It has been well established that having a diverse and inclusive workforce increases results and employee satisfaction, so why wouldn't’ the same be true for companies that invest in building a diverse supply chain? That question is the one that started Jaime Crump down the path to become a supplier diversity expert and consultant.

Jamie is the president of The Richmond Group where she provides consulting and coaching services to corporate and certified diversity-owned businesses in the areas of strategic sourcing and procurement strategies, supplier diversity initiatives, and optimizing the leverage of a diversity certification.

Although supplier diversity programs are well-intentioned, they also have to be good for business, and as Jaime points out, there is a lot of research highlighting the correlations between a more diverse supply base and quantitative business improvement. The American Sociological Review, Harvard Business Review, and McKinsey have all studied the issue and found strong evidence to support true supply chain diversification. 

In this interview, Jamie explains:

• Why the majority of diversity spend is associated with indirect suppliers.
• How stakeholders (or distributed buyers) are ultimately the ones with the power to make the greatest difference in supplier diversity.
• The fact that the effort to ensure supplier diversity is never done, and why it can’t be put on ‘cruise control.’

In last week’s podcast, Host Philip Ideson described the concept of the flywheel, a consistent pattern of small but deliberate actions designed to build momentum and deliver business results described in the book Good to Great by author Jim Collins. 

This week, we apply that idea to procurement directly to ensure our strategies and tactics become (and remain) aligned with the goals and objectives of the enterprise as a whole.

This focus has to permeate every effort we are involved in and the benefit can drive competitive advantage through cost optimization, risk mitigation, revenue growth, regulatory compliance, or operational agility. 

Listen to Part 2 of this series on the flywheel to learn:

• How procurement can apply the flywheel to reposition procurement at the organizational level 
• How we can harness the flywheel principles to help build more adaptable project management processes for efforts such as category management and strategic sourcing
• How it is possible to turn seemingly tactical efforts into full strategic alignment with high-level business decision makers

At Art of Procurement, we believe that helping procurement teams effectively align their capabilities and outcomes with the goals of the businesses underpins the transformation of a team from transactional to strategic. In this podcast, we discuss a concept that is a big part of our Procurement, Inc approach and a core part of how we manage the Art of Procurement business itself: the flywheel.

Because this concept may be new to many of our listeners (it was new to us when we discovered it), we’re going to cover the idea in two episodes. This week we provide the broader business context of the flywheel concept, and in part two (next week) we will contextualize the flywheel for procurement teams and discuss ways to put it into practice.

In this podcast, you will learn about the following from Art of Procurement Founder and Host Philip Ideson:

• What is a flywheel and what value does it generate for a business?
• The sub-elements of the flywheel concept and where you have likely seen one in action as an individual consumer (whether you received it or not)
• Why it is the accumulation of smaller efforts, executed consistently, that is more important to success than one ‘big bang’ moment

Due to the risks posed by the coronavirus, procurement teams responsible for managing facilities services are currently experiencing quite a change. Services such as janitorial have quickly gone from transactional contracts established based upon cost to highly strategic relationships that must be in place and meet a new high standard for a facility to operate or even open.

Arthur Piszczor is a Consultant at Corcentric, where he has been helping organizations manage their facilities services spend since long before our current elevated requirements went into effect, and he has helped a number of clients manage not only the transition, but the process of planning for the future.

In this interview, Arthur shares his point of view with Philip Ideson and Kelly Barner on:

• Whether smaller localized or large national players are more commonly used, and how a company’s existing supplier base and contracts affected their ability to respond to the COVID-19 shutdowns
• The combined involvement of HR and procurement in cases where employees not only need to be kept safe by third party janitorial and sanitation providers, but need to feel safe as well.
• How the elevated standards that we expect to be in place going forward may be restructuring not only facilities services markets, but also the relative leverage of the buyers and suppliers in those relationships.