On November 4, 2015, the Art of Procurement podcast officially launched. In 5 years, we’ve released 345 episodes and surpassed 500,000 listens. We’ve gone from being a new, unproven idea to being a trusted voice in the community and the #1 weekly podcast in all of procurement.
To celebrate this occasion, we are running a special series that will extend through the rest of November. For the next three weeks, there will be a daily 5-minute show that answers one of the most interesting and frequently-asked questions we have received from listeners. The questions will be answered alternately by AOP Founder and Host Philip Ideson and AOP General Manager Kelly Barner. (Fun fact: Kelly was AOP podcast guest #6.)
Thank you for joining us for this series and for being part of the AOP community - whether you have been with us since episode #1 or not!
MRO - or Maintenance, Repair, and Operations spend - is one of those categories that procurement has managed, and managed, and managed again… but don’t make the mistake of thinking there is no value left to realize.
Mike Croasdale has been focused on helping companies manage their MRO spend for years. If you listen to him describe the opportunities in this category, you’re very likely to walk away thinking it is one of the most nuanced and interesting spend categories in the company. MRO presents opportunities for complex analytics, operational understanding, and competitive advantage - if procurement knows where to look.
In this interview, Mike shares his point of view with Philip Ideson and Kelly Barner on:
Regardless of how you might choose to describe your journey through 2020, it is finally coming to an end. And while some of its effects will be with us for a long time, we have reached the point where it is not just appropriate to start thinking forward to 2021, it is absolutely necessary.
Christopher Sawchuk, Principal and Global Procurement Advisory Practice Leader at The Hackett Group, and Vishal Patel, VP of Product Marketing at Ivalua, joined us for an AOP Live session on September 15th.
As they pointed out during the live event, the preparations procurement originations make now will determine their readiness to succeed in the ‘next normal.’ Making good decisions now about digital transformation, agility, and supply chain risk will pay dividends later on.
In a podcast based on the AOP Live session, Christopher and VIshal answer audience questions about:
After months of planning, weeks of preparation, and days of sleepless nights, Mastermind LIVE 2020 is officially in the books. We had set an extremely high bar for ourselves: to run the most unique and meaningful event in procurement. From the session engagement and participant feedback, we believe we achieved our goal.
Our speakers spanned a number of industries and disciplines, and our attendees joined us from around the globe. Everyone walked away with a new idea, and we laughed together more than once as well.
In this podcast, Host Philip Ideson shares his primary take-aways from the two-day event, and shares what is to come next!
For many years, Peter Smith wanted to write a book that was fundamentally about procurement but would appeal to a wider business audience, One that would peel back the onion on the role of procurement, with tales of what happens when good buying practices are not followed. Following a career as a practitioner, and most latterly leading Spend Matters in the UK, Peter got to work. The result: Bad Buying – how organizations waste billions through failures, frauds, and fk-ups.
In this interview, Peter discusses:
Telecom has been on an interesting and unique journey as a spend category. Gone are the days when all that was needed to deliver significant savings was a professionally conducted third-party audit or service rationalization/optimization. Today, most organizations are several years post audit, looking for new efficiencies in a category that is not only evolving, it is also encroaching on other categories of spend.
Dave Pastore is a Senior Director of Sourcing Operations at Corcentric where he specializes in telecom spend. It was his analytical background that led him to specialize in this category, plus a noticeable gap in procurement ownership over telecom, a traditionally siloed category.
In this interview, Dave shares his point of view with Philip Ideson and Kelly Barner on:
AOP Host Philip Ideson starts each interview with a question about what brought that particular guest to procurement. With this week’s guest, business consultant and coach Juergen Scherer, it might have been better to ask what brought him THROUGH procurement, because he has held influential roles across procurement, supply chain, sales, and operations.
While he isn’t in procurement today, Juergen’s doctoral thesis on Procurement Marketing received the Scientific Award of the German Industry Association for Purchasing and Supply Management. His knowledge of the function has unquestionably improved his ability to excel in each of his other roles, as well as in his current coaching practice.
Today, Juegen splits his time between Germany and the US West Coast as a business consultant and coach, leading his business called BXB-Exchange. He reached out to Art of Procurement in response to our podcasts about the flywheel effect and its applicability to procurement. We took that opportunity to probe deeper into his thoughts about how procurement can better align with the business as a whole.
In this conversation, Juergen shares examples from his extensive background that illustrate the key part of his business philosophy:
Although procurement professionals don’t usually think of ourselves as making ‘cold calls,’ we do it all the time. If you’ve ever sat down with a stakeholder for the first time and immediately realized they either don’t understand procurement’s role or don’t particularly care for our processes, you’ve survived a cold call.
In that moment, you can either explain or listen, and although listening is the better way to build understanding and rapport, most procurement professionals aren’t prepared to structure this kind of conversation.
In this week’s podcast, Host Philip Ideson discusses how to master this type of first meeting using an approach that sales professionals use - and have no doubt used on you - called the discovery call. He explains:
One year ago, all procurement could talk about was digital transformation. Enter the COVID-19 pandemic, and many of those plans were thrown overboard.
We may not be doing what we expected to be working on as we approach the final quarter of 2020, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t still a strong appetite for procurement change, both at the executive level and within the procurement community. The difference is that we are now trying to lead transformation in the midst of a disrupted landscape without the benefit of any forward-looking certainty.
Christopher Eyerman is the Head of Procurement Innovation at Denali - A WNS Company and David Clevenger is their Director of Procurement and Operational Excellence. They are focused on the factors that influence digital maturity and readiness for change in the context of the entire procurement ecosystem.
In this podcast, which is based on an AOP Live session made possible by Denali, Christopher and David share their point of view on:
Technology is an extremely broad spend category and it is expanding by the day because of our emphasis on digital transformation. Nearly every function and category has an IT software or services component to it. Technology truly forms the foundation, or “lifeblood” as Rene Mathis put it, of corporate initiatives.
Rene Mathis is an Associate Director at Corcentric where he specializes in technology category spend. He is currently working side by side with companies that are reevaluating their IT contracts, redefining their uptime definitions and service level agreements, and attempting to put plans in place - despite the fact that no one knows what the next 6-12 months will hold.
In this interview, Rene shares his point of view with Philip Ideson and Kelly Barner on:
For the rest of August, I’m taking a roadtrip across the United States, and so because I’m out of the recording studio, I’m going to dip into the archive all the way back to 2016 to share some of my favorite episodes from that year with you that are still just as relevant as today - and if you found the podcast after 2016, there’s a good chance that you haven’t yet heard these conversations.
Today’s I rewind to a conversation that I had with Tim Jones, Head of Sourcing at Google.
Our conversation documents Google’s journey to become a trusted advisor. Google’s approach includes tactics around stakeholder engagement that I often recommend to procurement teams who are on their own journey from tactical to strategic, regardless of the size of your company.
For the rest of August, I’m taking a roadtrip across the United States, and so because I’m out of the recording studio, I’m going to dip into the archive all the way back to 2016 to share some of my favorite episodes from that year with you that are still just as relevant as today - and if you found the podcast after 2016, there’s a good chance that you haven’t yet heard these conversations.
Today’s I rewind to a conversation that I had with Jack Miles. There are few, if any, leaders in the procurement profession with the depth and breadth of experience as Jack. Jack has enjoyed multiple CPO roles at some of North America’s largest companies and has served as Secretary of the Florida Department of Managed Services. He serves, and has served, on a number of corporate boards, and has become a key advisor and friend to me personally, and to Art of Procurement.
In today’s show, Jack shares seven of the key lessons that he has learned from his career in both the private and public sectors. If you have any interest in growing your procurement career at any level, this episode is a must listen!
For the rest of August, I’m taking a road trip across the United States, and so because I’m out of the recording studio, I’m going to dip into the archive all the way back to 2016 to share some of my favorite episodes from that year with you that are still just as relevant as today - and if you found the podcast after 2016, there’s a good chance that you haven’t yet heard these conversations.
Today’s is a conversation with former procurement practitioner Sylvain Mansottee, now the CEO and Co-Founder of Whispli. It is a story about procurement fraud.
As a practitioner, Sylvain received the call from the newly appointed CPO of a large Australian based construction company to assist in building a new procurement function.
Within 2 months, he had uncovered a $20M fraud that spanned 12 years and led to the perpetrator admitting to the crime, and ultimately being sentenced to 15 years prison.
Today’s Art of Procurement is Sylvain’s story. Sylvain discusses how he uncovered the fraud, and the decisions he had to make in blowing the whistle.
We then talk more specifically about procurement fraud. Sylvain shares a number of fraud red flags and provides tips on how you can ensure you have an environment where a whistleblower feels safe in coming forward if they have information to share.
Sylvain’s story is really absorbing, and also, for me, a wakeup call to realize that procurement fraud is real, and that any one of us in procurement may find ourselves in the same position as Sylvain given the nature of our roles.
For a long time, procurement has gotten feedback that our terminology - and, more specifically, our abbreviations - have a distancing or alienating effect on internal stakeholders and budget owners. But if language has the power to push people away, it can also be used to purposefully clarify, align, and collaborate.
Steve Wills is the founder and Managing Director of Procurement Central and formerly served as the Procurement Advisor to the 2012 London Olympic Games. He has extensive business experience with blue chip organizations and has worked with leaders in industry and commerce as a CPO to transform complex procurement and supply chain functions.
In this interview, Steve outlines:
Marketing is one of those spend categories that procurement often has a hard time breaking into. They are less concerned with cost than their counterparts in other functions, and most of the services they contract are not only complex, project-based efforts, they are usually evaluated from a highly subjective point of view.
Kathleen Jordan is an Associate Director at Source One, a Corcentric Company, where she has been focused on the marketing category for years. She is familiar with the opportunities in marketing spend as well as the common disconnects that may prevent procurement from bringing marketing spend under management and cost marketing professionals the ability to make their budgets go further.
In this interview, Kathleen shares her point of view with Philip Ideson and Kelly Barner on:
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:
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:
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:
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:
It is never easy to request additional headcount, so making sure the timing is right and having a solid business case are critical to protecting your internal reputation and hopefully getting an affirmative response.
There are plenty of ways procurement can stack the deck in their favor, and most of them have to do with demonstrating alignment with enterprise objectives and a vision that explains the value associated with that position in the longer term.
Alexis Ryan has been in procurement for 2 decades, the last 5 years of which have been spent in leadership positions. After starting her career in Legal, she ended up in procurement with no preconceived notions about the function’s value proposition or focus.
In this interview, Alexis provides her advice about how and when to request additional procurement headcount and how to increase the chances of the request being approved:
When it comes to governance during the sourcing process, your experience probably matches one of the following two scenarios:
What do these scenarios have in common? They are burdensome, create mountains of paperwork, and really slow down the process. No wonder stakeholders want to bypass procurement altogether.
In this podcast, AOP Founder and Host Philip Ideson shares his easy 2-step governance process, one that he created when he was an Indirect Sourcing Manager earlier in his career. This process - and the templates required to carry it out - are part of one of the AOP Mastermind mini-courses that you member companies will be able to access on July 1st,.
For many procurement teams, risk management is now priority #1. If that sounds like your situation, how can you make sense of all the unknowns and ensure that each one of your category strategies is prepared to adapt to whatever may come your way?
In today’s solo show, AOP Founder and Host Philip Ideson shares one way you can balance risk and agility: by taking the business continuity and disaster recovery plans we often ask our suppliers to provide and applying the concept to your category strategy.
This approach can be used whether the category, product or service in question has a physical supply chain (products) or a virtual supply chain (services). Either way, a category continuity plan will help you proactively identify the risks associated with a category, product, or service and identify potential mitigation steps to take should a particular scenario occur.
Listen to this podcast to learn more about the following ways to apply business continuity planning to risk management:
A lot of things have changed as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, not the least of which has been procurement and supply chain teams being thrust into the spotlight in very challenging conditions. As an Executive Search Consultant, Tom Graham has naturally been focused on how this increased exposure has impacted leaders, individual contributors, and entire teams.
Since the lockdowns began, Tom has been holding regular, virtual roundtables with Chief Procurement Officers and Chief Supply Chain Officers to discuss everything from crisis management to planning for the new normal. Their observations and perspectives on next steps have evolved with the status of the crisis, and as businesses begin to open back up, the time is drawing near to start acting on those ideas.
In this interview, Tom shares what he has seen and heard and what he expects to see next as the world continues to adapt to the new normal:
Logistics has never been an easy category of spend to manage. Whether your company is multimodal, focused on less-than truckload (LTL), or depends upon small parcel, carriers and third-party logistics providers form a critical link between you and your customers. Superimpose the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic on top of that complexity, and you have one of the most fluid and challenging situations procurement will get involved in.
Joe Lazzerini is a Consultant at Corcentric, where he helps organizations manage their logistics category spend. In fact, he was consulting in logistics long before he found his way to the world of procurement.
In this interview, Joe Lazzerini shares his point of view with Philip Ideson and Kelly Barner on:
According to Harvard Business Review, under Zero-based budgeting (ZBB), “Expenses must be justified for each new budget period based on demonstrable needs and costs, as opposed to the more common method of using last year’s budget as your starting point, then adjusting up or down. ZBB is a straightforward, intuitively simple way to aggressively strip out costs that cannot be rationally justified.”
Sounds wonderful, right? Well, as this week’s guest (and the HBR article referenced above) point out, there is no such thing as a ‘one-size fits-all’ silver bullet, even when it comes to aggressively cutting costs.
David Ward is the Director of Global Sourcing & Procurement at a global pharmaceutical company, and has held procurement positions at Ford, Rolls Royce, AstraZeneca, and Unilever. During his time at Unilever, he became the ZBB Programme Leader for Marketing and Business Services, and so he has seen the advantages and disadvantages of this budgeting and management method first hand.
In this interview, David explains how ZBB works and whether it is a strategy that procurement should actively consider in the current economic conditions: