The Sourcing Hero

Few words empty a meeting faster than “governance.” Mention it to non-procurement colleagues and their attention tends to wander.

At the same time, governance determines how decisions get made across procurement, maintenance, and operations. In MRO-dependent environments, weak governance shows up quickly as duplicate orders, wrong or missing parts, strained supplier relationships, and unplanned downtime.

In this episode of The Sourcing Hero podcast, Host Kelly Barner welcomes Vernetta Tyler. Vernetta is the founder of NINET9 Solutions and has eight years of experience across operations, maintenance, reliability, and supply chain.

Vernetta shares her perspective on why procurement governance is about how decisions are made, not just the rules written on paper:

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Vernetta Tyler on LinkedIn

Procurement’s ‘hidden’ operational costs often sit in the coordination required to get work done across the business. Beyond the hours spent chasing stakeholders, locating contracts, reconstructing negotiation history, and digging through systems, teams can lose value through delayed savings, unsustainable supplier agreements, and the opportunity cost of focusing on transactions instead of more strategic work. 

Procurement works with nearly every other function, and so these costs can accumulate in the gaps between teams without ever appearing in traditional performance metrics.

In this episode of The Sourcing Hero podcast, Host Kelly Barner welcomes Mike Fedorov to the show. Mike is the Chief Operating Officer and Co-CEO at Applied AI Labs. He has over 25 years worth of hands-on operations and supply chain experience, and he has either run or turned around operations for some of the most complex companies in the world.

Listen in to hear Mike explain:

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Mike Fedorov on LinkedIn

While category expertise and strategies help procurement deliver specific business outcomes, sometimes it is the cross-category fundamentals that make the biggest difference of all.

Case in point: stakeholder expectation setting. 

How fast will a project move and why? What might need to be changed to deliver the results the business is looking for? How should stakeholders think about savings and cost avoidance? These are important topics for procurement to address before a sourcing project ever gets underway.

In this episode of The Sourcing Hero podcast, Host Kelly Barner welcomes Richard Campbell to the show. Richard has deep experience in procurement, specifically in sourcing and managing spend related to the fleet, transportation, and logistics categories.

Richard shares his perspective on why setting stakeholder expectations early and often is critical to procurement’s success:

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Richard Campbell on LinkedIn

Procurement and spend management play a critical role in humanitarian response because the speed and quality of sourcing decisions directly affect how quickly aid reaches people in crisis. 

Rather than simply purchasing goods, these procurement teams create the capacity to respond before disasters strike by establishing long-term supplier agreements, standardizing essential supplies, and ensuring resources can be mobilized wherever they are needed. Effective spend management is not just about efficiency, it is a force multiplier that enables organizations to extend their impact and save more lives.

In this episode of The Sourcing Hero podcast, Host Kelly Barner welcomes José Alfredo Rodríguez. José Alfredo is the Regional Supply Chain Director at World Vision International, a top-4 global organization managing $4B+ in annual spend, focusing on Health Insurance and large-scale Health Humanitarian Aid.

José Alfredo shares his unique perspective on procurement through the lens of humanitarian crisis response:

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World Vision Latin America

Supplier diversity programs have been part of procurement’s purview for decades, and they have changed a lot during that time. The categories of supplier ownership have expanded and become better defined, success metrics have narrowed, and initiatives like ESG have altered how companies relate to the program as a whole.

Today, the most notable change to supplier diversity is… the silence.

In this episode of The Sourcing Hero podcast, Host Kelly Barner welcomes back Lamont Robinson. Lamont is a leading voice on supplier diversity, but that doesn’t mean he’s hesitant to reexamine and reimagine everything about the practice. 

Lamont envisions supplier diversity programs that are both business-driven and legally defensible for long term impact:

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Lamont Robinson on LinkedIn

The mind-blowing potential of AI, either in LLM form or embedded in a SaaS solution, is so impressive that it would be easy to overlook the risks. Some of these risks come in the form of data security, but others linger in signed contracts that contain very real (but seemingly harmless) terms that change in importance as the technology evolves.

In this episode of The Sourcing Hero podcast, Host Kelly Barner welcomes Wendy Storino. Wendy is a seasoned procurement leader with nearly two decades of experience in technology sourcing and supplier strategy. She has taken it upon herself to better understand the contract terms that procurement needs to understand to manage risk and cost in the age of AI.

Wendy discusses some of the things procurement needs to know about AI-related contracts:

Links:

Wendy Storino on LinkedIn

There are some categories of spend that we all interact with differently because of the way they affect us as consumers. Packaging is a prime example of this. The level of strategy and effort invested in every choice make these buying decisions and supplier partnerships fascinating to study.

In this episode of The Sourcing Hero podcast, Host Kelly Barner welcomes Bhavuk Chawla. Bhavuk has a Master’s degree in packaging technology, and has worked in either packaging development or packaging procurement for almost two decades.

Bhavuk shares his in depth experience with packaging from the cost, brand, and supply chain points of view:

-How packaging choices enhance the consumer experience

-Considerations (including tradeoffs) that have to be managed in the buying process

-Balancing internal priorities and objectives with new supplier  ideas and innovations

-Increasing supplier (or supply chain) resilience through packaging sourcing decisions

If a company doesn’t know exactly what they are buying and about who they are buying it from, there is a good chance that their supply chain is riskier than they realize. The same lack of transparency creating that risk, also creates the conditions that allow forced labor and modern slavery to exist. 

In this episode of The Sourcing Hero podcast, Host Kelly Barner welcomes Justin Dillon. Justin is the Founder and CEO of FRDM AI, a solution that helps companies map their supply chain, isolate risks, and access risk mitigation tools. Justin first encountered the realities of modern slavery during his first career as a musician, progressing into documentaries on the subject, and finally getting more directly involved in solving the problem itself.

Justin talks about the effort associated with identifying risks that could hurt a business or that could hurt the world at large:

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Justin Dillon on LinkedIn

“We always want to go about it from a consolidated approach so long as the business, the organization, whoever we're working with, is open to that. That is normally my biggest piece of advice, because it really does make the procurement process as a whole for the organization much easier. It's going to make the savings grow a lot faster.”

Group purchasing organizations (GPOs) are known for their ability to provide access to beneficial ready-to-go contracts and pricing, but they can also be a source of market intelligence for their members, sharing the most relevant insights from suppliers with companies trying to manage a whole range of spend categories.

In this episode of The Sourcing Hero podcast, Host Kelly Barner welcomes Marissa Muzik. Is the Director of Sales and Member Success at Una, where she is focused on maintaining a tight and seamless process from start to finish with all of their new members.

Marissa shares her perspective on the Una member experience, and how she and her team go about helping those members continue to manage spend and suppliers:

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Marissa Muzik on LinkedIn

As procurement looks toward 2035, leaders will have to face deeper transformation requirements than simply adding AI tools. They will have to rethink their operating models, talent, data, and decision-making. Uncomfortable though it might be, this will be essential if the function is to move from transactional purchasing to strategic value creation.

In this episode of The Sourcing Hero podcast, Host Kelly Barner welcomes David Loseby. David is a former CPO, a speaker, an author, a “pracademic”, an advocate, and the editor of two very well regarded journals: The Journal of Public Procurement and the Journal of Responsible Production and Consumption.

David shares and discusses some of the key points from his recent article on procurement leadership in 2035:

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