In this episode of “Buy: The Way… To Purposeful Procurement,” Rich Ham, Philip Ideson, and Kelly Barner reflect on what we heard from Oliver Hurrey and Brian Kyle in episodes 3 and 4 and explore how these procurement leaders find purpose and passion in their work, no matter how big or small the project is.
Rich, Philip, and Kelly discuss what “purposeful procurement” truly means in 2025, challenging the notion that practitioners can only find purpose when they’re working for highly-mission driven organizations. With the right mindset, purpose and the potential for positive impact are within reach for any procurement professional working in any category.
Living and working with purpose also requires trust – trust among stakeholders and colleagues, trust with your suppliers, and in many cases, trust from the end consumer. When procurement faces challenges like flawed incentive structures and outdated standardization, it ultimately makes it harder for procurement to drive meaningful impact at scale.
Reflecting on these opportunities and challenges along procurement’s path to greater purpose, Rich, Philip, and Kelly also look ahead to upcoming discussions where they’ll take a deeper dive into how procurement arrived at its current state and some of the potential solutions that could help procurement reach its potential as a driver of purposeful change.
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“For anybody getting into the CPO role, whether internal or external, you ultimately have to start with your own assessment of the organization and quickly come up with what your priorities are.” – Darshan Deshmukh, President at ProcureAbility
The role of Chief Procurement Officer has changed significantly over the last decade, with the focus shifting primarily from cost savings to value generation. In this Art of Procurement podcast episode, Philip Ideson talks with Darshan Deshmukh, President at ProcureAbility, about why CPOs need to strike the right balance between their ability to influence and their technical expertise.
Darshan has extensive experience working with procurement leaders across multiple industries, and in this episode, he lays out a structured approach newly-minted CPOs can take in their first 100 days to set themselves and their teams up for success.
Understanding business priorities, creating strong stakeholder relationships, and aligning procurement’s initiatives and processes with organizational goals should all be top priorities.
Philip and Darshan explore:
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Procurement 6 is a short podcast from Art of Procurement that publishes in the Art of Procurement feed every Friday morning at 6am US Eastern Time.
Presented by a member of the Art of Procurement team, each episode has 6 short segments that summarize the week in procurement.
Segments range from procurement tips to podcast summaries, from details of events to news or overviews of blog posts that capture our attention.
“For anybody in procurement that’s ever uttered the phrase ‘seat at the table,’ it’s not always a comfy seat. This is one of those moments where, if we want to be a part of the leadership discussion on the directional momentum of the company, we have to find the way, find the person, and find the time to have this conversation about supplier diversity.” - Kelly Barner, Co-founder and Head of Operations at Art of Procurement
Is this the end of supplier diversity as we’ve known it? As the political and economic landscape continues to evolve, many supplier diversity programs are facing unprecedented scrutiny and rollbacks, forcing procurement to confront sensitive organizational shifts and rapid changes in corporate priorities and communications.
While no one can be sure exactly what the future looks like for supplier diversity, it’s clear that procurement teams and business leaders have reached a critical inflection point.
In this special episode, Art of Procurement co-founders Philip Ideson and Kelly Barner have what will likely be the first of many conversations about how procurement can approach these changes thoughtfully, maintain focus on their core values, and lead the business through important conversations during this period of intense transition.
In this episode, Philip and Kelly discuss:
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Procurement 6 is a short podcast from Art of Procurement that publishes in the Art of Procurement feed every Friday morning at 6am US Eastern Time.
Presented by a member of the Art of Procurement team, each episode has 6 short segments that summarize the week in procurement.
Segments range from procurement tips to podcast summaries, from details of events to news or overviews of blog posts that capture our attention.
The stakes are always high for procurement, but at mission-driven non-profits like the American Cancer Society, procurement is working to – quite literally – help save lives.
In this powerful fourth episode of “Buy: The Way…To Purposeful Procurement,” co-hosts Philip Ideson, Founder of Art of Procurement, and Rich Ham, CEO of Fine Tune, speak with Brian Kyle, Vice President of Supply Chain and Accounts Payable at the American Cancer Society, to explore what enterprise procurement can learn from mission-first organizations like ACS.
Brian shares the kind of transformative mindset shift that happens when you transition to a nonprofit environment where every donor dollar is stretched as far as it can possibly go to directly impact the cause – in this case, the fight against cancer.
He also explains how mission-driven environments create a kind of gravitational pull across the entire organization – suppliers included – where everyone is laser focused on the same set of goals and success metrics. Brian breaks down how this coalescence around a shared mission to help save millions of lives creates unprecedented levels of collaboration and collaborative decision making, engagement, trust, relationship building, and value beyond savings.
The procurement team at ACS represents the essence of purposeful procurement and offers a tangible example of practices and perspectives that even private businesses can adopt to elevate their impact and find purpose in their work.
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“When we start thinking about and putting the end customer at the center of everything we do, it changes our perception of what’s important and therefore what we measure in the outputs from our contracts.” Gordon Donovan, Vice President Research - Procurement & External Workforce, SAP
Services spend makes up a large, strategic part of the value procurement provides to the business. But, it’s also an area that’s ripe for improvement.
Building off of services spend management research we started in 2023 with SAP, we recently updated the survey data, gathering timely new perspectives on how procurement can drive greater value through services spend by collaborating with the business and optimizing processes.
In this episode, Kelly Barner talks with Gordon Donovan, Vice President Research - Procurement & External Workforce at SAP, about the key findings and recommendations from this updated research into services spend management.
Gordon shares his perspective on how procurement’s rising confidence levels and scope of responsibilities within the business require teams to challenge the status quo when it comes to services spend management and move beyond cost metrics to more strategic considerations.
Gordon and Kelly discuss:
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Procurement 6 is a short podcast from Art of Procurement that publishes in the Art of Procurement feed every Friday morning at 6am US Eastern Time.
Presented by a member of the Art of Procurement team, each episode has 6 short segments that summarize the week in procurement.
Segments range from procurement tips to podcast summaries, from details of events to news or overviews of blog posts that capture our attention.
“It’s still on us, as procurement professionals, to invest the right amount of time in building relationships and building our narrative.” - Ashish Dhongde, Associate Director Procurement Beauty and Wellbeing North America, Unilever
Unilever has built a notoriously well-integrated procurement program, and they are widely recognized for the strong partnership between procurement and the rest of the business.
In this episode, Philip Ideson explores what procurement excellence looks like in practice with Ashish Dhongde, Associate Director of Procurement, Beauty and Wellbeing North America at Unilever.
Drawing on Unilever’s success, Ashish explains how procurement can transcend traditional boundaries of cost savings to become an integral part of business decision making, innovation, and revenue growth.
Ashish also discusses:
Links:
Procurement 6 is a short podcast from Art of Procurement that publishes in the Art of Procurement feed every Friday morning at 6am US Eastern Time.
Presented by a member of the Art of Procurement team, each episode has 6 short segments that summarize the week in procurement.
Segments range from procurement tips to podcast summaries, from details of events to news or overviews of blog posts that capture our attention.
As Albert Einstein said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
After taking an honest look at some of procurement’s most pressing challenges and flaws in episodes 1 and 2, Philip Ideson and Fine Tune CEO Rich Ham shift their focus from problem-spotting to solution-seeking with special guest, Oliver Hurrey, one of the world’s foremost experts on purposeful procurement.
Through his work on sustainability and decarbonization in the supply chain with the Scope 3 Peer Group and the Sustainable Procurement Pledge, Oliver is the ‘real deal’ when it comes to empowering purpose-driven procurement teams to create meaningful change.
In this episode, Oliver shares compelling real-world examples of instances where procurement has looked beyond traditional measures of success – and some pretty challenging constraints – to find purpose and meaning, proving what is possible when procurement takes a deliberate approach to problem solving.
For example, Oliver shares how an innovative carbon pricing initiative is transforming the way major corporations evaluate suppliers, and the story of one little-known family-owned painting business that impressed seasoned procurement leaders at an international conference by sharing how they frame sustainability initiatives as a competitive advantage.
These stories of purposeful procurement prove how procurement can lead organizational change and differentiated value creation when they choose to innovate beyond the status quo, to emphasize and incentivize the right KPIs, and to stand up to broken, ineffective systems.
Oliver’s own experiences with purpose-driven procurement create a clear path for what’s to come in episode 4 and beyond in “Buy: The Way…To Purposeful Procurement” as we dive increasingly deeper into how procurement can envision and implement the kinds of transformative practices that create meaningful, lasting impact.
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Building off the previous discussion about “purposeful procurement,” Philip Ideson, Kelly Barner, and Fine Tune CEO Rich Ham are back to take a bold, honest look at the systemic flaws that have all too often shaped procurement’s behaviors and limited their impact.
In this candid conversation, we share and discuss real-world examples about how current incentive structures elevate short-term thinking and less-than-exceptional outcomes, ignoring the huge potential procurement has to generate value.
By tackling uncomfortable truths about dysfunction within the procurement system, Phil, Kelly, and Rich explore the topic with thoughtfulness, precision, and the kind of hard-won wisdom that can only come from years of experience in the procurement trenches. Listen in as we ‘interrogate’ procurement’s role in perpetuating flawed approaches and processes, usually to their own detriment. The candid exploration of these flies in the ointment will also serve as a springboard to solutions as Season 1 progresses.
Stay tuned for episode 3, where our guest Oliver Hurrey will offer a glimpse of what truly inspiring and purposeful procurement looks like in practice.
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“Show me the incentive, and I will show you the outcome.” Warren Buffet’s vice chairman Charlie Munger’s succinct and insightful take reminds us of the power of incentives—and provides a backdrop for this project.
In this first episode of the “Buy: The Way…To Purposeful Procurement” podcast, produced collaboratively by the teams at Art of Procurement and Fine Tune, Fine Tune CEO Rich Ham, Philip Ideson, and Kelly Barner lay the groundwork for this year-long series of bi-weekly episodes featuring hand-picked guests that will explore various flaws within commonplace procurement department incentive structures, and how those flaws are holding the profession back from its most purposeful potential.
This first conversation sets the stage for frank discussions with practitioners, procurement leaders, and subject matter experts about how prevailing systems of incentives create harms to the status quo, what a healthier system might look like, and the outcomes such improved systems might produce—both within the company’s walls and beyond them.
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“I look at building a business case in terms of storytelling, and the story that you have to be able to tell in procurement is around better, faster, and cheaper.” – Pratik Patel, Director - Category Management - Labor/North America Technology Spend, Mastercard
Understanding how to address skeptics, overcome objections, and communicate procurement’s value will ultimately determine how much buy-in (and resources) procurement receives. This holds true whether you are building a business case to establish a new procurement function or lobbying corporate leadership in a well-established team.
In this episode, Philip Ideson talks with Pratik Patel, Director - Category Management - Labor/North America Technology Spend at Mastercard, about how procurement can use everyone’s desire to eliminate waste to build a strong business case for investment and support.
Pratik also discusses:
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Procurement 6 is a short podcast from Art of Procurement that publishes in the Art of Procurement feed every Friday morning at 6am US Eastern Time.
Presented by a member of the Art of Procurement team, each episode has 6 short segments that summarize the week in procurement.
Segments range from procurement tips to podcast summaries, from details of events to news or overviews of blog posts that capture our attention.
“Instead of taking an inward look at your sourcing and procurement models, consider the easiest, simplest experience that you can provide to your internal customers.” – Ryan Bradford
Procurement is in the midst of a transformative period, but at the heart of all this change is one thing that is always relevant: the customer experience.
Procurement has traditionally done itself a disservice by approaching the source-to-pay process with their own goals, needs, or processes in mind. But, by taking a more customer-centric approach and prioritizing their internal stakeholders, they can actually drive more value for the entire organization.
In this episode, Philip Ideson speaks with experienced procurement leader and seasoned executive Ryan Bradford about how procurement can refine their approach to customer engagement. In many cases, this creates an opportunity to challenge conventional thinking about how procurement should interact with their customers to achieve the best outcomes.
As Ryan says, it starts by putting the customer experience first.
Ryan also discusses:
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Procurement 6 is a short podcast from Art of Procurement that publishes in the Art of Procurement feed every Friday morning at 6am US Eastern Time.
Presented by a member of the Art of Procurement team, each episode has 6 short segments that summarize the week in procurement.
Segments range from procurement tips to podcast summaries, from details of events to news or overviews of blog posts that capture our attention.
“Procurement is going to make a transformative leap. It may be in a year. It may be in three years. But it’s going to happen. So start experimenting.” – Remko Van Hoek, Full Professor of Practice SCM, Executive Director CSCMP Supply Chain Hall of Fame, hosted by Walton, University of Arkansas - Sam M. Walton College of Business
It’s time to make procurement fun again.
That’s what Remko Van Hoek, Full Professor of Practice SCM, Executive Director CSCMP Supply Chain Hall of Fame, hosted by Walton, University of Arkansas - Sam M. Walton College of Business, told Philip Ideson when they sat down together at DPW Amsterdam 2024.
In this episode, Remko shares insights from the 10X Procurement survey he led in conjunction with DPW, and what it reveals about how AI and digital transformation are injecting opportunity, value, and, yes, even fun back into procurement.
The survey also uncovered a troubling ‘inspiration to action’ gap between procurement’s AI readiness and their ability to successfully execute at the pace required by the rest of the business.
Along with discussing digital transformation pressures, Philip and Remko also explore:
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Procurement 6 is a short podcast from Art of Procurement that publishes in the Art of Procurement feed every Friday morning at 6am US Eastern Time.
Presented by a member of the Art of Procurement team, each episode has 6 short segments that summarize the week in procurement.
Segments range from procurement tips to podcast summaries, from details of events to news or overviews of blog posts that capture our attention.
“We’re in a new world where we’re trying to converge all these different areas, not only to fix problems, but to drive different kinds of capabilities for procurement, ones that are not theoretically possible with the old approach.” – Nick Heinzmann, Head of Research at Zip
Procurement is continuously improving and maturing, but over the past few years, a series of distinct trends has gathered momentum. 2025 is looking more and more like the pivotal year when all of these trends will converge, transforming procurement and their role in the business.
This is a defining moment for procurement, bringing with it a significant opportunity to finally solve some of procurement’s most systemic pain points.
In this episode, Philip Ideson is joined in conversation by Nick Heinzmann, Head of Research at Zip, and Matthew Hardin, Director of Advisory at Zip. Nick and Matt explore why they’ve dubbed 2025 as the “year of convergence” for procurement.
Nick and Matthew discuss:
Links:
Procurement 6 is a short podcast from Art of Procurement that publishes in the Art of Procurement feed every Friday morning at 6am US Eastern Time.
Presented by a member of the Art of Procurement team, each episode has 6 short segments that summarize the week in procurement.
Segments range from procurement tips to podcast summaries, from details of events to news or overviews of blog posts that capture our attention.
“One of the markers of a leading procurement function is when you see suppliers as more than just a source of supply but also as a source of value and innovation.” - Samir Khushalani, Partner at McKinsey & Company
Procurement is in a unique position right now. They have to balance immediate priorities and meet the needs of the business today while also navigating new realities and an uncertain future shaped by generative AI, geopolitical turmoil, shifting macroeconomic pressures, and an increasingly volatile global supply chain.
Procurement must reinvent themselves to find their footing in this rapidly changing environment, but they can’t stop generating value in the here and now.
In this episode, Philip Ideson talks about the nature of all this change and how procurement should respond to it with Samir Khushalani, Partner at McKinsey & Company. Samir explores how perceptions about procurement have changed and the ways their reputation has shifted from “bargain hunter” to strategic business partner.
But, there’s still significant opportunity for procurement to evolve and mature in response to all of the changes afoot.
In this episode, Philip and Samir discuss:
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Procurement 6 is a short podcast from Art of Procurement that publishes in the Art of Procurement feed every Friday morning at 6am US Eastern Time.
Presented by a member of the Art of Procurement team, each episode has 6 short segments that summarize the week in procurement.
Segments range from procurement tips to podcast summaries, from details of events to news or overviews of blog posts that capture our attention.
“The industry is evolving faster than our willingness to accept it.” - John Ward, Portfolio Director, ProcureCon North America, Worldwide Business Research
For 25 years, ProcureCon has served as a cornerstone for procurement education and community-building with their well-known annual conference series.
In this episode, Philip Ideson talks about the evolution of ProcureCon (and procurement in general) with Frank Musero, Divisional Director, Content and Strategy, ProcureCon, B2B and Finance Events at Worldwide Business Research; Michael Dunlap, Portfolio Director, Worldwide Business Research; and John Ward, Portfolio Director, ProcureCon North America, Worldwide Business Research.
They discuss procurement’s evolution from cost center to strategic partner over the last two decades and how ProcureCon events have adapted in order to meet changing practitioner needs and expectations.
In this episode, they discuss:
Links:
Procurement 6 is a short podcast from Art of Procurement that publishes in the Art of Procurement feed every Friday morning at 6am US Eastern Time.
Presented by a member of the Art of Procurement team, each episode has 6 short segments that summarize the week in procurement.
Segments range from procurement tips to podcast summaries, from details of events to news or overviews of blog posts that capture our attention.