I have worked in the US Gulf of Mexico and onshore oilfield arena for more than 35 years... Since 1999 I have been a Petroleum Project Consultant with 15-20 different companies. Only one company has had a SCM group that worked well with the production operations group. That one company was the only one that had a SCM group that was a "service group" to assist the operations engineers. The SCM groups goals, failures and successes were linked and based on the production operational projects. The group was smaller than most SCM groups, but they worked extremely well to assist the operations engineers with their projects by getting the equipment & services while optimizing cost. The other companies saw the operations group as an out-of-control buyer wasting millions of dollars. The SCM groups were set up as a separate group with no links or controls, and in some groups, no communication with the production operations group. One company actually put the SCM group under the legal department... another was so independent that their offices were behind card-keyed locked doors with no access except by invitation. Those groups were made up of buyers with no oilfield experience, poor communication skills and they viewed themselves as a means to build up their own self-serving ------- and beat the operations over the head and attack their operation every chance they could to prove their worth and justify their existence. A company I worked for a while back spent approximately .0MM more than necessary on a project because of the way they bid the equipment & services for the project. When it was pointed out to them of the waste, they ignored the pleadings and awarded the same companies a 4 year 0.0MM contract with the same conditions as the prior project. Does anyone have an actual example of a well-functioning SCM business plan where a company has saved money and and grown the business because of a realized SCM-generated actual savings?