Palambridge is the brainchild of Philip Ideson, who runs the Art of Procurement website that has produced a series of podcasts over the last year or so that feature interviews with procurement leaders (including one in which I talked about Sourcing Business Models.)

His partner in this venture is Kelly Barner, the owner/director of Buyers Meeting Point, also a well-known progressive procurement pioneer.

Ideson and Barner have put together a group of consulting and solution provider firms as partners to help them push a more progressive view of procurement. Partners not only include Vested (working with our Vested Centers of Excellence), but also Future Purchasing, a leader in category management; Market Dojo, a Bristol-based eSourcing tech provider.

Spend Matters praised Palambridge in an article this week.  “The firms can offer strategy, capability development, tools and execution support across a wide range of procurement requirements. The interesting concept in terms of business model (for Palambridge) is that clients can buy ‘credits’ and those credits are then used towards buying outcome-based services from one or more of the firms involved. But, just to be clear, the transaction is with Palambridge, not with the individual firm. There are also opportunities for more conventional project-based fee models too.”

Palambridge points to three layers in the venture: “brokered innovation,” leveraging “disruptive thinking,” and “on-demand access.” Basically, Palambridge is offering a subscription-based model where members can use ‘subscription credits’ to gain access to various experts on an as needed basis. What does this mean for Vested? Some of the Vested Centers of Excellence have agreed to provide services through the Palambridge platform.

My point of view? It’s great that Phil and Kelly want to promote Vested as a progressive approach to procurement, and as the founder of the Vested movement I am happy to partner with them. This will definitely help bring some of the Vested concepts to smaller companies who may be doing more self-implementation of Vested using the University of Tennessee’s Creating a Vested Agreement online course as their primary guide and want access to Vested experts “on demand.”

Bottom line: I see our association with Palambridge as a potential win-win in that it helps bring awareness of Vested to more people that may not be familiar with Vested and our work at the University of Tennessee.

Image: Introducing Palambridge, from the Palambridge website