Presented by a member of the Art of Procurement team, each episode will have 6 short segments that summarize this week in procurement.
Segments will range from procurement tips to podcast summaries, from details of events to news or overviews of blog posts that have captured our attention this week.
There are several obstacles preventing governments from realizing the value potential and cost savings associated with supplier diversity. For instance, a preference for known suppliers and the complexity associated with onboarding new suppliers are just two barriers that limit the potential supplier pool.
As unprecedented levels of Federal funding become available, it is more important than ever that part of these resources are used to support diverse suppliers and build communities in alignment with federal and state stipulations.
Sean Correll, Head of Ivalua’s Public Sector team, and Jarrod McAdoo, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Ivalua recently joined Art of Procurement for an AOP Live session. In this podcast version of the event, host Philip Ideson asked Sean and Jarrod questions about:
Procurement 6 is a new short podcast from Art of Procurement that will be published 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 will have 6 short segments that summarize this week in procurement.
Segments will range from procurement tips to podcast summaries, from details of events to news or overviews of blog posts that have captured our attention this week.
Historically, procurement has focused too much on savings and not enough on revenue and growth - the true heartbeat of any competitive enterprise. Rather than trying to reposition savings as top line impact, procurement needs to insist upon more suitable performance metrics.
This insistence has to be backed by concrete examples of the spend categories procurement believes they can manage in such a way that it fuels corporate growth. If these categories have been ‘off limits’ in the past, procurement is going to have to make a results-driven pitch for access, followed by the delivery of measurable outcomes.
In this episode, based on an AOP Live session run in late 2021, Host Philip Ideson speaks with Greg Anderson and David Clevenger about what procurement needs to do differently in 2022 and beyond:
Procurement 6 is a new short podcast from Art of Procurement that will be published 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 will have 6 short segments that summarize this week in procurement.
Segments will range from procurement tips to podcast summaries, from details of events to news or overviews of blog posts that have captured our attention this week.
Climate change, habitat loss, and plastic waste threaten our environment. Social issues such as modern slavery, inequality, and discrimination blight the lives of millions of people. As procurement professionals, we have the ability to use our buying power to help address these issues and drive change around the world. But how?
In this episode, Host Philip Ideson welcomes back two repeat guests, Mark Perera, CEO at Vizibl, and Peter Smith, Managing Director at Procurement Excellence, to discuss their new book: Procurement with Purpose. And yet, this is more than a book - this is an opportunity to have conversations with purpose-led procurement organizations and leaders all over the world.
They use this conversation to share their perspective on:
Procurement 6 is a new short podcast from Art of Procurement that will be published 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 will have 6 short segments that summarize this week in procurement.
Segments will range from procurement tips to podcast summaries, from details of events to news or overviews of blog posts that have captured our attention this week.
Entrepreneurs have a unique way of looking at the world. They identify gaps that need to be solved, and develop solutions so strong they create a brand new competitive advantage. This is even more true of ‘serial entrepreneurs,’ because they have perfected the ability to spot the opportunities to revolutionize how we live and work.
In 2021, Art of Procurement collaborated with BT Sourced, the procurement services group of BT, to produce a hybrid in-person and virtual event called Dare to Discover: Reaching New Heights for Procurement. This episode of the podcast is one of two panel sessions recorded at that event - the other recorded session will be published soon.
The panel was brought together to discuss (and debate!) some of the ‘big bets’ that have been made to spur procurement innovation. Charlie Clark founded Rosslyn Data Technologies and Darkbeam, Ulf Zetterberg founded Seal Software and Time is Ltd.; and Chirag Shah founded MarketMaker4 and is now Executive Chairman at Simfoni. Towards the end of the discussion, they pulled Adam Brown, Head of the Procurement Digital Garage at BT Sourced, up out of the audience to add in his perspective.
During this one-hour session, Moderator Philip Ideson asks the guests:
This time of year provides a natural opportunity to pause and reflect; standing on the boundary line between old and new, past and future. After skipping the tradition of writing a pair of annual letters in 2020 - because what was there to say that hadn’t already been said? - Philip Ideson uses this week’s episode to consider the foundational philosophy of the AOP team as we head into 2022.
In addition to sharing his reflections on 2021, Philip elaborates on the importance of mindset and culture in the face of what would seem to be never-ending disruption:
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:
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:
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:
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:
The three hours of conversation were full of insights and inspiration, and we’ve edited the best portions of them into this podcast.
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:
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:
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:
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:
Building self-service capabilities that distributed buyers really don’t have to worry about getting right
In 2021, 62% of the companies in the S&P 1500 index did not provide an annual forecast - some even stated that there is just too much uncertainty for them to be accurate (WSJ, 9/22/21). This is a reality that all companies in all industries worldwide have accepted; market conditions will remain uncertain for the foreseeable future.
In this episode, based on an AOP Live session, host Philip Ideson talks with Sherri Barnes, Director of Market Intelligence Services at ProcureAbility, and Kristen Rellihan, Senior Manager of Advisory at ProcureAbility. They discuss how procurement can develop strong buying strategies despite the certainty of uncertainty in the market and what tactics may be best suited in our current inflationary environment.
Sherri and Kristen also answer live audience questions about:
Usually the transformation journeys we hear about are focused on a single company, but there are instances of industry wide transformation efforts as well. The oil and gas industry is a perfect example. These companies are looking to evolve into broader chemical and energy organizations for the sake of sustainability, and procurement has the opportunity to become a strategic partner in this transformation.
In this episode, host Philip Ideson gets a look into the role of procurement transformation in the oil and gas industry by interviewing Artem Sherekh, the Global Oil and Gas Practice Lead at SAP, and Ferhat Eryurt, a partner at apsolut Group. Headquartered in Germany, apsolut Group is an SAP and SAP Ariba consulting partner that delivers on-premise cloud and hybrid procurement solutions.
After shining a light on the role of procurement in the oil and gas industry, Artem and Ferhat talk about:
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.
For the first episode in this special series, host Philip Ideson talks with Dr. Elouise Epstein, a partner at Kearney and the acclaimed author of Trade Wars, Pandemics, and Chaos: How Digital Procurement Enables Business Success in a Disordered World. She is surely at the forefront of driving the procurement profession to an elevated future.
Dr. Elouise shares her honest perspectives on:
The State of the Procurement Profession report, one of the largest studies of the profession, is now in its fourth year. Among the key takeaways is data that suggests cost-related objectives remain dominant, with sustainability initiatives far down the list of priorities, despite discussions and content that suggest more progress has already been made. The silver lining is that the entrepreneurial procurement movement seems to be taking hold, and may usher in a time of accelerated change.
In this episode, host Philip Ideson is joined by Dr. Marcell Vollmer, Partner and Director at Boston Consulting Group, and Christoph Bode, Professor at the Business School of the University of Mannheim and Endowed Chair of Procurement. They recently collaborated, with the assistance of ISM, to survey the procurement profession, and have published their findings in the newly released report “State of the Procurement Profession 2021.”
The key findings of the research focus on entrepreneurial orientation, digitization, and ESG, as well as considering procurement reporting structures:
In a recent Art of Procurement survey, access to market insights was cited as the second most pressing challenge for procurement professionals. Even when procurement is able to access the insights they need, they still have to ensure that they are up-to-date, harder than ever given the level of uncertainty and unpredictability in today’s business climate.
In this week’s episode, Host Philip Ideson is joined by Ashley Cruz, Manager of Client Services at ProcurementIQ, and Thomas Lawson, their Product Development Manager. Starting by providing an honest look at procurement’s legacy relationship with market intelligence, they share some of their best tips for making insights actionable and provide a behind the scenes look into how ProcurementIQ builds their market intelligence reports.
In particular, Ashley and Thomas answer questions about:
The high number of low-cost transactions is just the beginning of the challenges with tail spend management. Spend often finds its way into the tail through multiple ‘wrong turns,’ each of which requires a different approach by procurement and a correspondingly different resolution. There is no one ‘cause’ of tail spend and therefore there is no one solution.
In this episode, which is based on an AOP Live session, host Philip Ideson speaks with Jean-Baptiste Anne, Head of Enterprise Sales and Professional Services Teams for Amazon Business, and Vishal Patel, VP of Product Marketing at Ivalua about all things tail spend.
How do they define it, how to integrate self-service models, and ways to look at the ROI of your tail spend program.
Jean-Baptiste Anne and Vishal Patel answer audience questions about:
Procurement has been working hard to expand our value proposition beyond savings for a long time, and the current conditions in service-based industries may provide a perfect opportunity. Many service and people-based industries are being hit hard by what is being called ‘The Great Resignation.’ Managing these categories on cost alone will definitely not be enough.
In this episode, host Philip Ideson speaks with Amy Fong, Vice President of Sourcing and Vendor Management at Everest Group. Amy has had a front row seat to procurement transformation as both practitioner and an advisor, and she is currently focused on services categories. This interview was recorded as part of PASA’s (Procurement and Supply Australasia) ninth annual PASA Premier Confex.
Amy answers service-specific questions about:
We have observed a huge surge in investment in procurement technology startups over the last 12 months, and many of them are leveraging new ‘cognitive’ technologies to be smarter and more intuitive than the procurement technology of years past. In order to truly understand the value proposition of these solutions, procurement needs to have a solid grasp of what cognitive technology is and how its introduction will impact current technology, processes, and talent.
In this episode, host Philip Ideson speaks with Melissa Drew, an Associate Partner at IBM. Melissa has 27 years of procurement and supply chain experience, from both an industry and consulting perspective. She collaborates with organizations to reimagine how companies should look in order to remain competitive and was recently recognized as a global leader in consulting in the ‘Excellence in Influence’ category.
Since most procurement organizations are in the early stages of thinking about cognitive technology, Philip asks Melissa questions about: