In Search of the Best Procurement and Purchasing Books
In order to establish a good career path in this area, lifelong learning is a key and good purchasing books play the important role in your career advancement. Our book ranking method uses,
- Objective evaluation with a clear data collection plan.
- Metrics such as book performance, sales performance & reader's feedback.
7 Best Purchasing and Procurement Books are as below:
- Procurement and Supply Manager's Desk Reference by Fred Sollish and John Semanik
- Procurement Game Plan: Winning Strategies and Techniques for Supply Management Professionals by Charles Dominick and Soheila Lunney
- Category Management in Purchasing: A Strategic Approach to Maximize Business Profitability by Jonathan O'Brien
- Purchasing Chessboard: 64 Methods to Reduce Costs and Increase Value with Suppliers by Christian Schuh et al
- Purchasing and Supply Chain Management by Robert M. Monczka et al
- Procurement, Principles & Management by Peter Baily et al
- Purchasing and Supply Management by P. Fraser Johnson and Anna Flynn
Data Collection
Historically, purchasing people are considered a kind of clerical workers who are expected to perform basic tasks such as document issuance and price negotiation. However, modern purchasing and procurement have become a part of company's success.
To come up with a list of top 7 purchasing books, we collect data as below,
- Firstly, we collect the names of books available on Amazon.com.
- After that, we collect various metrics of each purchasing book, namely,
1. Citation counts - a basic bibliometric method showing how many times each purchasing book is cited by other publications. Citation counts indicate how well each purchasing book performs against its peers
2. Worldcat - a new kind of bibliometric method showing how many copies are stored in various libraries around the world (info can be retrieved from Worldcat.com) Numbers of copies indicate how useful each book is (in the eye of library staffs)
3. Amazon Customer Review - numbers of stars each book gets from the reviews available on Amazon.com. We use only positive reviews (3 stars or more) to evaluate a book
4. Sales Rank - this metric illustrates how well each book performs in the eye of the end users (number close to 1 is better)
5. Number of Pages - this metric shows how comprehensive each book is (the more is the better)
6. Number of Editions - how many times each book gets revised during its lifetime. We believe only a good book get the revised edition(s)
7. Recency - "time since the last update" indicates how "fresh" each book is. Of course, this metric will not be used in isolation. We will exclude a book from the list if it doesn't have a revised edition at all in the past 5 years (we assume this kind of book is "obsolete")
- Finally, we compare metrics of each book and select the best purchasing books based on overall performance.
- In case the author produced more than one book, only the book with highest overall performance will be included.
