Next Level Purchasing

Purchasing and supply executives reported another sharp rise in raw material costs in September.

ISM’s Prices Index climbed to 77.9%, up from 71.1% in August, with ISM’s Susan Spence pointing to rising steel and aluminum prices as a driver. Increasing lead times also came up in 21% of the survey panel’s negative comments.

For Procurement teams planning 2027, it’s a good time to:

✔ Map steel and aluminum exposure across contracts and tier 2 suppliers
✔ Review price adjustment clauses before renewals
✔ Build lead-time buffers into Q1 plans where suppliers are stretched.

NLPA’s certification pathway builds the cost modeling, negotiation and risk skills that matter most in a market like this. It starts with a built-in assessment of where your team is strongest.

What’s your team watching most closely: price, lead times, or supply continuity?

🔗 ISM September report: https://zurl.co/1fVI9

NLPA’s CPOx pathway: https://zurl.co/zkxuE

Here’s to a day filled with treats, no tricks and zero Supply Chain scares. 👻

Wishing all Procurement pros a spooky, strategic, and successful Halloween! 🕸️

Credentials hold their value because they're maintained.

NLPA credential holders need 8 Continuing Education Hours a year to stay in good standing, and October is a sensible time to check where you stand rather than finding out in December.

Ways to earn them:

✔️ Express courses, 1 CEH each, included with Premium Membership
✔️ Full-length individual courses, 8 CEHs each
✔️ Certification programs, which vary by program
✔️ Approved third-party learning from organizations like ISM and APICS

If you're a few hours short, express courses are the quickest route. If you're planning a bigger step anyway, one full-length course covers the year in a single go.

Check and log your hours: https://zurl.co/4fDBt

Every Procurement team has more data than it did five years ago. Fewer have a shared method for turning it into a decision.

Data Analytics for Procurement Professionals is a full-length NLPA course you can take on its own. It's built for practitioners who want to work with spend and supplier data directly instead of waiting for someone else to build the report.

You'll cover:
✔ Structuring spend data so the analysis holds up
✔ Finding the patterns that point to real savings
✔ Building analysis that survives a question from finance
✔ Turning a finding into a sourcing decision, not just a chart

8 CE credits, self-paced, and it's one of the six modules inside CPOS.
Browse the full-length courses: https://zurl.co/1aqiy

💡 Procurement Myth: “Procurement is just about cutting costs.”

✅ Reality: Procurement is about driving value, building supplier relationships, ensuring sustainability, managing risk, and fueling business growth.

At NLPA, we give professionals the skills and certifications to make Procurement a strategic advantage.

👉 Learn how you can advance your Procurement career with NLPA:
https://zurl.co/MzP92

DID YOU KNOW?

Deloitte's Global Chief Procurement Officer Survey found that pairing technology with talent competencies correlates with stronger enterprise performance.The takeaway: tech investment only pays off with people in the loop.

The same survey asked CPOs how their function performed against its own plan over the past twelve months. Deloitte's leading group came out ahead of the followers on every measure:

✔️ Cost savings: 96% met or exceeded plan, against 80%
✔️ Cost avoidance: 94% against 75%
✔️ Supplier performance: 84% against 59%
✔️ Innovation enablement: 56% against 24%

The spread widens as the goal gets more ambitious. Sixteen points on cost savings. Thirty-two on innovation.

Buying the tool is the easier half of the job. Knowing what to do with what it produces is the half that takes building.

Source: https://zurl.co/yyCaA

That second half is the work NLPA does with Procurement teams: https://zurl.co/s50hI

Fractional Procurement leadership keeps coming up in year-end planning conversations, and the numbers explain why.

Jeff Dean, SPSM, SPSM2, CPOM, CPOE, CAIC, Vice President of Education at NLPA, wrote about this with American Fastener Journal. Three figures from that piece:

✔ Procurement spend reduced by 5-15%
✔ Return above 2.5x within the first year
✔ One SaaS company saved $216,000 a year on a $60,000 investment

The model works because a fractional CPO isn't advising from the outside. They sit inside the function part time, own the strategy, and stay accountable for what it delivers.

That suits organizations that need executive-level Procurement judgment without an executive salary on next year's budget.

Read the full breakdown: https://zurl.co/kQ72w

Not sure it fits? Adam Merritt can talk it through. Reach him at [email protected]

Q4 is when most supplier scorecards get filled in. It's also when they tend to be least useful: twelve months of data, one conversation.

Before your year-end reviews, pull:
- On-time delivery month by month; the year average hides the quarter things went sideways.
- Change orders and rework; they usually cost more than the price line you negotiated.
- Response time on open issues
- Your share of their revenue; this tells you what leverage you actually have heading into renewal season.

A review that only reports price performance is a report. One that covers all of the above is the start of a negotiation.

Supplier performance management sits at the core of the CPOx curriculum: https://zurl.co/zgrKG