We often refer to “the business” when we are trying to ensure that we take a larger perspective on procurement’s work. But at the end of the day, “the business” is made up of many individuals, each one of them is a different type of procurement stakeholder. We want to share more stakeholder voices because procurement is always at risk of misunderstanding or misinterpreting what they really need from us.

At Mastermind LIVE Fall 2021, Philip Ideson moderated a session with Chet Patel, Chief Commercial Officer and President of the Americas at BT, and Cyril Pourrat, CPO at BT Sourced, BT’s procurement services company. 

Art of Procurement has had a front row seat to watch the transformation of the BT Sourced enterprise procurement team, one that we believe is setting the standard for the future of procurement. In this session, focused on stakeholder collaboration, we got to hear:

• What a procurement digital transformation journey looks and feels like to stakeholders observing from the outside
• How closely related partnership with the business and partnership with suppliers are for procurement
• How procurement can establish themselves as a trusted advisor to the business - even when that means telling them ‘no’

Data was a major topic in 2021, whether the focus was on quality, access, or analytics. There always seems to be too much data, not enough data, or trust issues from procurement and/or the business to make our decision-making processes as data-driven as we would like.

At Categorypalooza 2021, Betsy Pancik, Joe Adamski, and Nick Buitrago from ProcureAbility considered the challenge of getting accurate data to inform procurement’s buying strategies and offer their personal tips on how to overcome those challenges. 

Betsy Pancik moderated the session, which included deep dives on topics such as:

• The impact that procurement’s data problems have on the business and what we can do about them
• How much time procurement should spend digging into their data versus building relationships (for instance)
• What leading procurement organizations are doing with (or about) their data and what others can learn from them

In 2021, we facilitated a lot of discussions about category management. Is it still fit for purpose or does this 25-year old business process need to evolve faster to keep up with the ways procurement continues to change?

At Mastermind LIVE Spring 2021, Nancy Nicoll, VP of Indirect Sourcing Center of Excellence at Retail Business Services, and Jaime Robles, CPO of Caseys General Stores, joined Philip Ideson for a panel session to discuss procurement operating models - specifically, whether category management is 'dead' or 'alive' and if procurement should pursue a relational or expertise-based model for working with the business.

They answered questions such as:

• What are some of the challenges that a category management-driven procurement structure brings and how can we overcome them?
• How might procurement’s approach to category management affect their relationship with the business?
• Where should procurement get category expertise from if it doesn't reside in the person running the sourcing process?

Supplier experience management is a new area of focus for most procurement teams, even though we often serve as the primary point of contact for suppliers. We just haven’t thought about it before. If we want to improve the supplier experience, becoming customers of choice in the process, we are going to need to revisit many of our policies, processes, and programs.

In an effort to better understand the supplier experience and the opportunity associated with improving it, we partnered with HICX to run a three-part AOP Live series. We were joined by leading practitioners to answer audience questions on three topics:

1. Making a Business Case for Supplier Experience Management
2. Looking at the present and future of Supplier Experience Management in Practice, and
3. Articulating the ROI associated with World Class Supplier Experience Management

The three hours of conversation were full of insights and inspiration, and we’ve edited the best portions of them into this podcast.

• In the first session, Charlotte Anabelle de Brabandt and Ramit Mahajan talked about the benefits associated with creating a good enough supplier experience to be seen as a customer of choice - what that looks like in practice and whether the disruptions of the last two years have impacted how executive leadership regards that objective. 
• In part 2, Adam Brown and Costas Xyloyiannis talked about the misalignment between how highly procurement would rate themselves as a partner and what the supplier experience is actually like in practice.
• In the final installment of the series, Robert Bonnar and Mary Beth Lang explored the meaning of supplier experience management and how it connects to other types of value and initiatives that procurement is already leading.

Leading procurement organizations are constantly reimagining their processes and operating models, but in today’s unpredictable and fast-changing world they are under more pressure than ever to deliver a high-level roadmap to building the procurement function of tomorrow.

In TRANSFORM - a thought-provoking new podcast series from Art of Procurement in partnership with Globality - we spotlight the agenda-setting procurement leaders and companies who are changing the game and redefining the Future of Procurement.

In the third episode in the series, host Philip Ideson talks with Vanessa Pepperell, Global COO and Strategy Procurement Vice President of Aquanima, the procurement company of Santander. Their two decades’ worth of expertise now allows them to support external clients as well.

In this interview, Vanessa explains how Aquanima is driving digital transformation in services procurement:

• How investing in ESG can help companies build brand value and ward off risk
• Why strategic partnerships require transparency, but they also require development from the buy-side organization
• The change management effort that will be required over time to account for the fact that sustainable supply chains are often more expensive

There are multiple ways for procurement to achieve savings - and some are more collaborative than others. The more planful we can be about the overall process, the more opportunities we are creating to work arm-in-arm with the business in pursuit of those savings. 

Art of Procurement recently hosted an AOP Live webinar with Joe Payne, SVP of Source-to-Pay at Corcentric, and Dave Quillan, Senior Manager of Procurement at Alliant Credit Union (ACU) to discuss how procurement should discuss savings with the business and what incentives can be used to ensure the business feels rewarded by the process.

Dave and Joe share their experiences and points of view to these topics and more:

• How procurement can work with leadership to incentivize savings and minimize compliance problems at the same time
• Partnership oriented ways for procurement to increase their category-specific credibility with the business without stepping on their toes
• The critical step of defining - or potentially redefining - addressable spend before developing strategies to deliver savings
• How to build and execute a sourcing roadmap to ensure annual savings targets are met and the resources that can help procurement reach their savings goals

Each change journey is unique - and yet - can benefit from embracing proven best practices that have been formalized by specialists with equally unique expertise. The benefits of taking such a journey are becoming clear at the University of Massachusetts, as they bring their print, marketing, and branded merchandise spend under management through a partnership with SupplyLogic.

David Cho is the Chief Procurement Officer and Managing Director at the University of Massachusetts. His team began their change journey with an investment in their partnerships (both internal and external), technology, and data that helped them achieve a deeper understanding of their marketing and print services spend. They worked at the category level to inform strategies and decisions that would have a lasting impact and deliver multiple forms of ROI for the university.

In this episode, based on an AOP Live session, David is joined by Phil Schoonmaker, CEO of SupplyLogic, and Host Philip Ideson to answer live audience questions about what he and his team have learned on their change journey:

• The importance of centralizing procurement so that there can be one ‘attack plan’ for managing large numbers of suppliers and transactions and one approach to influencing stakeholders
• When and why to leverage experts outside of the organization to advance the partnerships being built internally
• Insights and intelligence that can be used to advance corporate social responsibility in the form of local, diversity-owned, and environmentally friendly supplier partnerships

Leading procurement organizations are constantly reimagining their processes and operating models, but in today’s unpredictable and fast-changing world they are under more pressure than ever to deliver a high-level roadmap to building the procurement function of tomorrow. 

In TRANSFORM - a thought-provoking new podcast series from Art of Procurement in partnership with Globality - we spotlight the agenda-setting procurement leaders and companies who are changing the game and redefining the Future of Procurement.

 In the second episode in the series, host Philip Ideson talks with Adam Brown, Head of the Procurement Digital Garage and Senior Manager of Transformation at BT Sourced. Adam and his team are leading the way in transforming the role and the impact of procurement beyond traditional boundaries. 

This interview gives Adam a forum to talk about the importance of building a digital procurement ecosystem to enable lasting transformation:

• Why procurement needs to think about transformation as a process of constant reinvention
• How his perspective on procurement talent is shaped by the emphasis BT Sourced places on their best-of-breed digital ecosystem

Building self-service capabilities that distributed buyers really don’t have to worry about getting right