All companies have been affected by the pandemic over the last year, but companies in the healthcare industry - like Kaiser Permanente - have felt the pressure and the change to their operating procedures more than most. Mary Beth Lang is the Chief Supply Chain and Procurement Officer at Kaiser Permanente, an integrated managed care consortium, based in Oakland, California.

In this conversation, Mary Beth tells Host Philip Ideson:

• The importance of understanding your suppliers’ supply chains: how they produce or secure volume, whether their demand is met by contracted demand or spot buys, and where they are reliant upon imports to fill orders
• How Kaiser Permanente revamped its procurement resources and became more agile during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• What Kaiser Permanente learned from the pandemic about its procurement processes and what will be changed in the future
• How the Kaiser Permanente procurement team plays an active role in helping drive community impact
• Tips on how procurement teams can leverage their spending efforts to support their communities through working with diverse suppliers

In the spring and summer of 2020, there were plenty of stories about professionals and teams rallying to get their jobs done while working remotely, in some cases even going above and beyond to achieve levels of performance that no one would have thought possible. As the pandemic stretches on, and reaches a second wave or additional shutdowns, widespread fatigue is starting to set in.

In this conversation, Tom tells Host Philip Ideson:

• How to be an effective leader while moving from an operational focus to one based on preserving and fostering employee engagement
• The social and lifestyle differences between employees that have been exacerbated and highlighted by the need to work from home in varied personal circumstances
• The critical role that authenticity and trust play in building professional relationships that are strong enough to overcome situations when people are not okay

Casey’s General Stores is the 5th largest convenience store chain in the United States and owns one of the largest pizza brands in the nation. With 2,200 locations in 16 midwestern states, they have $10 Billion in revenue and a double-digit growth rate. What wasn’t going well for Casey’s? They had no procurement team.

When a new CEO came in, one of the first things he did was to bring in Jaime Robles as his Vice President of Procurement and Sourcing. With a career of successes in procurement team building and transformation, he was uniquely qualified to build Casey’s brand new procurement organization from scratch.

In this podcast, Jaime tells Host Philip Ideson:

• What he sees as the top two factors in procurement’s evolution over the last decade
• How he achieves a balance between procurement talent and technology
• What he believes procurement should be doing other than strategic sourcing

Despite the fact that Jan Griffiths has had a successful career as a tier-1 CPO and entrepreneur, she still wasn’t prepared for the personal and professional impact of the pandemic. After indulging in a full day of Netflix, she decided to push herself out of her comfort zone and into a non-judgemental accountability project with a pop-up group of peers.

What started as a ‘therapeutic’ accountability clinic evolved over time to become the accountability lab: a group of people that connect daily for 30 minutes at 6:30 a.m. to make commitments to themselves in the supportive presence of others. The learnings from this experiment have changed the way she feels about her own situation and will no doubt impact her leadership seminars going forward. As Jan tells Host Philip Ideson, “I love, love, love leadership.”

In this conversation, Jan shares her candid perspective on:

• The power of incremental change, whether it includes improvement over time or small course corrections
• Why procurement needs to change their approach to goal setting before they can increase their impact on the enterprise
• The rallying impact of having a brand identity at the functional level, and the need to ensure that the brand aligns with company objectives

We are all customers in our personal lives, and most of us can easily distinguish between a good customer experience and a poor one. But can procurement create a positive customer experience in a B2B setting for all of our different stakeholder groups consistently and at scale? Absolutely - but we have to set the right expectations and priorities first.

This interview, based on one of the most popular sessions from AOP Mastermind LIVE 2020, features Stephanie Thum, CCXP, Founding Principal of Practical CX, discussing the fundamental principles of customer experience with Art of Procurement General Manager Kelly Barner. 

Key takeaways from this session include:

• The core values emphasized in formal customer experience development and how procurement stands to benefit from putting proven practices into use 
• Suppliers are not one of procurement’s customer groups, but they are absolutely vital and we can’t create a positive customer relationship without them
• The difference between creating or fostering a good customer experience and putting in the energy and effort to repair a poor or damaged customer experience

After years of investment in talent and technology, procurement has become a catalyst for enterprise transformation. No other function is in a better position to lead disruptive change and reinvention than procurement. But if we want to thrive in the ‘next normal,’ we must be able to go let go of the past, be bold, and embrace intelligent risks. 

This interview, based on one of the most popular sessions from AOP Mastermind LIVE 2020, features Chris Sawchuk, Principal and Global Procurement Advisory Practice Leader at The Hackett Group, and Keith Hausmann, Chief Revenue Officer at Globality. They join Host Philip Ideson to discuss how leading CPOs are helping their teams re-imagine the ‘art of the possible’ and to drive new sources of value for their companies and for their stakeholders. 

Key takeaways from this session include:

• Digitizing legacy processes is not enough to be agile in today’s challenging, fast-paced environment
• Procurement should not try to generate revenue, but rather work to enable revenue through creative strategies
• Since large companies tend to buy from other large, stable companies, procurement needs to be focused on incentivizing suppliers to deliver their very best work
• Capabilities that can be leveraged - regardless of where in the organization they sit - should be pulled into procurement projects rather than expecting to increase headcount

To meet today’s challenges in supply chain spend management, we must embrace automation. Gone are the days of being able to throw bodies at a problem. Systemic inefficiency not only creates unsustainable processes, it creates enormous waste and revenue risk. Now is the time for procurement to lead through change.

Procurement teams are uniquely positioned to lead supply chain resilience initiatives. That’s because procurement brings together the right suppliers, products, and materials needed to fulfill customer demand. 

In this podcast based on an AOP Live session, Tom Kieley, CEO and Co-Founder of SourceDay, and Go Kamiyama, Senior Manager of Strategic Initiatives from NetSuite, answer audience questions about:

• How we can better understand supply chain-related spend management challenges
• What resilience and responsiveness to demand signals look like in practice, and how procurement can incorporate them in their existing processes and frameworks
• Opportunities for procurement to embrace automation for the purpose of increasing supply chain visibility and resilience

For all the stories of stress and struggle we heard in 2020, there have also been some amazing examples of heroism and success. Procurement teams worked long hours with little information to go on to keep their operations running, often partnering with suppliers and colleagues to find creative solutions on the fly.

Art of Procurement recently partnered with Ivalua to interview several CPOs about what they learned in 2020 and how that will change their approach going forward. 

In today’s bonus podcast, I thought I would share just a couple of short outtakes from two of the CPOs - Dan Symon, the CPO of New York City and Sajid Kunnummal, the Vice President and CPO at Navistar.

January 1, 2021 won’t bring a return to normal, but it does mark a new beginning. Procurement has never stopped maturing and evolving, and the past year brought on an enormous growth spurt. We’ve uncovered hidden weaknesses, seen the benefits of transparency and risk management, and forged new partnerships both inside and outside of the company.

To read more about how CPOs are pivoting their teams to enable success in 2021, you can get the full paper at artofprocurement.com/2021pivot.

Financial services spend has never been what you might consider ‘low hanging fruit,’ but many procurement organizations are getting to the point where they are not only ready to manage it, the organization needs them to bring consistency and transparency to these critical supplier relationships and operational requirements.

Diego De la Garza, Senior Director Global Services & Delivery at Corcentric, brings over a decade of industry experience to the table to address this complex spend category. Whether the company is B2B or B2C, the increasing role of technology in global business is increasing the range of financial services requirements most companies have and raising the bar on what current partners need to be capable of. 

In this interview, Diego describes the financial services category with Philip Ideson and Kelly Barner:

• How new or disruptive technologies are redefining financial services or altering how companies partner with providers meet those needs
• The key internal relationships procurement needs to manage when sourcing financial services and how those other functions measure success
• The nuances and opportunities to switch suppliers and how they compare to other, less regulated, categories of spend

In the current moment, companies are finding themselves at the intersection of digital transformation and the varied but extreme pressures of the pandemic. And who is positioned to address the opportunities and challenges of this intersection? Procurement.

Tony Uphoff is the President & CEO at Thomas - formerly ThomasNet. He has enjoyed a successful career leading and growing media and information businesses such as The Hollywood Reporter, UBM TechWeb, and business.com.

In this conversation, Tony speaks from the perspective of a multiple-time CEO about:

• How procurement can demonstrate their expanded impact on the business and what is required to gain access to the most strategic discussions in the company
• How investments in supply chain risk, diversity, and sustainability are starting to affect the valuation of publicly traded companies
• The impact of COVID-19 on sourcing trends in PPE and beyond based on Thomas’ treasure trove of data, including some really interesting predictors of still trends to come