Featured Speaker Slate Filling Up For Commodity Edge

If you haven’t yet had a chance to peruse the Featured Speakers list for MetalMiner and Spend Matters’ upcoming event, you should take this Friday morning (or afternoon, or evening, depending on your time zone) to do so.

We just added a few key speakers this week, all of whom have extensive experience in commodities. As the conference will be focusing on providing sourcing strategies and tools for buyers across commodity sectors, our speakers’ expertise reflects the interconnected natures of commodities markets and their supply chains.

If you’re a steel buyer or supplier, you’ll want to hear Peter Wright lead the Steel breakout session on March 20.

Peter is the Producer of Gerdau Steel Market Update, which we follow quite closely. He spent 51 years in the steel industry, with experience in quality engineering, metallurgy, product development, sales, marketing, operations management and corporate management as VP of the Bar Products Business Unit with Chaparral Steel Co. In 2007, Peter received the AISC Special Achievement award for “Analysis of the structural steel industry that has aided the development of metric-based marketing statistics.”

If you’re an energy buyer — we’d be shocked if you or your company did not buy energy to some degree — you can’t miss Mark Pruitt (leading the Energy breakout session), who worked at the Illinois Power Agency. Currently, Mark serves as Principal, the Power Bureau, and as Program Director at the Illinois Community Choice Aggregation Network (ICCAN). Before he joined ICCAN, as Director of the Illinois Power Agency, he secured electricity supply on behalf of residential and small commercial ratepayer accounts serviced by Commonwealth Edison and Ameren Illinois.

Mark created one of the largest utility aggregations (natural gas and electricity) for the State of Illinois during his time at the University of Illinois, where he managed purchasing on behalf of 27 state agencies and 12 municipalities. Prior to his University work, he developed energy efficiency and power generation projects for federal clients on behalf of Nicor.

And if you deal in or with transportation, Chandler Hall of BravoSolution (leading the Transportation breakout session) should leave you with more than enough to think about — and act upon. Chandler is a Vice President with BravoSolution based in Chicago.

Over more than 12 years with the company, he has helped to build then lead their Collaborative Sourcing practice for transportation globally, across a wide range of client industries. This has included the development and advancement of applying advanced optimization capabilities to the transportation sourcing process and creating unique transportation spend management solutions.

For the full roster of our confirmed speakers, go to our Featured Speakers page.

–Taras Berezowsky