doing things right and creating a great place for their employees to work, it means they can service you better, provide better prices and products and have employees who are happier to work with your company.

In today’s blog we will be looking at a few other areas that suppliers are evaluated against that should be part of how you measure your potential and existing suppliers.

Non-Profit Organization Ratings – Along with industry reviews, there are also organizations like the Better Business Bureau who give its ratings to companies based on complaints that have been logged against those companies and any other information available.  Others sites like Angie’s List and customer driven feedback sites allow you to see consolidated views of the companies, services and products.  These sites go beyond surveys and get right to the customer feedback you are looking for.

Peer Opinion – One of the most valuable questions you can ask a supplier but one that is rarely asked is “Who are your top three competitors?”  By asking all of the vendors this question during an RFI or RFP process you will quickly understand the landscape of who the leaders in the field are and how they view each other.  This can be valuable information to get from the companies who know their industry the best.

Industry Reviews – There are so many organizations these days whose sole purpose is to research and rank other companies against one set of criteria or another.  This BLOG was sparked by one of these surveys performed by a financial periodical, but there are other major companies like Gartner and Hoover who regularly publish the findings of their research for both companies and products.  These types of surveys and research results are important because they include the same types of criteria found in an RFI and are performed by independent organizations saving your organization some valuable research time.

Certifications – Almost all organizations have been certified for one reason or another depending on the industry they belong to.   Many times their customers have no idea that they carry these certifications.  Capturing these during an RFI or RFP process will help you better evaluate the vendors you do business with.  Another way of getting this information is to go to the Certifying Organizations websites to find out which companies have been certified by their processes.

Understanding your potential and existing suppliers and how they compare in areas outside of the normal metrics, can help you develop good partnerships well in advance of any final contract with them.  For information on how SafeSourcing can help you gather these types of details, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Service Representative.

We look forward to your comments.

Today’s post is from our  SafeSourcing Archives

Google’s search algorithms are notoriously complex and secretive. After all, if a savvy online company cracked the code to becoming the first result you see no matter what your search, they could stand to profit immensely. The ambiguity and complexity also makes it difficult to conduct research effectively and avoiding false-positives within your search results. What many users don’t know is that there are many shortcuts embedded into the search bar that allow you to get more specific with your results. We have passed through the many shortcuts available, and ranked the ones we think would be the most helpful to any procurement professional:

Search term format, followed by description:

1. 1. Word1 Word2: The default search parameter used by most users will search BOTH terms as separate terms. Therefore your search results won’t necessarily use the same word order, which may not return the correct results when using compound words or specific phrases.
   2. “Fourscore and seven years ago”: Using quotation marks will search the exact phrase entered in its exact order. This is best used for searching exact quotes, or product descriptions that must have an exact match.
   3. Star -Trek: Is your search result giving you too many false positives? If searching a word like Star is giving you too many results within a popular science fiction category that doesn’t belong in your scope, placing a “-” symbol before a second term will prevent the results from returning results containing that second term.
   4. Logistics site:www.safesourcing.com: Enter a search term, and then use “site:” to limit the search results to a specific domain. This can be helpful when looking for a specific product within a manufacturer’s website, but aren’t certain where to find it.
   5. Filetype:pdf: This shortcut allows you to search for files of a certain extension type. For instance, if looking for a sample specification, sometimes limiting your search to a pdf or word filetype will return the most relevant results.
   6. Fluid Milk Type VI 2008…2013: Placing three periods between two numerical terms will limit your results to between those numbers. For instance, if you are conducting historic market research for a commodity within a certain timeframe, this search will only return results containing numbers within the year range given. This can be useful if shopping for within a known price range as well.
   7. Related:www.cmegroup.com: When looking for similar suppliers or services, a “related:” search can be helpful for returning other sites of similar scope.

For more information on how SafeSourcing can assist your team with this process or on our “Risk Free” trial program, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Service Representative. We have an entire customer services team waiting to assist you today.

Today’s post is from our  SafeSourcing Archives

I come from a history of cold calling. When my mom was in junior high (circa 1955), my grandmother started her own catering business. A hard working Hungarian immigrant, she would sit at their kitchen table every Sunday afternoon after church and call the family of every single young woman listed in the engagement announcements to ask if they had decided on a caterer. My dad is a mechanical engineer, turned salesman, who spent the bulk of his career in the tool and dye industry selling everything from diamond grinding wheels to linear ball bearings.

I guess you could say that I was born into it. Although I resisted for the first several years of my career, once I finally gave in to the sales call, I never looked back. One of my favorite parts of the sales cycle is the cold call. It’s the first introduction of the product or service that you have to offer to a person or business that may have a need for it. I see cold calls as a challenge, each one a fresh opportunity. Apparently not everyone feels the same way. Here are a few suggestions that might help your cold calls be a little less frightening and a little more fun… like mine!

• Be Confident. Go into each call with confidence and optimism. You are a business professional providing a viable product or service to someone whose company might very well have a need for it.
• Listen. You’re prepared. You have a good understanding of your value proposition and basic understanding of the businesses that you’re calling on. Now have a conversation, paying close attention to what’s being communicated verbally and otherwise.
• Be Yourself. Believe it or not, discomfort is easily perceived over the phone. You do not have to be unnaturally pushy or super aggressive to make sales calls. Using your own assets and unique personality to create a genuine rapport can be much more effective.
• Speak at a Normal Speed. Or even slightly slower than normal, and enunciate. You want to do everything you can to help your potential customers hear what you’re saying. There is nothing worse than struggling to understand someone who is speaking too quickly or mumbling.
• Be Succinct. Get to the point quickly, keeping in mind of course that if your potential customer feels like engaging in a little small talk to feel more comfortable, you’ll be happy to oblige.
• Know Who To Ask For. When making sales calls, do your best to understand who the decision maker is for your particular product or service. For some clients, it might be VP of Marketing, for others it could be the head of Human Resources. Learn who makes the final decision before picking up the phone, so you’re not wasting their time or your own.

Would you like to learn how SafeSourcing could help your company run more efficiently? Interested in a risk free trial? Please don’t hesitate to contact SafeSourcing. Our team is ready and available to assist you!

We look forward to and appreciate your comments.