Seminar Provides Purchasing Playbook

ISM Seminar spoiler alert: One of the first things instructor Edward F. Cocca does in “Fundamentals of Purchasing: The Building Blocks of World-Class Professionalism” is hold up a blank sheet of paper.

“I’ll hold it up and point out that it has boundaries, horizontally and vertically, with a flat plane. It’s defined. That’s theory,” says Cocca, a Scottsdale, Arizona, based consultant and trainer with decades of materials management experience. “What we do as a profession — and this is where I ball the piece of paper up in my hand — is change the theory. We shape and massage it to suit the business we are involved in. My job as an instructor, using my years of experience, is to connect students to my experiences with theory.”

And a wide array of experiences and theories are combined during the three-day seminar, which will be held June 15-17 in Baltimore and July 18-20 in Dallas. It covers many of the nuts and bolts of purchasing, from basic contact and antitrust law, negotiation, responsibility/ethics, sustainability and strategic planning.

Cocca says that while the seminar is geared toward those somewhat new to supply management, some of his students are veterans looking to refresh their knowledge or learn recent developments.

“We get a mix, people from different functions who come into it and what to understand what it’s all about, why is purchasing so policy-oriented,” Cocca says. “If I had to pick the type of audience we get, it would primarily be lesser-experienced purchasing people, but we often get the salty old dog who wants to brush up on things. So we get novices to senior managers.”

Seminar attendees can earn 21 Continuing Education Hours toward recertification. For registration and more information, call 800.888.6276, opt. 8 or visit the ISM Seminars webpage.