Data Unleashed: Recent Episodes
Stephany Lapierre
Stephany Lapierre is the CEO of Tealbook, a supplier intelligence platform with the power to revolutionize the way buyers obtain supplier data. Data Unleashed is an unscripted, authentic, and candid discussion between Stephany and the customers, chief procurement officers, influencers, top leaders, partners, entrepreneurs, and investors who inspire her every day.
These amazing people are passionate about leadership and advancing the procurement function and the impact of data and achieving digital procurement success. While most are still looking for answers and hearing from peers, Stephany has decided to open some of those discussion to share them with our community.
“Consolidation doesn't necessarily mean innovation going away. Sometimes two things that join together end up being greater than the sum of their parts. There are some things that I wish were already consolidated. I won't name specifics, but some things make more sense together than apart. And when it comes to the future of the market … look, I mean, I talk to investors all the time who say, Wow, this is a highly fragmented market. And I pull up slides of different visualizations, like logo maps, as the ones we see from Kearney or the ones we see from other firms, it’s like, Yeah, there's a lot. And we throw more logos on this slide every single year. So it's a time for reorganizing a competitive landscape.”
- Nick Heinzmann, VP of Research at Spend Matters
In the vast and competitive market that procurement is now becoming, how do you find the best suppliers and vendors for your needs? And how do you realize success if you are one of those new suppliers trying to be seen?
At SIG recently, Stephany Lapierre sat down with Nick Heinzmann, VP of Research at Spend Matters, and their conversation delved into the questions above. Among many things Nick is responsible for, he works on Spend Matters’ list of 50 Procurement Providers to Know, 50 Procurement Provides to Watch, and the Future Five. How does he measure what qualifies a provider to be on the list? Find out.
Nick has a unique insight into what companies have the toolsets required for what he calls a “period of economic reorganization”, as well as the creativity within integration and workflow that organizations should be looking for.
Show host Stephany Lapierre and Nick Heinzmann address the vitality of data in procurement’s future, where procurement has come in the last five years, projections of where the industry may go in the next five years, and the leaders and thinking driving the future. With Tealbook in its second year on the 50 Procurement Providers to Know list, this is a timely and knowledgeable discussion.
Additionally, in this episode, Nick Heinzmann talks about:
- Why he sees a lot more partnering, banding together, to address problems in the near future
- How data will necessarily require a shared consensus standard to speak to the heart of where the industry is operating
- What he’s been hearing in conversation as the big themes of SIG, what is being looked for, what is moving the industry?
About Nick Heinzmann:
Nick Heinzmann is the Vice President of Research at Spend Matters. Prior to this role, Nick was an associate analyst covering niche and new technology providers for Spend Matters. His coverage spanned solutions that don’t neatly fit into any of the boxes used to bind the Spend Matters SolutionMap analyses (e.g., e-procurement, e-sourcing), along with vendors new to the procurement technology market or ones that need validation of capabilities before entering the rigorous SolutionMap RFI process.
Nick is a native of Tri-State area Connecticut. He found his way into the world of procurement by indirect means. He started out as a music student at Northwestern University, completing an undergraduate degree in cello performance. He decided to jump ship into journalism, completing the master’s programme at Northwestern’s Medill school the next year. Trading counterpoint studies for the real-world “thrill” of covering agricultural derivatives at the Chicago Board of Trade, Nick got his first whiff of global commerce that, he would later learn, is in large part orchestrated by procurement professionals.
Armed with that minimal procurement knowledge, he decided to take a job out of grad school copy-editing for Spend Matters, spending many hours spelling out acronyms and deciding whether he should be typing e-procurement, eProcurement or eprocurement. The minutiae of grammar and style eventually led to more writing-focused roles within the Spend Matters editorial team, including a stint as the lead writer for our client content programmes within Spend Matters Brand Studio.
Resources in this episode:
- Elouise Epstein at Kearney
- Elouise Epstein spider graph
- Tim Herrod
- Jeff Wright of NASDAQ
- Fairmarkit
- William Bagley of Freddie Mac
- Spend Matters “50 Procurement Providers to Know for 2022”
Links:
Stephany Lapierre - TealBook: website | twitter | linkedin | youtube | instagram
Nick Heinzmann - VP of Research at Spend Matters: website | linkedin
“Where does the business network come in? It's an operational extension of your company, so this can make it happen. Think about this example of when many, many moons ago we all joined LinkedIn. What was the first thing that LinkedIn did? They said, Give me your Outlook address book and I'll tell you how many of your address book are already members. That's the same concept we do with the business network. So if you're not a member, you have your supplier, vendor master data, and then we'll load that into our network, and say 40 to 50% of that population is already a network member because of the work of the others. So you're basically coming into, say, the next year and you're not a member of a network, but then you can say, Oh, I can actually pull that off because I don't have to invite all these thousands of companies to connect with me. I just put my hand up… and say, I want to be connected to this already existing network member.”
- Achim Voermanek, Global Vice President for Intelligent Spend Community Strategy at SAP
A vision of a network of different departments and suppliers sharing a combined data backbone sounds brilliant, right? That is exactly what SAP is pioneering.
Achim Voermanek sat down with Stephany Lapierre at SIG and explained how the acquisition of Ariba, Fieldglass, Concur, and most recently Taulia, into the SAP fold works to create an intelligent spend community network that benefits every member. Do Ariba, Fieldglass, and Concur cease to exist? Not at all, they are simply now unified under SAP into the visionary network.
Achim tackles the challenges of bringing this vision forward in real talk. It isn’t just technology that needs to be addressed, it’s psychology. There is an overwhelm mindset to be overcome which he is keenly aware of.
Show host Stephany Lapierre and Achim Voermanek talk frankly about the data privacy aspects of the network, the incentives required to coax people into supporting the bold venture, and the vital part that data plays in all of it. With Tealbook set to join the SAP App Exchange, it’s a timely and insightful discussion.
Additionally, in this episode, Achim Voermanek shares the following:
- Things coming through now on the SAP business technology platform, BTP.
- How the Spend Connect event will be a unifying event for all the ecosystem companies and players.
- How he views the notion of data unleashed as a “visual free flow or a free dynamic movement” towards a highly desired outcome.
About Achim Voermanek:
Achim Voermanek is a Global Vice President for Intelligent Spend Community Strategy at SAP. He is responsible for regional and global aspects of that strategy, and for customer engagements during the innovation lifecycle. Achim has over twenty years of cloud product owner, portfolio management, and significant startup experience in the digital media production space. He has worked in various leadership roles in Germany and the USA at SAP, Ariba and other companies in the B2B market, and lives in San Francisco with his family.
Resources in this episode:
- SIG
- Concur
- Fieldglass
- Ariba
- Taulia
- Nick Heinzmann at Spend Matters
- SAP Spend Connect
- SAP TechEd
Links:
Stephany Lapierre - TealBook: website | twitter | linkedin | youtube | instagram
Achim Voermanek - Global Vice President for Intelligent Spend Community Strategy at SAP: website | linkedin
“What's critical is that you have the capability, the resources to find these use cases, and the pragmatic approach on how to work with data. Far too often people hide behind ‘cannot consolidate that’ or ‘cannot add that together, and that's why I struggle’. Why don't you put them up in a data lake that allows you to ignore all the source differences and pick what you need and harmonize what you want to look at, because you should know where your challenges are.”
- Ralf Peters, Vice President of Procurement at Coca-Cola Europacific Partners
How long would it take you if your CEO came and asked how many suppliers you have based in Russia? How long would it take to give the risk profiling of those suppliers with a contingency plan?
Those two questions were posed by host Stephany Lapierre during a panel at DPW. The only person in the room answering differently, citing quick access to the information, was Ralf Peters. So he shared with Stephany how he has set up procurement at Coca-Cola Europacific.
Ralf deals with the sort of fast moving supply demand that requires exacting speed and agility from procurement. He also must ensure that suppliers meet the company’s sustainability agenda which requires their being onboard with Coca-Cola’s digital environment. He keenly understands the need for good data and analytics to work in efficient alignment.
Show host Stephany Lapierre and guest Ralf Peters discuss the meaning of good data and the niche products Ralf has integrated into the end-to-end source-to-pay suite solution that specifically ensure protections in the realm of integrity and risk sensing. Ralf very much speaks the same language as Stephany and views data similarly.
Additionally, in this episode, Ralf Peters shares his knowledge and insight on the following:
- Why procurement teams must have the ability to not only select solution providers quickly, but pilot, implement, and embed the systems to jumpstart innovation
- How a digital environment defines Coca-Cola’s global system of suppliers’ alignment with sustainability agendas
- How he views data as an “endless universe of insights” which informs the company’s vision and strategy
About Ralf Peters:
Ralf Peters is a business leader with 26 years of experience within FMCG across finance, sales and procurement with different entities within The Coca-Cola System. He has worked and lived in 5 European capitals (Berlin, Athens, Prague, Bratislava, London) and he “has been blessed and honored to lead and be part of great teams across the business working with passionate customers and innovative suppliers”. He is currently heading the procurement function as Vice President for Coca-Cola Europacific Partners (CCEP) and also assuming the role as Chairman of CEPG, the global procurement consortium for the entire Coca-Cola System. He is very passionate about sustainability across the system, working towards a world without waste and turning CCEP into a Net Zero Emission company by 2040, ten years ahead of the Paris Climate Agreement recommendation.
Resources in this episode:
- DPW Amsterdam
- IBM Watson Solutions
- FRDM
Links:
Stephany Lapierre - TealBook: website | twitter | linkedin | youtube | instagram
Ralf Peters - Vice President Procurement, Coca-Cola Europacific Partners: website | linkedin
“I think the conference is a great starting point to meet some of those startups that are really getting traction in the space… going out and getting inspired by the visions of those startups is something I encourage. And I think the conference can help and is really more around inspiration in the end, right?”
- Matthias Gutzmann, Founder of DPW
How do you take the plunge on a great new idea? And is the risk of losing stability worth your vision for something bigger and better? These are common questions startup founders ask themselves during the build of a new venture, and despite the glaring risks, the opportunity for industry-wide innovation drives them forward
Matthias Gutzmann is the Founder of DPW and the acclaimed DPW Amsterdam conference. He started DPW in 2019 after leaving his job in New York for his parents’ home in Germany. Why would he do this? Because he saw a gap in the market for procurement tech community events and was compelled to make it a reality.
What was seemingly a guaranteed success in the first year turned into an insurmountable challenge the following year when COVID hit. He speaks candidly about both the struggles of his venture as well as the growth of the DPW brand. How did he make DPW rise again and become the procurement conference to attend in such a short time? Matthias speaks to the power of contacts, of networking, and of leveraging social media in the right way.
Show host Stephany Lapierre and Matthias Gutzmann discuss the valuable community forming around procurement, the rise and innovation of startups, and the scaling of new ventures in this episode. Matthias reveals that data and sustainability are two major topics featured at this year’s DPW Amsterdam.
Additionally, in this episode, Matthias Gutzmann shares his unique perspective on the following:
- How procurement teams can start with optimizing the basics like their ERP ecosystem before introducing new point solutions to drive performance
- In the context of digital—whether it’s reimagining an entire process or replacing analog functions—waiting is not a viable strategy
- Why the leaders of smaller countries will be speaking on innovation at DPW Amsterdam
- How CPOs can leverage the resources presented at DPW Amsterdam to better navigate the growing procurement technology landscape
About Matthias Gutzmann:
Matthias Gutzmann is on a mission to disrupt the procurement industry. He founded DPW, the first organization of its kind to focus on bringing startups into the procurement industry, after he recognized the importance for breaking down the procurement silo and more collaboration in order to harness the potential of new digital technology and more innovation.
Resources in this episode:
- DPW Amsterdam
- ScoutLab
- Vizibl
Links:
Stephany Lapierre - TealBook: website | twitter | linkedin | youtube | instagram
Matthias Gutzmann - Founder, DPW: website | linkedin
“If you master the data in procurement, you’ll have an advantage by getting access early to information, and also having an early warning system. What might help you to prepare your supply chain, your manufacturing process, your logistics in a meaningful way…this is really where I believe the power of data and who will master the data in the future will win in procurement and by that will help his or her company to be successful and really go to the next level.”
- Dr. Marcell Vollmer, CEO of Prospitalia Group
How much impact does the role of CPO have in your organization? What is the true value of a CPO and how closely should they align with the CEO?
Dr. Marcell Vollmer has worked on both sides of the organizational coin: he has been a Chief Procurement Officer, a Chief Operating Officer, and is now a Chief Executive Officer. He brings his procurement sensibilities, the analytics experience, and his consulting background to the CEO table. How has he done this? And what can other CPOs take away from his journey?
Dr. Marcell believes in the power of strong data to drive the success of procurement. He also stresses the necessity of being able to translate that data and action it. The role of CPO is one of risk management, logistics, business opportunities, being on the lookout for startup innovation and potential substitutes, in his eyes. He’s a futurist with experience on both sides of the corporate equation and insight to share.
Show host Stephany Lapierre and Dr. Marcell Vollmer discuss how he transitioned from CPO to CEO and the invaluable contributions CPOs must offer their companies. He states that the core of the CPO’s value is tied to both the level of data transparency offered to the business as well as the consumption of data used for the benefit of procurement decisions.
Additionally, in this episode, Dr. Vollmer shares his unique perspective on the following:
- The biggest opportunity for CPOs right now in the eyes of a CEO
- How can disruptive technologies and machines help us to overcome manual processes
- How procurement can build a business case for investing in their data strategy
About Dr. Marcell Vollmer:
Marcell Vollmer is Chief Executive Officer at Prospitalia Group.
Before that he was Partner & Director at Boston Consulting Group (BCG) with over 20 years of experience developing and implementing procurement, supply chain, finance, shared services, and digital transformation strategies across industries globally. Prior to joining BCG, Marcell was Chief Innovation Officer at Celonis, the world’s leading process mining software company, where he was supporting customers and partners in developing and executing digital transformation initiatives. Marcell brings more than 15 years of successful digital transformation and procurement optimization experience gained at SAP in various roles as Chief Digital Officer, Chief Operating Officer as well as Chief Procurement Officer and Senior Vice President at SAP. He has also managed various strategy & implementation projects at PA Consulting Group as well as at DHL Express.
Marcell is a wanted speaker at conferences and an active social media influencer with more than 90k followers on Twitter and 50k followers on LinkedIn.
Marcell earned his PhD in Economics from the University of Hamburg in Germany.
Prospitalia Group brings together various specialists in the healthcare industry. In addition to procurement (Prospitalia, Pro Care Management and Prospitalia Comparatio), the focus is also on digital support for healthcare institutions (Prospitalia h-trak, Miralytik and Wawibox) and a wide range of consulting services (WMC HEALTHCARE, hmg). As a corporate group, we thus offer a comprehensive range of services and support our customers as well as partners with broad-based expertise.
Links:
Stephany Lapierre - TealBook: website | twitter | linkedin | youtube | instagram
Dr. Marcell Vollmer - CEO at Prospitalia Group: linkedin | twitter
Arnold Liwanag, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of TealBook, joins Stephany Lapierre to discuss how the organization began using ML & AI in its early years and how Arnold’s experience and background are now helping scale TealBook’s technological infrastructure.
Stephany Lapierre explains how, when was first introduced to the idea of machine learning and artificial intelligence as a way to quickly and effectively gather better supplier data, the concept of that kind of technology was still very new in the procurement space. Now, years later, as TealBook is working to scale its technology, it was challenging finding a CTO who understood the company’s vision, possessed the right technical knowledge needed to improve tech, and felt energized by the challenge of building that architecture.
Enter Arnold Liwanag.
Having learned from the godfather of ML, Arnold has a deep understanding of, and interest in, AI and machine learning and finds TealBook’s mission exciting. He and Stephany explore Tealbook’s strategic employment of Humans In The Loop (HIL), relationships with partners, and the growth that continues to drive the product roadmap.
Throughout this episode, Arnold discusses his love of startups, what he feels is necessary to help them succeed, and the pride he feels in the quality of data and work TealBook produces for their customers as well as the quality of people in their workforce who drive that output.
About Arnold Liwanag:
Arnold Liwanag serves as TealBook's Chief Technology Officer.
Arnold Liwanag serves as TealBook's Chief Technology Officer.
Arnold brings an impressive background to TealBook's C-suite. In prior roles, he led the Artificial Strategy and Transformation practice at PwC/ Strategy&, and has also held technical leadership positions at Scale AI, Hewlett Packard and Sybase. He is a talented and coveted speaker at industry events that include CogX, Elevate Toronto and AI4. Most recently, Arnold served as the CTO at IVADO Labs, where he served as the technical authority for the company.
Arnold has the technical depth, experience, skills and understanding of supply chain issues to position TealBook as the only supplier data foundation that powers the digital enterprise.
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Stephany Lapierre - TealBook: website | twitter | linkedin | youtube | instagram
Arnold Liwanag - Tealbook CTO: website | linkedin
As a global procurement and supply chain leader, Joanna discusses her career with Stephany, her thoughts on the importance of the right data, and her advice to both leaders and junior employees looking to disrupt their companies for the better.
Joanna delves into her start as an engineer and how she moved from supply chain to falling in love with procurement. She highlights mentors who taught her valuable lessons and the experiences that built her confidence about speaking up when she had solid insight to share with senior executives. She and Stephany break down the differences between data and information.
Joanna shares practical examples on how the right data with the right technology helps save money, benefit clients, and streamline workflow throughout different organizations. She discusses the value of really thinking about processes, your business, what your pain points are, and what your goal truly is when choosing technology for transformation. Joanna’s conversation with Stephany provides thought-provoking insights applicable to all organizations.
Tune in to this episode to learn more about:
- The difference between raw data, information and analytics
- How asking the right questions of your data dramatically changes how information can be used
- Using data as the raw materials procurement is sourcing for actionable insights
About Joanna Martinez:
Joanna Martinez is a speaker, consultant and advisor with a special focus on helping companies and individuals achieve their transformational goals. Sometimes that means advising senior executives directly; frequently it means rolling up her sleeves and working on projects along with the team or delivering workshops to improve skills in areas like stakeholder alignment, digitization, or creating positive change.
After receiving engineering degrees from Rutgers University Joanna’s career has centered on assisting companies that were being battered by disruptive forces, creating innovative ways to grow their bottom lines or reduce costs. Working as a Supply Chain or Procurement leader, she led transformation initiatives for firms in different sectors, among them Johnson & Johnson (pharmaceutical, consumer products), Diageo (beverages), AllianceBernstein LP (financial services), and Cushman & Wakefield (real estate services, facilities management). Today, her consulting clients range from startups to Fortune 100 companies in a wide mix of businesses, recently including insurance, manufacturing, life sciences, health services, and technology.
She was named a Distinguished Alumna by Rutgers College of Engineering and now sits on the School of Engineering’s Industry Advisory Board. She also advises two technology companies and a professional services organization. Joanna and her teams have been recognized for innovation or customer excellence by Determine, American Express, Egencia, and Heublein. For the last four years, she has been designated a Top Global Influencer and Thought Leader in multiple categories by Thinkers360.
Her book, A Guide to Positive Disruption, draws on her experiences making positive changes at the organizations for which she has worked and provides a framework to follow for those who want to be successful in a business undergoing disruption. It is available on Amazon.
Her latest project is a set of workshops to help people in business understand digital concepts like Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence.
Resources discussed in this episode:
- Joe Agresta
- Matchbook
- ProcureTech 100
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Stephany Lapierre - TealBook: website | twitter | linkedin | youtube | instagram
Joanna Martinez - Speaker, Consultant, and Advisor: website | linkedin | book
Transcript
Welcome to Data Unleashed, a podcast that brings you insights from procurement's most innovative visionaries. Alongside incredibly brilliant guests, show host Stephany Lapierre explores the power of data, how it challenges us, and how you can challenge the status quo. You'll be inspired, but more importantly, you're getting actionable advice in every conversation that will help you unleash the power of data in your own organization.
Katherine McCleery
Welcome to Data Unleashed. Steph, how are you doing today?
Stephany Lapierre
I'm great. How are you, Katherine?
Katherine McCleery
It's a pretty great Monday coming off from some summer holiday weeks. And I love the episode that we're introducing today. This was actually our very first recording and this was our first go. And we had an incredible guest. Let the audience know who we're talking to today. And by the way, this is Steph Lapierre, CEO and Founder of TealBook. I'm Katherine, I work here at TealBook as well. We are on this incredible podcast journey starting with our first guest...
Stephany Lapierre
Joanna Martinez.
Katherine McCleery
Yes. And Joanna has got quite a bit of experience in supply chain and then transitioning over into procurement. Stephany, if you want to give our audience just a little bit of insight into the Joanna that you know, I know we're going to hear some of it in the episode. But tell us a little bit about the Joanna that you've come to know.
Stephany Lapierre
Yeah, I've known Joanna now for a few years, she actually chaired one of our CPO roundtables, meetings back four or five years ago, and it was in New York, and it was Phil Ideson, actually, from Art of Procurement that introduced us. And so we hadn't had an opportunity to chat or meet and then we connected to have her chair. And she did such a fantastic job, first of all, chairing that conversation, and then became really excited about what we were working on and the idea of solving this Big Data Challenge. And so her and I stayed connected ever since. I had the pleasure to get to know her more personally. And she's also an advisor at TealBook. And so she sits on our advisory board, where we have a group of thought leaders that are keeping us honest and really more connected to what's happening in the industry. And Joanna has been such a fantastic, I'd say friend, advisor, inspiring thought leader. And I was excited to have her do our first podcast, because she has always had the ability to see opportunities in the role that she's had, and leveraged tools and leveraged data as a way to differentiate herself and positioned herself so that she could navigate a lot of different mergers and acquisition, restructuring, her story is quite impressive. And so in the last few years, she is not operating anymore. She's become a teacher of technology. She is also an author, she wrote a book recently called The Guide to Positive Disruption. And she has behind her - I don't know actually, if in the podcast, you won't see if you're just listening - but she has all these fish in a frame. And she has this one fish in the middle that's red that’s swimming upwards, the other way. And that's very much how she has defined herself, as how do you disrupt yourself? How do you navigate all these challenges and ensure that you're staying relevant and moving up in your career throughout all the changes and the things that you can control and the things that you can't control. And so you know, the fact that she gave a very tangible example of how she used data earlier in her career. And she took a big sort of step and took her courage to speak up, allowed her to differentiate herself in a situation where it actually enabled her to make some significant changes that were adding value to the organization and position herself to be on this career journey that she's had. And so I'm excited for everyone to listen, it's part data, but it's also part of just inspiring. And we know by hearing customers right now, times are just hard. People have been stretched thin asking to do more more requirements, more disruption. It feels like procurement has gone through like such a roller coaster in the past couple of years. And I just think that this is going to be a nice little uplift of seeing in your own career, where do you see those opportunities? How can you leverage data? How can you leverage tools and relationships so that you can move into a career that is rewarding and inspiring, and one day, you know, inspire others like Joanna has done for so many of us.
Katherine McCleery
Yeah, you nailed it. And the coolest thing about Joanna and hearing her stories and seeing certain patterns and how she has operated, she does ask the hard questions and she's not afraid to challenge. And so I think that's what we love the most about her. And she really is good at disrupting and she's good at identifying what should be disrupted. So I hope that everybody enjoys this conversation, Joanna is giving us a masterclass on data, and she's got the experience to do it.
Stephany Lapierre
Joanna, I'm so happy that you are taking the time to speak with me today. You've become a friend, you've become a mentor. I've heard you speak several times, we've had conversations. And I certainly feel like I've learned a lot from you. Now we're here today to talk about how data has impacted your career. And I know that you have a ton of experience to share. Walk us through your career, because it's such an impressive career. How are you here today?
Joanna Martinez
So I'm an engineer, I just actually posted, a few weeks ago, a photo of myself and another woman I had gone to school with and said, "This is a photo of 40% of the women in my class in engineering school." That was pretty impactful when you kind of step back and look at that. I spent the first part of my career in supply chain roles. The second part in procurement because I did a stint in procurement and just loved it, and decided I was going to focus on fixing broken procurement organizations. And then the last bit has been, after my company was purchased in a takeover, I was about to take another CPO role and said, ah, I think I've been given a gift, I should try something a little bit different. And that's what brought me to working independently. So today I do a mix of speaking, I do some roll-up-the-sleeves consulting and coaching, and I advise a few companies. I believe that I am more effective when I actually get down and dirty into the projects. Because you have a better sense for, you know, the impact of bad data, for the technology that's out there that you can use to help this company solve its problems. It's one thing to be, you know, a consultant from, you know, 10,000 feet. I like being a consultant at a working level.
Stephany Lapierre
You said something important. You went from supply chain and then you fell in love with procurement. And so I'd love to unpack this a little bit. What made you fall in love with procurement and not go back specifically to supply chain?
Joanna Martinez
Well, I was about to become the first female plant manager in the division. I worked for a big company but in that division I was about to become the first female plant manager. It was the job that I had been working for. And as I was getting ready, it was a few days before the announcement was gonna get made, I realized that my boss's office was cleaned out. There were no family pictures or anything else on the wall. I came to discover that there had been a coup, that a new management team was coming in, he was out, all bets were off. And my opportunity to get that job was gone. So the person who took over, after a few weeks, asked me to go for a walk and said, 'You know, I am loathe to fire you because you appear to have some brains. But your replacement has already bought a house. So here's what I suggest.' The person who was the beloved head of procurement wanted to move to mergers and acquisitions, didn't have anyone to take his place, and so I went there with the promise of getting that role when he said I was ready to have that role. So I spent several years - it was like the Jedi learning at the feet of Yoda. He was he was wonderful in terms of the things that he taught me and the opportunities that he gave me. So it turned out to be great. And I think that as a technical person, you are a better procurement person, because you understand or have a curiosity about how things are made. And even when it's not a tangible thing that you're buying, when it's a service, there's still a supply chain, there are still components that come together to provide you with a piece of technology or even the act of bringing a temporary employee on board. There's a supply chain involved in that. And so with that kind of supply chain curiosity, procurement offered the opportunity to be looking at many, many, many different supply chains.
Stephany Lapierre
I 100% agree. And, you know, throughout my career I've met thousands of people in procurement and everyone that gets into procurement falls in love with it. Like no one goes to school thinking I'm going to be in procurement one day, and then the people that once they touch it, because it oversees, to your point, so many parts of the organization. And it's great to meet so many people passionate and it feels like, you know, we need to spend more time for the rest of the organization to really have a good understanding of the value that procurement can drive. Let's fast forward, so data in itself, and that's actually one of the gap that I've seen in procurement from the early days, we got really passionate people that wanted to drive change in the organization. And we have a function that has not necessarily had the luxury, right, of having all the investment and having better data, better insight, right? And I'd love to hear, in your career, especially in the earlier days, you've had a great story of how data has impacted your career very early on, and how it's changed a mindset for you of the importance of data. I'd love to hear it.
Joanna Martinez
There's a difference between data and information. And data abounds, even before all the automation and all the digitization, there was plenty of data there. But the act of creating that into information that you could use was onerous, you know, it required calculation, you have to think, you know, what am I trying to do? What pieces of data do I get? Now, as there's more automation, that is at your fingertips, and it enables you to make decisions much faster. What happened with me is that I was helping on a project that had to do with automation. Now, it wasn't automating equipment, it was that people, who had been with the company for a long time, a few people had retired, they had way too much information up here, and not codified in any way. So I was part of a project to look at codifying this, and what technology could we put in place? And how could we take advantage of the good processes they had been following and automate them in some way now that those gentlemen were no longer working. And it was all going to be about making the information available much faster in a different kind of way. But as I was doing it, I kind of stepped back and said, if I look at this a different way, if I'm not focused on just the speed with which I can have this information or this data, but, in fact, if I look at what it's telling me - what it was telling me was that it took 90 days to actually make the product that this facility was manufacturing. And that was a shock. Because we were surrounded by equipment going at 1000 a minute, 700 a minute, there was certainly a perception that things were just speeding along. But with the lack of an end to end look at the data, in fact, there was a lot more time lost, there was a lot more time waiting for quality checks. It wasn't just get the information, if you were going to make an impact, you needed to significantly invest in the end to end and look at the end to end because maybe that warehouse automation project you didn't have to do anymore, because maybe you're going to make all of that go away. So it created a different set of priorities. And when I first went back to the senior folks and said, hey, I'm doing this and look at what it's showing me, I'll never forget one gentleman, he didn't believe me at all. And it wasn't, he wasn't mean or anything else, he just said to himself - and I think he kind of said it to me - well, the kid made a mistake, right? The kid made a mistake. And it was when they went in and they started to check the numbers and look at this and look at that, the kid didn't make a mistake. It really was in this interconnected world, where you have these just in time and all these other kinds of processes in place, this, for all of the whirling and all of the activity, stuff was just stopped because nobody had looked at that. And nobody had stopped to ask themselves, how can I do this differently? How can I approach this in a different way? And, in fact, in the end, the investment didn't happen, where the expectation was when we started. The investment happened in automation, and in reducing inventories, and then linking pieces of equipment together and normalizing that, so, in fact, you weren't creating, you know, multi steps, you were getting, you know, raw materials out and then a finished product at the end. It also resulted in a different kind of supplier relationship. Because this company didn't have the technology, or the desire to invest in the technology, for some of the steps along the way. It's a consumer goods company. They're good at marketing, brilliant at research and everything else, it was a wonderful learning and working experience. But they were smart enough to recognize that some pieces of the process were best going to the suppliers and tapping into their brain power. And I learned that there in that process, that we can be very myopic. We're surrounded by smart people. Look at all the brilliant people you've hired, right? You're surrounded by all this brilliance. It's very easy to get too inner with your thinking. And, in fact, the solution, in many cases, the real expertise is sitting outside. And, when I went into procurement, I think one of the reasons I was successful is that experience was successful because of the participation of the suppliers. The company made the investment it needed to make, it relied on suppliers to make investment, and when they reworked the supply chain, there was a different kind of very connected relationship. So I brought that with me. My challenge to myself was a third of my time was with suppliers, at their facilities that - you know, back in the day when we went to facilities - but in the absence of that, just conversations, knowing the senior executives, understanding where their research direction was, matching them up with the marketing and the sales and the R&D professionals at our company. Sometimes we can be bottlenecks. Because we want it all to come through us. And sometimes the best thing to do is to make the match and then step back and kind of let them have it.
Stephany Lapierre
There's so much I want to unpack into everything you said. One thing that I love, actually, I think maybe from the same company, was Joe Agresta. I heard him speak maybe five years ago to procurement leaders, and he said, 'You're so lucky to be in procurement because you have a window into the world'. And it's what actually got me excited about procurement, was the sense that companies were having business challenges, and they're trying to figure out how to resolve them on their own. And my first consulting firm, which was Matchbook, was meant to take a business challenge and then go look into the world, which supplier had resolved, or faced a similar challenge for another company, because usually when a company faces a challenge it's not unique to that company. Most organizations face similar challenges. And so tapping into that innovation pool, finding suppliers that maybe would have already solved it for someone else, had already maybe innovated from that first solution, or bring suppliers together to develop a solution that was innovative, that was going to impact the top line. That's how I fell in love with procurement. Because I really genuinely thought, if you can leverage all this talent outside the organization, you were only focused on solving that problem.
Joanna Martinez
You're right. And you know what, Stephany, what I came to learn was, that's what they want. Right? I was in the beverage industry for a while. And you've got flavor chemists, and you have people who are watching trends in terms of consumer consumption. And you know, flavor profiles, is watermelon in or out, you know, are people drinking chocolate drinks, that kind of thing. And then developing flavors to go along with that. And there would be these almost affairs, we used to call them, where suppliers would come in and they would bring some of the products they were working on. And what I tried to do was flip that. So they weren't doing it in a vacuum anymore. But, in fact, could hear from our marketing folks, what they were looking at, could share their information, their consumer preference information, and then together come to a decision on where our company's interests were so that they could focus, right, instead of sitting down and coming up with a this, a vanilla, you know, a cola, this and that. They could be targeted based on what our company was sharing with them.
Stephany Lapierre
Yeah, 100%. And to your point, I think the suppliers are looking for that. And us, for example, we could have never built this platform without customer input, right? It's the reiteration of the client's value and business outcome that helps us build a better product. When you have that partnership is when magic happens. I want to go back into... so first, you made a really good point earlier in our conversation where you said there's a lot of data. Data has been around for a long time, there's a lot of it, but it's not the same as information. It's actually not the same as insight. Right? And so, to your point, there's a lot of information. But a lot of the processes in the workflow were built around the collection of this data to turn it into information. If that took time, it was a bottleneck. And so I think that's a really good point that you've made. If we come back to data, when you are, and it doesn't matter the level, when you're building a business case, for delivering bad or good information or an idea, what would be your advice?
Joanna Martinez
Tie it to a business need. Not just because it's cool, or it would make this go faster. I was helping a Human Resources organization for a very large company that was way behind the times, and they had not digitized most of their HR. And I was helping this process and they were justifying it based on the amount of space they were going to save, right, with filing cabinets being gone. And it was like, no, no, no, the company doesn't care about the number of filing cabinets. And these are embedded in facilities, you're not exactly going to lop off a room and sell it, you're doing this because you will have less errors, your employees will feel empowered, when there is something like an address change or a new child or a marriage, that change can happen quickly, the information will be at the fingertips. So someone is leaving the company, you'll be able to have a good offboarding process. There were a million reasons why they do it. And all of them supported the company's objectives in terms of how they wanted their employees to be treated. But they had started that project kind of going off in the wrong direction. In terms of the justification.
Stephany Lapierre
Yeah. It's the why, too that's so important. Like the why, and people being curious to get to the why.
Joanna Martinez
You know, Stephany, another example in financial services. So I worked in financial services during a time that there was a lot of scrutiny on the fees that financial services companies were charging their customers. And we were able to take a lot of the work we were doing or wanted to do, and tie it to how it would have an effect on those fees. Because you have bank charges and transaction fees, and you printed annual reports and did all kinds of things that actually did add cost, kind of buried back in the supply chain. And they did add cost. And they did result in customers or clients being asked to pay an upcharge because of all of that. And so being able to take it and tie back and say, 'look, this is a component, this is a component, this is a component, we're going to work on this'. And then that is going to reflect your ability to have a lower number, you're gonna be able to reduce those transaction fees, was, for me, a shining moment. There was nothing like sitting at a quarterly investor report meeting and listening to the CFO talk about some of the procurement activities that had a result in their ability to meet the kinds of challenges that the SEC was putting in front of them.
Stephany Lapierre
Isn't that powerful?
Joanna Martinez
Yeah, very.
Stephany Lapierre
And we've seen that, I think more than ever,in the last two years, is the importance of having information, having data, building the business case. Because the senior leadership has been looking at answers that are impacting, disrupting, supply chain procurement, across the organization in the compliance requirements that are growing an organization. So I think having access to that information to be able to take it to the leadership team with the why, with the information that they need to drive decision, is a great, great opportunity for procurement. How would you say that, in terms of your career, how are you thinking about data as we're going forward? Right, to my point, there's a lot more disruption, there's a lot more requirements, there's a lot more technology, there's just more. I'm sure, like, if you look back at your career, what we've been, you know, the pace and the demands are growing. What do you think the role of data is playing even today versus, I'd say, even 2, 3, 4 or 5 years ago, right, it's changed quite a bit.
Joanna Martinez
So, you know, people don't understand. It was one thing to pull data and summarize it in an Excel spreadsheet type of device, right? That was something that people could wrap their heads around. Now you have, you know, artificial intelligence playing a part, you have, you know, other kinds where, you know, robotic process automation taking place where accuracy rates of certain functions are going way up, because a robot's doing it, you know, you've got all of these changes that are taking place because of digitization. And 100% of the time, when I speak about the digital world, somebody comes up to me when it's done and says, thanks a lot for explaining this, whatever this is, I didn't understand it. And I didn't want to be the one, I think everybody else on my team does, and I didn't want to be the one to raise my hand and to say that I didn't understand it. So now at least, you know, my goal is always to help people have a very basic understanding. So when someone says machine learning, they kind of understand what it is about blockchain, etc. And that's very powerful. But the fact that it happens so often tells me that there are thousands, certainly dozens, for every one that raises their hand, there's a dozen more in the room that are thinking the same thing and don't want to be the ones who will say that. In fact, I had a situation where I was addressing the global procurement organization for a financial services company, and as I was watching the faces, I realized that the one who didn't get it was the CPO. That he didn't understand all of this. And there were many people in the organization, they might not have gotten it all, but they got enough snippets that they were comfortable talking about a digital experience or a digital journey to go on. And he was the one who, I had to keep watching his face, and adjust what I was saying, and pose questions to the group and get some answers and sort of change the scope of the presentation, to make him feel more comfortable. But also to get them in a mode where he was actually going to learn something.
Stephany Lapierre
I'm going to throw something maybe a bit controversial to you. Do you think procurement needs to know - and I love that you have made a point to educate and simplify because I do you know, on one hand, I'm gonna say I do believe that people need to understand technology enough to be able to translate what this means in terms of their own business. But would you say procurement needs to have a deep understanding of the technology itself?
Joanna Martinez
Well, you just have to look at Elouise Epstein's interconnected map to see all of the technologies that are out there. You don't have to understand each one, not at all. You don't even have to understand any, you just have to accept what they do, kick the tires a little bit, and work to find the pain points in your organization and those point solutions that are going to help you get where you're going to go. You know, some of us work in companies where it's possible to spend tens of millions of dollars and bring in a really big consulting firm and go after it in a very big way. But many folks don't. Many folks have some kind of constraints. And it's particularly those who need to educate themselves a little more. If you're working with, you know, one of the big consulting firms, you need to establish a good relationship, be comfortable with asking questions, and work hard within your organization to get the funding for the big projects you're going to do. At a smaller scale, you need to be a little bit more roll-up-the-sleeves. That doesn't mean, even, that a CPO should be able to go into Tealbook, for example, and do a search in Tealbook. Doesn't have to do that. But needs to have watched it, have an understanding of what happens, and feel confident that their people have been adequately trained to be able to do it.
Stephany Lapierre
I 100% agree. I think there's a lot of options today on how you decide to go after this digitization. It's very personal to an organization and their business outcome and their budget and the scale and what they're ultimately trying to achieve. When I think we're going to see a world where there's more and more and more technologies and more solutions in the market. What do you think when I say garbage in garbage out, porta potties, if only we had better data?
Joanna Martinez
That's true, right? I'm going to tell you, actually, I can't even remember how many times I was part of an end to end, you know, ERP system going in. And that data never got cleaned up. You know, this whole thing of, okay, we're gonna take these supplier profiles we have, whatever the number was 6500, 15,000, depending on the size of the company, and we're gonna go through an exercise and we're gonna clean it all up. It never happened. There were good intentions, it would take much longer, sooner or later, the rest of the project would be implemented, that cleanup never took place. And things would just chug on. And yeah, maybe you went from 15,000 maybe to 13. Maybe you eliminated the suppliers that you hadn't done business with in the last couple of years. But you never really made it happen and, therefore, you don't get the ultimate, you know, the ultimate responses. You don't find that someone's going to order something they don't have, maybe some of the options that are showing up in the system, or suppliers that you dropped for some very good business reasons. You know, the things, for example, that you all do in making sure that that information coming in is good and it's constantly being refreshed. To me, it's like the flavor chemists who are out there, they understand where the company is headed, and they're working to develop the new products there. You understand where the data need is, and you're working to make sure that things are constantly being refreshed, that you're going to the best sources, that you're weeding out suppliers that don't belong there. So companies need people to do that, because they will never do it themselves.
Stephany Lapierre
You're an adviser to us. And you've known me now for a long time so I appreciate, you know, your statements.
Joanna Martinez
It wasn't meant to be a commercial. But it's true. When you think about, one of the garbage in garbage out situations I think of ,is the lack of cleanup. I mean, I was involved in one just three years ago, nothing ever really got cleaned.
Stephany Lapierre
Well, it may be clean for a moment. But what's fascinating to me, so you've been in this space for a long time, and you're a thought leader, you understood very early on when we start speaking, but data itself, it was almost like - and I feel this, like, 5, 6, 7 years ago - it was almost accepting that data was never going to be great. Right? And I wonder why, like, why was data not as important as it is today? Because it definitely feels to me, at least, you know that the world has changed. And I think the realization of the importance of data as part of the digital transformation is becoming more critical. But I still hear CPOs that are still claiming, you know, oh, if only we could get master data and will shrug their shoulders because... Why do you think that's the case? I'm honestly more just curious on your perspective.
Joanna Martinez
So I think that the big legacy systems, they have compromise built into them. They're not perfect. If you're doing something end to end, the more you have multiple steps and multiple organizations dealing with, you know, a technology, the more things it's trying to do, the more it has to compromise along the way. And so there is an acceptance that it's not right. Oh, I would like to do the monthly closing this way but the technology doesn't allow us to do it so we have to do it that way. So there becomes an acceptance of doing it the best way you can or the best way you perceive you can. And I think the emergence of all of these very targeted pieces of technology, whose goal it is, is to fix that problem, or this problem or whatever, is very different. That's not the same as a massive system going in and trying to do everything end to end. And so there's more possibility of data, you know, the world is enabling it. Someone once said to me, I think this is true, a good idea is a good idea forever. You just have to wait until the world changes and you can implement it. And I think it's like 100% true. Things change, you know, technology changes, cars go from gas driven to hybrid to electric, you know, the the world... and you just have to kind of jump on, seize the opportunity when the change is there, and you're able to grab it and use it.
Stephany Lapierre
It's a good point. I remember when, in the early days of Tealbook, I heard ad procurement leaders, a CPO, saying I will never put my data in the cloud. That was not that long ago, right? I'm sure either he's moved on and now he has lots of data in the cloud, or he doesn't have a job anymore. But that was not too long ago. And I do think that, to your point, we were even early thinking about data, talking about, like, we were educating on AI machine learning only three years ago we were doing webinar. I don't think that we would do that again. There's maybe, to your point, a lot of people that still don't quite know, but I think we've passed now that there's so much technology being leveraged, that we're sort of looking at, okay, how can we leverage these tools, which - technology is really tools - to enable parts of our transformation. But I think your point is right, that it's the right time at the right place. And there's an appropriate time for people to adopt. And we’ve seen, as early adopters to now, especially with COVID, highlighting that the software that promises good data, end to end software to even any sort of software promising good data, was not doing it at the speed and at the scale that the organization needed it. And to the C suite that needed information, insight, or recommendations so that they could make faster decisions that were, you know, as critical as ensuring that the business was still gonna be around.
Joanna Martinez
Totally, totally.
Stephany Lapierre
It's really fascinating to hear, like, every time I talk to you I feel like I learn something new about your path. I'd love just maybe a few last words of wisdom. Now you've seen a lot, and we've only had a tiny little tip of the iceberg of everything that you've done, but what would you say to the procurement community that is now looking at this Elouise Epstein echographic? All these technologies, right, all this expectation? Like, what would be your word of advice?
Joanna Martinez
Well, you know, you're not a kid with a shopping cart, right? You're not Christmas shopping here. It all sounds so good. And it's all good, right? It's not going to be, a technology is not going to be on her chart unless it works.But you have to really think about your process, your business, what's the goal? And where are the pain points, and you've got to fix the pain points, or have something that's going to help towards the company making its goal or the division making its goal, whatever. That's how you have to start. It's too easy to be swayed by 'wow, that's really cool, that's really cool, I'd like to try this, or I'd like to try that'. And then you don't make any progress at all. So to the extent that you can stay laser focused on 'what are the critiques that our senior leadership has of my organization and is there a technology that's going to help it as a technology solution'? What's the company striving for? What are its objectives from a people standpoint, from a technology standpoint, and what's out there that can help me do my piece much faster?
Stephany Lapierre
Yeah, I agree. And what do you think the role of data - because I would differentiate data from software, right, the technologies that exist and we're seeing now, I don't know, I think there's thousands that were being reviewed by ProcureTech 100, and there's gonna be more - how do you place data as part of the future of procurement?
Joanna Martinez
Well, decisions need to be data driven. And it was an interesting thing I read and it talked about financial services, and it talked about portfolio managers and how it used to be that they focused on choosing the best stocks. And now the more forward thinkers are focused on choosing the best algorithms. And using that to get the best result for their clients. And then stepping back and saying, again, as I said, does this make sense? With what I know about this client and their personal preferences, with what I know about them and their family and the decisions are making, is this the right portfolio to recommend? And I think that we don't have to understand all of the nuances of the math that's going on in the background. We do need to feel comfortable that the right data is being pulled to give me that recommendation or that end result. When I was talking to Catherine, we discussed, we kind of laughed about a situation I was in where a supplier came in with all this information about, you know, they've been measuring themselves, the SLAs and it was incredible, their accomplishments were just right there at the top of the chart, except none of the things they were measuring themselves on were important. So they had the data - and it was legitimate data, there was no problem with the data - but they were using that to measure success that wasn't important, metrics that were not important to the company that I was working for. So I think it's a marriage. You certainly need confidence, you need to be able to rely on the technical people on your team, that the data that's being pulled in is the right data. And then you need to understand enough about the algorithms and the factors to know, in the end with what comes forward to you, does this make sense? Or do I need to adjust this because I know some things that the algorithm doesn't?
Stephany Lapierre
Yeah. The other thing I would say is that I hear often people talk about analytics being data, right? And I think of them to be very different. Because if you don't have good data, if you're not pulling the right data, it doesn't matter what analytics tool or how sophisticated it may be, it's still not gonna give you the right insight to be able to drive your business forward. I think that's a bit of a misconception that I hear often is, oh, yeah, we talked about data we have here analytics, or insights and analytics, which I think are different.
Joanna Martinez
To me the data is the raw material, right? It will give you insights, doing some analysis will give you information or give you an idea or give you a recommendation, whatever word you want to use. But it's the foundation. You can't do anything without data that's good. Everything else, you know, it's kind of the beginning part of the supply chain of information. And if that's not good, then everything that gets built on it going forward isn't going to be right.
Stephany Lapierre
To me, it's the premise of what I build my entire career on is just the fact that if we don't have good data, the strategic objectives are really hard to achieve. Because it's the unsexy foundational things that you need. And if there's ways to improve the quality, automate the collection, because a collection is really hard, right? How do you get this data? How much data across how many attributes that you need? And then how are you able to give context to it and pull it in a way that's insightful and actionable? I always think the data piece is not necessarily what procurement wants to talk about, because it's not sexy, but without good data it's impossible to achieve your strategic objectives. So one kind of feeds the other. That's the sexier stuff that people get to see and communicate.
Joanna Martinez
Oh it's totally unsexy. But you can't get to the cool stuff without it. You have no chance. Because your recommendations will be questioned, your results will be questioned. You just open yourselves up to people not believing you. The second they find a hole in your data foundation, your credibility takes a huge step back.
Stephany Lapierre
Yeah. I often say that we've built procurement on a lot of the processes that we've established in the early days. And I always saw, like, to me it was never a people problem, because we got really smart people very passionate about supporting the business and making good decisions and getting to good outcomes. I then found it was a process issue because we actually over processed. The seven steps of sourcing alone, if you say that to someone in marketing, I know they want to run because they don't want a seven step process. They want, you know, fast and instant. And it was not a software problem because there was all these really sophisticated software that were being built trying to workflow information. I just really saw this as being a data problem. Without good data it's just really hard to be able to, you know, to drive those business objectives. Listen, Joanna, I always enjoy talking to you. And, you know, there's so many topics that I would have gone with you because I think people can learn, people in their career that are navigating. You've been through so much change in your own career and you've reinvented yourself, you seized opportunities, you leverage information, you exude this inquisitive nature of asking the right questions to uncover the truth. And a lot of people could learn from that. So it's probably the next podcast when we talk about how to disrupt yourself or how to take your own career right in your hands and be able to swim upstream like that picture behind you that has the fish. I know you're blocking it, but that's my favorite picture.
Joanna Martinez
Ah, that's right. That's right. That's right, I forgot about that. There's the fish going in the opposite direction. Don't be afraid. Hashtag: be the goldfish.
Stephany Lapierre
Be the goldfish. And to me personally, in what I've heard from you, is, again, that curiosity, asking the right question, get the right information, to build a business case. That no matter where you are sitting in the organization, no matter your gender, no matter how junior or senior you are, you need to build those business case and have the right information to do it. And so it starts with curiosity because, to your point, you could look at a slide, you can look at a chart, it may look really good, but you have to be inquisitive enough to dive deeper. On that note, Joanna, anything, any last words?
Joanna Martinez
You sort of said it. But I tried to use the mantra 'embrace the churn’. Things are gonna get disrupted whether you disrupt it yourself, or whether it gets disrupted for you. And, you know, I keep saying to people that pandemic disruption is new, but disruption because of competitors or pricing or supply chain shortages or new products or, you know, new management teams, mergers, acquisitions, there's a million reasons why things get disrupted, and the less time you spend saying, 'woe is me' and the more time you spend saying 'well, what can I learn from this', how can I gain here, you know, what do I have to offer this new structure, organization, problem, whatever it is, you will win.
Stephany Lapierre
Wise words, I tell my team all the time, change is constant. If there's something that's guaranteed is that things are going to keep changing and change is always uncomfortable for everyone. Change is uncomfortable. But it's how, to your point, it's how you embrace it and seize the opportunity to learn from it and how can you leverage it to move forward and achieve, you know, different bigger things in your career.
“And what autonomous commerce means to us is the ability to bring buyers, suppliers, partners, things together in a self governing, multi-tenant, SAS platform for end to end B2B commerce. And so if you think about what's required in order to get autonomous commerce, there's a couple of key elements of that, one of which is data.”
- Jim Bureau, CEO of JAGGAER
Stephany Lapierre welcomes Jim Bureau, CEO of JAGGAER, to the show to discuss JAGGAER’s partnership with Tealbook. They explore Autonomous Commerce, how COVID shaped the buyer and supplier relationship, and how they are designing responses to customer’s demands for time to value in applications.
In this episode, learn more about:
- How covid accelerated the buyer and supplier relationship within the procurement ecosystem
- Exploring the concept of Autonomous Commerce, applying lessons learned from CRM to the buy-side of business
- Why time to value is the most impactful KPI for procurement organizations
Jim Bureau came to JAGGAER most recently from the CRM space, and he shares with Stephany how the impact he saw made in customer service in the CRM space is what he’s now applying to the spend management space. Jim explains how he is working to shift spend management to Autonomous Commerce, which he defines as the ability to bring buyers, suppliers, and partners together in a self-governing multi-tenant SaaS platform. He stresses the customer’s need for time to value in usage.
Stephany and Jim reveal how the demands in their respective worlds - from procurement issues to collecting data to scalability - led them to their respective innovations and current partnership. Information, records, requirements, and automation are all necessary in enabling faster onboarding, better supplier experience, and reducing redundancy. This episode sheds light on truly exciting developments between Tealbook and JAGGAER.
About Jim Bureau:
As Chief Executive Officer, Jim Bureau is responsible for JAGGAER’s overall vision to transcend customer experience by providing intuitive and intelligent spend management solutions that allow JAGGAER clients to transform their supply chain. He brings more than 25 years of leadership experience, with his most recent role as Executive Vice President, leading JAGGAER’s Global Sales & Marketing initiatives. Jim came to JAGGAER from Verint Systems/ KANA Software where he was in the role of Senior Vice President. As an executive with KANA software Jim played a key role in successfully growing the company as it was acquired by Verint Systems for $514 million.
Prior to Verint/ KANA, Jim held leadership roles at Pegasystems, Shared Health, and Oracle Corporation.
He also holds a B.S. degree from Georgia Institute of Technology.
Links:
Stephany Lapierre - TealBook: website | twitter | linkedin | youtube | instagram
JAGGAER
Jim Bureau on LinkedIn
Transcription:
Katherine McCleery
Welcome to Data Unleashed, a podcast that brings you insights from procurement's most innovative visionaries. Alongside incredibly brilliant guests, show host Stephany Lapierre explores the power of data, how it challenges us, and how you can challenge the status quo. You'll be inspired, but more importantly, you're getting actionable advice in every conversation that will help you unleash the power of data in your own organization.
Katherine McCleery
Welcome to the show, we're on episode three of Data Unleashed. I've got Steph Lapierre of TealBook here with me. I'm Katherine McCleery. And today's guest is a special one to TealBook. Steph, let us know who we've got on today.
Stephany Lapierre
Well we're talking to Jim Bureau, he's the CEO of JAGGAER and Jim and I got to know each other over the last couple of years. JAGGAER had approached us a couple of years ago to better understand the vision and what we were working on and our position in the market. And we have a lot of partners, but he was definitely at the forefront of looking at how can data contribute to his vision of autonomous commerce. And what's interesting about Jim is that it's the first time that he's been in procurement. Prior, he's been a CEO and an executive with lots of experience, and prior to that he was working more on the other side, on the sell side. And there's a lot of parallels that we see that's migrated from sales side to buy side, which is procurement, over the last decade that we can learn from. And both him and I agree that when you look at what happened just over a decade ago, Salesforce came out, suddenly this, you know, this cloud based CRM system was going to fix customer data, everyone was going to have access to the customer source of truth. And in reality, it made it easier to implement, it made it easier to get all the updates versus on premises, but actually, the data didn't get really good unless humans, people, employees, maintain the data. And what we saw as these newcomer platform, as technology evolved, that were focused on aggregating, collecting information on businesses, in a way that they could feed that data into Salesforce to improve things like contact information. And as contact information became more automated, it improved sales and marketing outcome and business development. And that's where Jim, his lens came, like 'Hey, when I entered this new world of procurement, I was shocked to see how far behind the technology stack and the innovation versus on the revenue generating side that has already been over a decade'. So what can we learn and apply from what happened on the sell side? And how can we migrate this to the buy side, to enable procurement teams to be as agile, automate the things that are tactical and low value, so that we can focus on more strategic drivers. And to his point, how do we get, you know, the seat at the table is by delivering value and by contributing to those core business objectives. And so our visions really marry what's been done in procurement, building software solution to collect in workflow processes. And that's been done well, and there's a lot of competitors, and it's a pretty crowded space. Where he's taking JAGGAER is more on this, how can we further automate some of these processes to make it more autonomous? And then how do we bring data to ensure that, you know, the things about collecting information - asking suppliers to populate their profile, asking employees to validate, you know, manually, or collect records manually - how can we bypass this so we can marry the best in breed of software solution with the best in breed of data platform. And so our partnership with JAGGAER is one that's been very successful. Lots of excitement on both sides, lots of success story of customers that have now embraced this marriage between the software to autonomous commerce vision, and what they're delivering to their customers to TealBook's vision on autonomously enriching supplier data. To remove a lot of the manual process to collect, enrich, distribute data, and also to reduce the burden on suppliers to maintain the same information across multiple portals. And so our long term vision is very similar. How can we make the experience easier for suppliers? How can we remove this barrier that has been put upon them to bring this, like, they call it portal fatigue, right? So if suppliers are not coming into a portal, they're not putting the information, and you don't have other ways to autonomously enrich the information in the portal, and you're going to build your transformation and you're going to make decisions without having all this good data that can drive so much value out of your investment in systems.
Katherine McCleery
What I love about this conversation with Jim is that he really does bring that sell side perspective that procurement has been needing for years and years, and creates an incredible product on the procurement side with the same kind of vigor that the sales side has had for so long. So here's my favorite little snippet - and I won't give away too much because this is a great episode with Jim - but, you know, he mentioned, 'Hey, procurement hasn't changed all that much', as a CPO why do you have a seat at the board table now? And he said, 'Well, because it's impacting top line revenue, and they want to know how I'm going to, how we as procurement, are going to fix it.' So in a nutshell, he really gets into the core of that for procurement, with such an incredible set of experiences from years before. So I hope everyone enjoys this one. It's a deep dive. And I know that you and Jim really get into the partnership. But you also talk very high level about the future of procurement, and how this new approach, the CRM approach, essentially for autonomous commerce, is changing the way that we do procurement.
Stephany Lapierre
And if we go back to Elouise Epstein's spider chart, it actually makes what she's talking about real. Like, our partnership, and the fact that we can now enhance data in JAGGAER so that the customers of JAGGAER can benefit from better data on more attributes across all of their suppliers, it's really kind of more than making that vision more tangible. And it's so amazing that JAGGAER is one of the first ones who've embraced that partnership and that marriage, and we are driving a lot of value. And we're seeing a lot of growth and successes within a relationship and a partnership.
Katherine McCleery
All right. Well, without further ado, let's jump right into that interview with Jim.
Stephany Lapierre
So Jim Bureau, I'm super excited to have you on the Data Unleashed podcast. This came about during COVID, where I was connecting with customers, thought leaders, partners, and we're having such fantastic conversations. And I thought, not because of what I had to say, but more what I was hearing, especially that things were happening so fast, that I thought your industry would love to hear these types of conversations. It took about two years to finally bring this up to life, you know, busy growing a fast-growing company. But we finally put our act together and started to host these conversations. I'm particularly excited to have you, Jim. First, we got to know each other a couple of years ago. I think from a culture perspective, too, I see a lot of familiarity. I know your team, you've got a great team. There's great energy. Also that we've been exploring how can we partner together and really be part of this autonomous commerce that you're building with JAGGAER? So let's take a step back. We'd love to hear more about your career. What brought you to become the CEO of JAGGAER? And we'll go from there.
Jim Bureau
Yeah, sure. Thanks, Stephany. First of all, thank you for having us, it's always great to chat with you. It's been a good run up until, you know, our engagement here, which has been terrific over the course of the last few years. Just quick background on myself. I mean, I've been in enterprise software space for, sadly, it's going on 30 years now, in a variety of different roles and positions, I sort of covered everything from ERP to business process management. Most recently coming from the CRM space. The CRM space was of particular interest. Because if you think about why people engage in CRM, it's really to make an impact on the customer experience and how people are interacting with one another in order to, you know, achieve a certain objective. And I come upon JAGGAER, which is in what has historically been known as the spend management space, and honestly, when I look at it, that space has been there for quite some time, it's going on almost 30 years now. And needless to say, the customer experience, in my opinion, wasn't really where it needed to be. And so, you know, we've come on board and really tried to shift from this notion of spend management to autonomous commerce. And what autonomous commerce means to us is the ability to bring buyers, suppliers, partners, things together in a self governing multi-tenant SAS platform for end to end B2B commerce. And so if you think about what's required in order to get autonomous commerce, there's a couple of key elements of that, one of which is data. Right? I can't automate anything if I don't have the appropriate data, it's available to me when and where I need it, so that I can apply machine learning to it, apply artificial intelligence to it, and scale things. Hence, the introduction to TealBook and how we got introduced to one another. So you guys, I believe, have the same goals and objectives, which are how do you automate and bring things at scale with supplier management and buyers together so that they can transact business in a much more efficient manner? And that's how I ended up at JAGGAER and we're excited to really change the world to autonomous commerce.
Stephany Lapierre
I find it super interesting that you come from the sell side and we'll probably talk about this a little bit. But the sell side, to your point, was much more advanced. Right? We're talking Salesforce is - I don't actually know when Salesforce was born - but the focus on enabling sales and marketing team to make better decisions that would significantly impact with top line revenue is so far behind on the buy side. And we see now a lot more excitement in the last, I'd say, three to five years around how the buy side is catching up and started thinking about better buyer experience, better supplier experience, autonomous information. But I'd love to hear, sort of, as a CEO of JAGGAER, you're coming into 27 year old company, right, who has been through a lot of transition, what has been that experience and what's the biggest lift to get to that autonomous commerce vision?
Jim Bureau
I love going out and talking to customers because you get to hear sort of first person real world events that are happening. And one of the things that every one of our buyers struggle with is, you know, this space has been here for quite a while. And it's actually quite amazing to me that this day and age, you know, what inevitably, they all come back with is, I put the application in, and I've got, take your pick 50,000 / 60,000, some cases, 100,000 suppliers that I needed to get from point A to point B, with clear, accurate, updated information. And they struggle with that. And ultimately, what our goal is, if we're going to help those both buyers and sellers have a better, tighter relationship that is automated wherever possible, we need to be able to scale it so that they can actually work with the volume of suppliers that people are seeing today. You guys have probably seen it as much as we have, you know, there's been quite a big shift that's occurred over the course of the last 18 to 24 months, around the number of suppliers that buyers are engaging with. And a lot of it's come down to, you know, where the market has evolved to in dealing with supply chain issues. And so the real question there becomes, how do you scale? How do you scale it so that you can, in turn, automate it?
Stephany Lapierre
Well, that's the old thing, right? My inspiration for TealBook came in the early days where large Fortune 100 company was saying, like, we want to reduce our supply base by 50%. I think that was the goal for the last, like, 20 years. And the reason they were doing this is because it was costly to maintain all this information on suppliers. So there's a cost to maintain the record, whatever, whoever decides what the cost is, we've seen from $500 to $2,400 per record, which is a lot of money, especially if you have 100,000 suppliers. So it's been a logical thing to say, especially if you want to leverage existing contracts so that you can get economies of scale, it's kind of the old way. But what we've seen in some of the articles that you guys have published recently is, like ,that diversification. And the scalability. It doesn't matter how many suppliers you have, right, as long as you have a well distributed, diversified supplier base. And if you can automate a big part of that, then the costs of maintaining records should actually not be getting in the way of that scalability.
Jim Bureau
We actually did an article for the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago. And the reason why they were talking to us, is we noticed a pretty material shift in how people are going about and building their supply chains. And part of the reason that came about, if you're a CPO today, think about the things that you're having to wrestle with, right? So you've got COVID, if you're in China not only do you have COVID, but you have lock down. So, like, physically nobody is in the plant, building, anything or, for that matter, shipping anything, which raises the issue of transportation logistics. So not only can I not get the product out, once I do get the product out, what we've found is it's taking twice as long to get product from Asia Pacific to the US today. And it's costing me twice as much to do it. And so if you're a CPO, you throw that on top of the geopolitical issues that are arising, inflation that's arising, ESG, right? So they're trying to do things responsibly now, to where, you know, they're tracking carbon emissions. And they need to know that. And so what we're seeing is a shift from organizations who have been consolidating on a global scale to nearshoring. And part of the reason they're shifting to more of a nearshore is, you know, at least in our space, we do a lot of work with manufacturers and consumer goods that need to have things produced, and those are goods and services that go directly related to top line revenue. And when you can't get your top line revenue goods in the hands of your customers, it has a direct impact on your revenue.
Stephany Lapierre
And that's when the executive team really care about procurement.
Jim Bureau
That's exactly right. So then all of a sudden, it's not really procurement, it's supply chain. And it's-
Stephany Lapierre
Survival.
Jim Bureau
Yes, it's survival. Precisely, right. And it's a totally different conversation. And it's interesting you bring that up, because I've asked people like, hey, procurement hasn't changed all that much. Why, as the CPO, why do you have a seat at the board table now? They're like, because it's impacting top line revenue. And they want to know how we're going to fix it. So you nearshore and what's happening was when they're nearshoring, they're not so much severing those previous relationships, is they're growing those relationships so that they can have more resiliency in their supply chain. And when you do that, you need to be able to manage the volume at scale, which is, hence where TealBook comes into play for us.
Stephany Lapierre
Well, it's building contingency. It's diversification. And then, as you pointed out, the kitchen sink of added requirements has been thrown at procurement over the last couple of years since COVID and it's not going to stop. It feels like it's just the beginning. And when I talk - and I was in the UK last week speaking at supply chain live - and you hear all the requirements that need to be collected, and what procurement teams are doing, and when you ask, like, do you even have good quality, complete supplier data on your tier one suppliers today? And what are the challenges of collecting that information and having visibility, they all laugh, they all smile, because they know it's really hard. So we haven't quite figured out, like, how to get tier one visibility across our existing supplier base. And now we're being asked to expand, to be able to find contingent suppliers, to diversify and redesign our supply base. We're being asked to figure out how to standardize and report on ESG requirements that the board cares a lot about. So, you know, you're seeing the added requirements. And my empathy with procurement is where do you even begin on this journey, if you haven't had quite the opportunity to get your hands on it, and this is every single organization in the world, there's nobody that's uniquely, like, just doing this in an amazing way yet. Obviously, we're looking to change that and bring a lot more visibility in automation, and the way data is collected on supplier, that's what we're focusing on and spending a lot of the investment, and how can we feed that data to complement what JAGGAER is already working on? And you're collecting a whole series of other data that's incredibly useful for the buyers to understand trends, and being able to automate some of the decisions that they need to make to deliver on their business objectives.
Jim Bureau
Yes, absolutely. And we're seeing... it's just fascinating, over the course of the last 24 months, how those trends have shifted. The other thing that we're finding is, the speed at which the shifts are changing has changed drastically, right? It used to take quite a bit of time in order to identify a supplier, onboard a supplier, and then get them productive. And people are having to do that in a fraction of the time now.
Stephany Lapierre
100%. Onboarding, right, is so key to business outcome and figuring out how to do that faster and with better information so that you're reducing your risk, because risk is the other hot topic right now that everybody's talking about. How do you monitor risk, how do you stay on top of risk, and which risk? There's, like, a dozen different risks that you need to track. And so I want to talk a bit about our relationship because you and I have a similar sort of vision when it comes to the supplier experience. And so for one, our relationship, again, this is a journey where we are feeding some records that we're autonomously collecting, that we have high quality, into JAGGAER, so that when customers are using JAGGAER, there's some records that are auto populated. Records are typically hard to find or hard to collect, especially when we're talking about small, diverse local businesses that they may not have the resources to maintain all these different portals. You know, the intent and the hope is that we can have an interchangeable data set. So as we're continuously to go on our journey to collect the completeness of supplier information, that we're able to feed more and more to JAGGAER, increasing time to value, increasing compliance and better outcome for customers who are using JAGGAER specifically. But on the flip side of this, we talk a lot about supplier experience, right, and being a good customer to supplier is becoming more and more important, especially when we're in a competitive environment, especially when there's pretty lofty goals around small diverse businesses, and you can't crush those businesses, you have to enable them and champion them and nurture them and make it easier to do business with them. And so those are all considerations, but in our vision - and I remember when we spoke, I don't know a year ago about this - is there an opportunity to have interchangeable information, and we're not there yet. This is, again, we're talking a bit more vision, but having the supplier coming to JAGGAER and being able to auto populate all their information that it's 80 to 95% quality, be able to make adjustment to those records, and then get that data to be redistributed into other modules or version.
Jim Bureau
Yeah, so you just hit a super hot button for us because one of the things that customers demand and expect today, is time to value. They don't want long implementations. Usually when you're paying a subscription model, they want to see value immediately. The other thing is they don't want to have redundancy. So if I'm a supplier, I want to be able to go update things one time and have it propagate. At JAGGAER we did a study - we've got approximately 5 million suppliers on our network - and we did a study a few years back with those suppliers and interviewed him as a supplier, what are your pain points to working with the buyer community? And likewise, we did the same thing with the buyers and got that feedback as well. And the biggest stumbling block in that interaction was redundancy and having to do the same thing multiple times.
Stephany Lapierre
And we can relate to day to day ourselves, right?
Jim Bureau
Absolutely.
Stephany Lapierre
I got three kids, I go to eight different camps and activities in school, like, can you build something for me to just automate that process?
Jim Bureau
Yes, yeah, you go to the doctor, I swear, I just filled this out yesterday at the doctor across the street. So yeah, absolutely. And so people don't want to do that. They don't like redundancy. And it goes everything from, you know, in our world, I don't want to be redundant on filling out RFPs, I just filled the same one out yesterday. I don't want to be redundant in filling out supplier information, I don't want to be redundant in filling out payment information. We talked a little bit about, you know, the growth of people's supplier base, you gotta have to do that at scale. And you can't scale that in today's world without automating the process.
Stephany Lapierre
Oh, not again, with the number of requirements that are upon procurement to keep track of, to report, the benchmark to consider in sourcing events or the lifecycle. And we do have a slide on this, where you're looking at this lifecycle of a supplier, and how many functions of the organization and impacts and poor data can cripple a lot of those activities, and, frankly, the ROI into the software solution that works at capacity on the IRR when the data is good, right? If you have data gaps in the software, you know, I would say discount the software by - I don't know, you probably know this - but I'd say 50% maybe. And so getting better data in an autonomous way. And I think the flaw that I see, and you and I've talked a little bit about this, and I think it'd be interesting for the audience to hear, is the analogy to Salesforce. Right? And we're, 15 years ago, do you want to tell it, you go ahead, you tell the story.
Jim Bureau
Coming from the CRM space, one of the things that everybody struggles with is how do you get a sales rep to, like, fill out data? They just don't like to do it, they're not very good at it, it's not accurate, it's not updated. Well, imagine, right, a world where you can actually pre-populate the data, not only could you pre-populate the data but then you could hand it over to the prospect, or buyer in this case, and go, Hey, do I have this accurate? And let me allow you to self service so that you can make sure that I'm getting, like, wouldn't that be the panacea of sales? Now, flip that analogy over to what we're dealing with in autonomous commerce. Right? And so that's why this becomes so incredibly important to us. Because I believe that we actually have the ability - or we're getting closer, let me rephrase that - we're getting closer to the ability to sort of get to that panacea of being able to automate that in a much more efficient manner than we historically have.
Stephany Lapierre
And there's two things, there's the automation of a workflow, right? And then there's the automation of the task itself. And that's where a lot of our research has been, could you make the supplier come in and do the exception versus the rules? Right? Can they see this pre-populated profile with all the information that is available, that we've been able to collect, and we've able to enhance through having, you know, historical data, possibly, or even insights and ties a supplier to see more value than just filling up, you know, a portal.
Jim Bureau
Exception handling is relatively easy, but getting them to fill out a, you know, a 30 minute form, a little more challenging.
Stephany Lapierre
It sounds like with the CPO today, I was a judge at a digital procurement world and there's all these pretty cool solutions that are coming to the market that JAGGAER's not touching, right? There's a plethora of niche solutions that are going kind of far into circular economy and plastic marketplace and things like that. And so when I look at, you know, for ESG specifically, if you were to - depending on how you're going to be building requirements - you may end up with 5 to 25 different niche solution that you'd have to kind of bolt together on top of your SDP. Right? And so when I start asking those providers who give you 100 reasons why the suppliers will come to their solution, like, how are you getting the data and they tell you that the suppliers are going to come in and do this by the third company, the CPOs on the judging panel start catching on, they start asking the same thing, like, Hey, how are you going to get the data? And then suddenly it's like the light bulb. Wow, I've got, like, you know, five, I've got my legacy systems, my core platform, I'm going to buy these niche solution, but then - what? I'm going to ask my suppliers to also come to these other providers versus just being able to connect it to your legacy systems, to your core solution and be able to optimize the information across that. That's sort of the future state when we're looking at this growing ecosystem. And I don't think JAGGAER thinks, like, you're the only platform that the enterprise will be using, right? It's a core platform. And there's a very strong value proposition, but it's part of an ecosystem.
Jim Bureau
I think that, though, the enterprise software space has tried to capture market share by saying, we're going to create a well functional, closed environment, that as long as you have our platform, things will be fantastic and great. Well, then there's a reality, right? The reality that even if I wanted to do that, I'm gonna go acquire someone tomorrow, who's going to have a different platform, a different environment, and guess what, best laid plans, you know, need to be altered, like, overnight. And so one of the things that we've really been attuned to at JAGGAER is, we absolutely would love people to have our entire platform and yes we think it's optimal when that happens, but we also know that that's not oftentimes not the reality. And so creating an open environment where people can pull in different pieces of requirements, right? You know, if you're working in the pharmaceutical space, right, there are certain things that you need to be able to pull into that mix. You work in manufacturing, there's all sorts of different niche environments which you pull in. One of the ways that we connected with you guys was this notion of creating an app store where it's easy for someone to go and go, yes, I need to be able to pre-populate my suppliers. What's the easiest way for me to do that? I can go plug TealBook in and it just works, right? Because that's what their experiences in the consumer space are now, right? So people have that expectation, and they should have that expectation in the B2B world. It's no different.
Stephany Lapierre
Yeah, when you look at the architecture of today, it's just been very disparate. And to your point, so end to end or all one platform, that's changed, and there's no going back, right? And so I think living in that ecosystem is so important for companies, legacy companies, especially, like, you look at JAGGAER has been around for 27 years, is how do you evolve? How do you create the best value for your customers? And how do you evolve into this ecosystem? Which we're super happy to play a part of that. Anything else that we should know? Where's JAGGAER heading? What's exciting? Other than our partnership, of course.
Jim Bureau
Yeah, we have the TealBook partnership, which has been fantastic. We've been working together for, you know, several months, or maybe even a year now. But we've formalized it, making it easier for the customer. So we're super excited about that.
Stephany Lapierre
And just to clarify, we are pushing certificates. So if you guys wondering like what is TealBook and JAGGAER doing, the journey starting with diversity certificates, which we autonomously can enrich. So at a scale speed that it's very hard to depend on suppliers to come and put their certificate in a portal. So baseline, and then we're continuing to enrich their profile. Because I believe we are enhancing discovery. Hopefully, we are doing that at some point. And then, obviously, to have the plugin to auto populate JAGGAER supplier record is sort of the dream. So we're going to keep working towards that.
Jim Bureau
Right, right. No, that's right. People will be able to actually see this. We have our user conference coming up in October in Nashville, Tennessee.
Stephany Lapierre
Great town. We'll be there with flying colors.
Jim Bureau
Yeah, nationals that happen in place these days. But yeah, we're super excited about that. You know, we've got some really exciting things coming around the autonomous commerce that really will close the gap between that buyer experience and the supplier experience. TealBook, certainly one of those being able to close the loop on RFP issuance, as well as responses to buyers and sellers. So we're excited.
Stephany Lapierre
We're super excited to continue to expand our partnership. And so, Jim, such a pleasure seeing you again, as a CEO looking at someone who had such a successful career to be able to scale a company so successfully in different sectors is, you know, very inspiring. And so I hope to continue to learn from you and make our partnership a great success.
Jim Bureau
Well, thank you for the invitation. It's always a pleasure to chat with you and look forward to seeing you in Nashville.
Stephany Lapierre
We'll be there. Okay, thanks, Jim.
“Fundamentally, every supply chain disruption we have today is because of design choices we made 10 or 20 years ago. And so if we don't start to change the thinking for the next 10 to 20 years now, we're just going to keep pushing that timeline out. And we're going to go from one disruption to another, all we're going to be is the disruption responders. And I want to get us beyond that as a profession.”
- Dr. Elouise Epstein, Kearney
Dr. Elouise believes that suppliers need benefits translated to them, and indeed that in the future all our data should benefit us. She is emphatic about data and analytics literacy being at the forefront of our media and our minds. Do consumers know how much of our data is being collected and how it’s being used? Assuming they do is a fallacy.
Having just finished a book on the complexity of digital procurement, Dr. Elouise is already many steps ahead into formulating her next book. She won’t rest on the advancements of today when she is so aware of the problems tomorrow will bring. And she has strategic thoughts on how data can address issues within risk management and sustainability that she debates with Stephany.
Show host Katherine McCleery brings this foundational data discussion with TealBook Founder Stephany Lapierre and Dr. Elouise Epstein to listeners, including conversation on:
- The challenge of managing and automating ever-changing supplier data without relying on portals, a corporate IT function, or an S2P
- Where the greatest risk to an enterprise lies and how a deeper understanding of third party data is the key to future-proofing
- How procurement can adopt digital and break a massive problem into bit-sized pieces through incremental, tactical planning and open-sourcing strategy through real-time community engagements
- The true vision of data unleashed is when actions start changing based on more informed decision-making beyond procurement and throughout an enterprise
About Dr. Elouise Epstein:
Dr. Elouise Epstein is a digital futurist and Kearney partner based in San Francisco. She has more than two decades of experience working as a trusted adviser with clients to develop digital procurement and supply chain strategies.
Known for her dry wit, historical anecdotes, and direct tone, Dr. Epstein is a frequent presenter on digital procurement. She is author of the newly released book Trade Wars, Pandemics, and Chaos: How Digital Procurement Enables Business Success in a Disordered World and is already working on a follow-on book.
Links:
Stephany Lapierre, TealBook: website | twitter | linkedin | youtube | instagram
Dr. Elouise Epstein on LinkedIn
“Trade Wars, Pandemics, and Chaos: How Digital Procurement Enables Business Success in a Disordered World” by Dr. Elouise Epstein
Dr. Epstein spider graph
Transcription:
Katherine McCleery 00:01
Welcome to Data Unleashed, a podcast that brings you insights from procurement's most innovative visionaries. Alongside incredibly brilliant guests, show host Stephany Lapierre explores the power of data, how it challenges us, and how you can challenge the status quo. You'll be inspired, but more importantly, you're getting actionable advice in every conversation that will help you unleash the power of data in your own organization. Hey, Steph, welcome to episode number two. How are you?
Stephany Lapierre 00:39
Yes. Hi, Katherine. I'm so excited today about this episode with Elouise. The famous, the disruptive, the opinionated Elouise Epstein from Kearney. She's a friend, she's a thought leader, she's an pusher of the envelope across our industry. You know, I'm just so grateful for the opportunity every time I have the opportunity to spend time with her. I learn something, I'm challenged on something, I challenge her. It's always super fun.
Katherine McCleery 01:05
I was about to say if you didn't place the label challenger on her and you, honestly, the conversation that I heard, even in the pre interview and on recording day, I love the back and forth that the two of you have, how you respect each other's thoughts and opinions and approach. While not agreeing on everything. I think that is so healthy and it's fun to watch, it's fun to see the two of you - I don't want to say spar - but it's fun to see the two of you take on an issue with different sides of the coin. For everyone listening, if you haven't figured out from our comments so far, we're going to be interviewing Dr. Elouise Epstein. I'm Katherine McCleery, I'm co host here, and Steph Lapierre is the CEO and Founder of TealBook. She's the one sharing access to all of these great interviews. And this one, this one's a great one. I don't want to say that conversations with Dr. Elouise are my favorite, but they're up there. I liked how she really brought the mission of data foundation, what TealBook is doing right to the center of what she's trying to solve. And so we talked about the spider chart, we talked about future state, and what data unleashed means to her. So I'm not going to give it away. That's towards the end of the episode, all of you are going to have to tune in to that to find out what data unleashed means to her and where she sees the future state of procurement. But Steph, any other thoughts on that episode that you want to share before we jump right in?
Stephany Lapierre 02:44
I become friends with Elouise quite a few years ago, and you'll hear that in the podcast, how we developed a relationship. But I spent many hours, sometimes on Sunday, I remember one particular Sunday afternoon where I walked like 100 times around - maybe more - around my backyard just talking to her. Because we were challenging each other's thoughts. She was really trying to understand how I was thinking and I was really trying to understand where she was going. You never know in our conversation where it's going to take us. And this is actually why we brought Katherine as a co host because Katherine's like 'Hold on a second. Like, let's bring this back to Earth.' Let's make this tangible, and actually that people can understand or can bring back to their actual objective because we can go kind of a little crazy. She goes way out. Like I always think that I'm a little bit ahead of the market in terms of how we're thinking about data, how we're thinking about digital transformation, but she's like, I don't know, she's in another wave. Where as soon as I catch her, she's already now throwing, you know, something that's probably 10 years away from us. But what we've seen in the last couple of years is that things that would have taken 5 to 10 years have significantly accelerated because of all the market pressures, the investment coming in the space, the disruptions, the growing requirements. And so what she's presenting that maybe 10 years, or that you may not agree with, is where the future is going. I think it's something that you should know about and you should think about and start, you know, integrating as you're building your transformation, because there's some things in the future that you should start thinking about applying now.
Katherine McCleery 04:21
Right. So I do a little bit of harnessing the vision between the two of you and bringing it back to Earth. Because, like you said, you get going and you get going fast.
Stephany Lapierre 04:31
And Elouise in many ways, has been such a driver for our position in the market. As we position ourselves as the supplier data foundation that powers the buy side digital enterprise. It came by watching and listening to her, and you'll hear the story of me sitting at ISM 5 years ago or so now, and she was presenting her first version of that echo system spider chart and going from, like, disparate data silos per software to a data cloud AI hub to fully integrated technology stack. And I think analysts when they're thinking about TealBook, we were building the data set to address use cases but the market was a bit confused. Because like, 'Well, are you supplier discovery? Are you supplier diversity? Are you knowledge, like, what are you?' And so we were in the original spider graph, we were in the outside with all the other providers. But when she presented this migration from siloed data into each software to this fully integrated technology ecosystem, I was like this is TealBook - in the middle, that AI hub and that data lake. And so we spend a lot of time dissecting this in the market, because the one thing that's very difficult when you're building a tech company in a new space as something that never existed, is defining that position. The market to understand what you're building. And it was probably the biggest challenge in building TealBook, is people didn't understand it initially. And so to be able to hang on to something that was now in front of me, on a slide deck, by someone that I respected, it gave us something to start really carving our market positioning around. And we're really fortunate, we didn't pay to be part of that ecosystem. This is all Elouise and the fact that she put us in the middle of that spider chart, when we were raising capital, it allowed the market to get really excited, investors to get really excited. And that's when we shifted from really focusing on use cases that could solve for, which made us look like a software provider, to a data platform and data foundation. And then she released that spider chart, it all kind of come together. A lot of the growth that we've seen in the past two and a half years is really with that positioning in the market. So she didn't do this for TealBook. But we were able to shape where the market was going up with how we were trying to articulate our value proposition and our position in the market. And, you know, the rest is sort of history, still happening, in the making.
Katherine McCleery 06:57
Yeah, I loved watching that. It was like seeing a category being built in real time. Very cool to watch. And I hope that the audience takes from this conversation, a little bit of that future thinking that Elouise provides. Let it soak in, challenge it, and consider the possibilities because she takes us, like you said Steph, about 10 years ahead. Anyways, enjoy this episode. We had a blast. I had a great time with Steph and Dr. Elouise, this is another great one.
Stephany Lapierre 07:31
Yeah, and I know there's a lot of fluff right now. Or it feels like there's a lot of fluff. I think what she's saying as the vision, and then what's tangible out of that vision that you can apply today. I think that's the message to me, is sort of what is she saying? There's so many great, fantastic nuggets that are applicable today. Yeah, and then get inspired because the vision and where she's heading is, I think, is right on.
Katherine McCleery 07:54
Excellent. All right, let's get right to it.
Katherine McCleery 07:57
Welcome, everybody, to our podcast Data Unleashed. I'm Katherine. I'm so excited today, we have such a fun show. Of course, Stephany Lapierre, CEO and Founder of TealBook is with us, and special guest Dr. Elouise Epstein. Welcome to the show.
Dr. Elouise Epstein 08:16
Thank you, I'm really excited to be here today.
Stephany Lapierre 08:19
Me too.
Dr. Elouise Epstein 08:20
Stephany, you're one of my favorite people in the world.
Stephany Lapierre 08:23
I was just gonna say exactly the same. We'll provide some more context of how we got to know each other.
Katherine McCleery 08:29
Give us the background between why you two are each other's favorite people.
Stephany Lapierre 08:35
So we met four or five years ago. TealBook was still in very early stages, and I was invited to participate in the ISN Thought Leadership Council. And I thought 'What a great opportunity'. And it was positioned as the most progressive people coming together in the industry, a blend of thought leaders, consultants, CPOs. And I thought, 'What a great opportunity to be in the middle of that conversation'. And so, I think the first one we had was in Phoenix. And not only it did, you know, deliver on this group of thought leaders, but it created friendships in the small group. I don't know what kind of magic potion happened in that room that time, but we all ended up not only exchanging a lot of thought provoking ideas, and there was a lot of heat and a lot of energy, and a lot of strong opinions about the future state of procurement. And I have some examples that I still remember in my brain of you and Marcel going at each other talking about the future state. What I love the most about this group is we've all stayed friends. And everyone, you know that you think Jamie Bliss to Charlotte de Brabandt to Tim Herod... Marcel, Marco, that group continued to progress in their careers. Like really all evolved in a way that we've all been very supportive of each other and watching each other's career grow. And it's just been a phenomenal opportunity to build these connections. And in my view, now, they've all become friends. And Elouise has certainly become a close friend. What got me more excited, so when we first connected, we exchanged and Elouise understood what I was building, or had some, you know, it was sort of an exciting moment of talking to someone that got it. I got to sit at a conference, I think that was in Houston for ISM and see you present that first sort of notion of the ecosystem and where we're moving from disparate system with disparate data into the future kind of close state that had this data lake AI foundation, and then to the future state, which is a fully integrated ecosystem with applications. And every possible way that I was trying to articulate TealBook, we were always put in this box because data uncovers a lot of use cases, and so we were seen as a software company that could do all these different things. So we were always positioned as this discovery, supplier diversity, supplier performance management, all these things. But when I saw the middle of this ecosystem that said data lake and AI hub, I was like, 'Well, that's TealBook'. And so it was sort of the first time that I saw someone in the industry that I respected, clearly identifying what I thought we were, but what the industry had not yet understood. And so that was a long time ago, think about that, and how far that ecosystem graph and we've come along. But that was the magic moment where I knew, 'Okay, this is what can hang our hat on' and we started defining ourself as the supplier data foundation that powers the buy side digital enterprise. But that all started with you articulating this visual, that I still have probably somewhere in my computer but definitely in my brain. Anyway. So that's how we met and got to exchange a lot of thought-provoking ideas. And, Katherine, I'm so happy you're here today, because even in the pre call we get hyped up so much on the future. And so Katherine was able to bring us back down to reality, what's actually conceptually real and applicable to today's environment. Anyway, I'm gonna pause here, I'd love, Elouise, to get your version of how we met.
Dr. Elouise Epstein 12:17
Well, and yeah, I want to say, I mean, that thought leadership council and we gotta give credit to Amanda Prochaska for bringing all of us together. It was a unique time in all of our careers, you had just started TealBook, I had just come up with this grand unified vision of the future. There were others in the team that were just starting to their current trajectories. Jamie and Jocelyn - Jamie Bliss and Jocelyn Stahl - I actually wrote about in my book as sort of this next generation people that are going to change procurement and be CPOs one day, and watching what Amanda's done, and Tim has done in his roles. I could go around that whole room - even Marcel, we've had some disagreements, but we've pushed each other to be better. And actually, I think, it goes both ways with Marcel. We have some very intense and passionate discussions. But you, Steph, really, when you saw it, and then you internalized my vision. And you were actually able to give me feedback and push me to be better at defining what I was talking about. And I think as you get older in your career, the number of people that are willing to give you critical and tough feedback dwindles, and it dwindles pretty rapidly, and you don't realize it until it's too late. And so to have somebody that is willing to challenge and say, 'Hey, this is great, but you're missing that. Go define that'. And at the beginning to 2021 you did that to me, and I think you were doing it in 2020, I just don't think I was listening.
Stephany Lapierre 14:02
Oh, you were. I remember a Sunday walking around my pool probably 150 times, you and I talking about some fundamental that I didn't necessarily agree. Right? So we debated certain topics and when your book came out, I had to actually pause. I didn't want to give you feedback right away. I knew my feedback would be incredibly biased to our approach. And I didn't want, necessarily, that to be the feedback. I didn't want to be self-centered around TealBook. But you've always been so open: every time I provided feedback, you want to understand it, that you agreed or not, I actually never knew. You take that opportunity to dig deeper. Although I do feel that now you've moved, you know, you're light years now ahead of where we were five years ago. And, because the market is evolving so fast, and what I saw is in the last two years, the acceleration of what may have taken 5 to 10 years to get to has reached, you know, a speed that we could have never anticipated before COVID. That's why I think your thinking is moving as fast as it is. But I have a hard time keeping up with you.
Katherine McCleery 15:03
What both of you are referencing is something that I think a lot of people in the procurement / supply chain communities are familiar with, but we aren't naming just yet. But Elouise's spider chart for Kearney. It is the famous spider chart. And it's gone through a couple phases. And so I remember seeing it the first time, that was one of my first exposures - well, not first - but in the first year or so of knowing about TealBook. And now we've seen, recently, a second rendition. So I'm curious, what are the major differences with this second round?
Dr. Elouise Epstein 15:39
Early on, I had this concept that we'd have this AI hub in the middle. We didn't have to define that because it was just enough to show that we had all these individual capabilities, and some abstract AI hub. And when I say it out loud, I cringe, because it's like, 'Oh my God, how did I not define that from the get go?' But what I was showing early on, is the amount of innovation and the amount of precision that was happening. Now that's gone from, like, I turned on the garden hose to I've turned on the firehose, and there are so many capabilities, so many startups coming. And that's why you see... and what I do map, is I map the innovation that's happening around the procurement value chain. And I always say read the labels. Labels are the procurement value chain deconstructed, because I don't like abstract, big lofty concepts, show me the exact capability, the exact skill I need. And the more solutions there are for individual capabilities and skills, that's of interest to me. So that's the one big change, is that we've gone from, you know, like eight capabilities, which was blowing people's mind back in 2017 and 2018, to at least 40 or 50, if not more, I've kind of lost track. So that's the one big one. And then the other is taking that AI hub concept and breaking that down into its component parts. Because what - and Steph is the one that challenged me on this, because she's saying I'm at the center, and I'm like, 'Wait, what is the center?' How can I tell TealBook or whoever, anybody else, if you're in the middle or not if I haven't defined it. So I've gone through and defined that you have to have a good user experience, a modern user experience, what has become the app store concept, the data foundation, and, of course, the intelligence. And even those four categories are going through their own iterations now, especially the intelligence one, and we can talk about that separately, but I'm getting folks that are saying, 'Hey, you know what, let's push on this intelligence concept, maybe there's more sort of beneath that.' And that's one of the things I'm working on right now.
Stephany Lapierre 18:01
When I saw it publish, it went along our thesis that the market's been sold by cloud-based technologies, that because technology were moving from on premise to the cloud, it was going to fix data. Right? And so our first slide of our investment deck is the big fat lie is that software fixes data. That's what we believe. And if we look back at Salesforce, it was also that promise of having a unified view of your customers. But it didn't mean, buying a cloud-based software, that you necessarily got good data. So our thesis has always been you should buy the software that you need, because you do need those workflow and those piece of functionality to go deeper into the lifecycle, right, or to meet some of the digital requirements of the organization. But you're going to have more and more options, and having optionality is a good thing, right? And you need to be able to buy best in class and have a more interchangeable agile technology stack. In order to do that, you need to connect the data, otherwise you're going to try to connect the systems to each other. And if you do that, you're going to be entering, you know, an endless sort of infrastructure that's going to be very expensive. And you're still assuming that the data in those software is good, which it's never the case. And so that's why, you know, when when we saw your eco, and we were just in the fundraising process, we were saying this about ourselves, but no one was pointing the finger back at us and when your chart... Which we did not pay, I did not know this was coming out, but it was sort of the perfect timing because you defined that data, the notion of data foundation, which I know now is going through other reiteration, but it was on point with how we were positioning ourself in the market.
Dr. Elouise Epstein 19:44
Well, and I would add is it becomes almost the most important piece, this data foundation. The other three areas are equally important for different reasons. But the big lie, as I have taken the previous generation of providers, is that if you went with a closed loop suite, you would get that data integrity across all the apps. And that proved to be a colossal lie. And I've been very vocal about that. And so now, companies like TealBook and others, are focused on this core problem, which then in turn makes you 10 times more valuable than any transactional system. Probably 100 times more valuable. You are the most valuable piece in that puzzle, because everything else becomes commoditized, because the data is exactly the piece that you solve.
Stephany Lapierre 20:37
And I often say, when I talk to CPOs, because there's this notion right now, 'Well, I'm going to build the data lake, I'll build my own data foundation'. Recently, I was in Europe talking to a team that built a TealBook, internally. You're like, 'Arrgh', you know, we've been talking to them for five years, but they went and they started building the infrastructure for it. But the way that they've done it is pull the data out of their existing systems into a data lake. And I understand the notion of why you would want to do that and why would that make sense, but unfortunately, you're assuming, again, that the data in those systems is good. And if you're pulling together incomplete, duplicate, you know, messy data, there's so much insight you could generate out of it, very limited. And they put AI and they hired data scientists to start looking and mining this data. And you're like, 'Well, how much insight are you really getting out of it', because AI requires a lot of data, or a lot of users, or both, and, you know, in our space we just don't have millions of users like in the consumer space. We have very limited users. And if you're limiting to your data out of your system, again, sure you'll get some trends, some intelligence, but it will be very subpar because you're paralyzed by having limited amount of information. Yeah, so that's why I think having more access to more data, and then more users through that technology ecosystem, becomes really interesting. Because if you can learn from it, and inject additional intelligence, additional attributes that you don't have to manually collect and maintain, then that opens up all the possibilities. But I know we've had some debates on a lot of the application store.
Dr. Elouise Epstein 22:13
Yeah, I mean, because you're getting at a fundamental premise - is we go forward, having that data about the supplier, let's talk about supplier specifically, although it could be more broadly third parties, but that supplier data, the mistake everybody makes when they do it internally is that they assume they can do it better. But I always argue that the network effect is going to be much better. Every company could build their own LinkedIn. But you're not going to motivate employees to keep all of their information up to date, there has to be a payoff. And for the suppliers, this is what's missing in the broader piece, well two pieces. One is, we don't look at the supplier experience at all, we're always just 'Hey, come to come to one of 1000 portals and put your information here again', and I just wrote that article about the fullness of supplier experience management. But the other piece is, that even if you solve that, like a supplier record, just onboarding that information, is only a fraction of it. That's why IT groups think they can solve it, but they can't. Because you're not actually managing a record like you would with your material golden records or your product golden records, those don't really change. But suppliers are constantly in flux. They are constantly being acquired, their risk ratings are changing, their ESG capabilities are changing, their ownership structure is changing. And there's all kinds of other things that change. So you need to not only collect the information, which is what supplier information management is, but you need to enrich it. And then you actually need to do things with it, whether it's a transaction or a risk signal or ESG signal. And this is not something that corporate IT can do. This is something that you have to partner with the supplier, and do what I think you all have done very well, is automate this collection of the information and they can streamline that. Because it's a massive problem that takes a lot of resources to solve the problem. And you just can't do that with an IT group or a bunch of data scientists.
Stephany Lapierre 24:30
Or the STP by themselves because that's what they've claimed for a long time is that they could do it. If I think back in the early days of TealBook, we had built just like everyone else. Like, we had built a software where we could ingest a master data, and we could invite the suppliers to come and claim their profile. That was the TealBook way seven years ago. And what we found out is that suppliers were just not coming. Even if we had this debatably critical mass, have enough customers to entice the suppliers to come, they would still not come at the speed and the scale that was required. And the information that they would be putting in would be fairly limited to what they need to put in.
Dr. Elouise Epstein 25:06
What's the supplier want? They want to get paid, and they want more work. That's it. You know, your risk management initiatives, your ESG initiatives, your supplier doesn't care. Your collaboration initiatives, most of the time, what does that actually lead to for them? They put in a bunch of information and they, you know, never hear back or you never take their ideas? Or even if you do, you might hire a different supplier to do that. And even if we could solve that, then there's this whole issue of how many sourcing events do you run with these folks, and you're just including them to get that third bid of three bids in a buy? Or, like, what burden are you putting on your suppliers without even realizing it? Because you're following quote/unquote best practices in procurement? And I think this is especially for tier one, but I think tier one, we do this probably implicitly and pretty good collectively as a profession. But it's tier two, we could debate that.
Stephany Lapierre 26:06
I was just gonna say it's so hard to take tier one, we haven't solved for that, and you're going to tiering visibility.
Dr. Elouise Epstein 26:12
Right. But if you get to tier two and tier three, forget it. I mean, we're not even looking at that and that's one of the big big problems, especially as we look at it, because we're never looking at it from the supplier point of view.
Stephany Lapierre 26:24
Well, I think tiering visibility, which is becoming a requirement, right, which can unlock a ton of value and also risk mitigation, is challenging. I said that on stage a couple of weeks ago, we're talking about how difficult it is to collect basic information about your tier one suppliers at scale, like that's a problem in itself. And you ask any CPOs, do you have good, complete supplier data across your tier one today? They all smile, they don't have it. Now we're asking them for tier two, for tier three, so we can map this out, and that's a really big challenge. Because even the solutions today that I'm hearing that are focusing on the tiering and the mapping of the supply chain, it's still just focus on one potential element, being risk. And it could be also a standalone solution, so that you can have some visibility, but still doesn't give you the raw data that you need to then leverage, you know, that information based on what you're reporting, or your corporate objective, or your system setting. I think that's a big, big challenge, and I can only imagine what all the added requirements that are being put on procurement today, with all the noise, all the technology, all the methodology that are being suggested, how confusing, right? How difficult would it be for someone like Tim Herod, a CPO Albermarle, to go into transformation, or any other CPOs thinking how they're going to leverage today's environment to achieve digital procurement success.
Dr. Elouise Epstein 27:53
The greatest risk to any enterprise comes through the third parties. Most employees, they gotta lock down, like everybody goes through training, everybody gets sort of secured laptops, and you can sort of cascade that down to contractors and, you know, temp labor, debatably. But third party risk management is, like, we talk about it, but we're not doing it. And it comes back to this data problem. We don't even understand the totality of our place. If you have 50,000 suppliers, even 30,000 suppliers, you're not managing 30,000 suppliers. I'm sorry. And I have some clients with 100,000 suppliers, but you're not managing 100,000 suppliers. So we have to stop deluding ourselves to say that we are actually, we have some handle on this. We should be going to bed, like, with massive anxiety. I go to bed with massive anxiety and it's not even my direct problem. And so our greatest risks come from these third parties, but also our greatest opportunities, whether it's innovation or ESG. And we can't find, we can't transact, we can't figure out what the risk is, or the opportunity is. Because we just don't have the data to either illuminate all the different suppliers and what's going on, or to find the capabilities. And that's what drives me crazy.
Katherine McCleery 29:19
Okay, so I'm going to bring this conversation from 500 feet up, down. You're speaking in such visionary concepts, but there are people like me listening who want to know, okay, so we know there's a data problem, there's a supplier data problem, there's a huge challenge to be solved. There's an ecosystem that incorporates supplier data, and there's all these moving parts. How do we do this thing? How do we make a change? And I know that's a huge loaded question. But I think that that might be what some of us are thinking as we hear these conversations. 'Well okay, now how do I do this?' How do I move forward from, like, a large suite or maybe a disjointed ecosystem? What's our first step?
Dr. Elouise Epstein 30:14
So you could see exactly why I love Steph though, because we talk, like, we will talk for hours like this, at this level. And nobody else listening, just on and on and on. I'm sure our spouses are like 'Will you two shut up.' So that question, though, is a great question because that's why I wrote the book, is because at a certain point we have to actually define what we're talking about and come up with a plan to execute this. My current book was, how do you do this digital transformation? How do you adopt digital and break the big massive problem into very bite sized chunks, and that's what I attempted to do, whether or not I was successful, everybody can choose for themselves. I just made it available to everybody. And so what you do is you break the problem down in its component parts. And I think the other piece that I did, specifically in the book, is to highlight people that have done this, that are doing this, to say that, you know, this is possible, this is real, we don't have to, doesn't have to be, in fact, it should not be a massive effort. We should measure progress in three to six week increments. Because if we're waiting months and months and years and years for the value, it'll never come. And that's what the previous generation, we got wrong in the previous generation, myself included. So it's much more tactical and practical. And it's very much in the 'try before you buy' kind of era. And so I think that's my first piece. But also, the other piece that I highlight is that we collectively are in a much better community. And I talk a lot about the procurement foundry. There's other communities that have put that, I think, since the pandemic, that's one of these big things is that we're all sharing information. And we're all helping each other out in a way that we didn't before. And I think when you look at it from a community point of view, that helps everybody in their individual careers, on their digital transformations, or whatever other program they're trying to get started. And I think that's what, those two things are what's different.
Stephany Lapierre 32:23
I 100% agree on the community side because, you know, same procurement foundry when it was founded to what it is in such a short period of time. And I think there's a lot of resources now for procurement to be able to exchange the best practices, although there's still a lot of noise. And I would say, my conversation with a CPO last week, like he described nirvana, and I was like, 'Did he accomplish nirvana?' Like, did he actually do what he says, because he's describing this future state in a way that I was listening to him and then I had to talk to another CPO about it, and he was like 'No Steph, I'm talking to all CPOs right now, and everyone's facing some massive challenges'. No one has the answer. And I'm telling you, because I've been through every single, you know, community based roundtable of CPOs. And there's no one that has nirvana. It's a nice vision to sell to the market. But the challenges are real. And so I think those communities are good to be able to exchange best practices and understand what is working and what's realistic and tangible, versus what's visionary and nirvana-like that may not actually really exist.
Dr. Elouise Epstein 33:27
If I could drag consultants for a moment, I think that's the, we've looked to consultants to give us this insight. We've looked at it, and consultants, whether it's good or bad information, is lagging the market, because well, for a variety of reasons, by the time it actually gets published and out. Whereas I think the difference, the a-ha moment I had, is the communities, it's like real time, and now we saw this, and I wrote about this with procurement foundry, all of a sudden, at the beginning of the pandemic, you know, people are exchanging information on where they found N95 masks or transportation from here to there. Like, the information exchange was instantaneous. And that's carried through of, 'Hey, I need to go, we're inflation city oil right now, or whatever commodity, anybody have any ideas on this?' Or, 'Hey, what's your thoughts on IT labor sourcing', and seeing that exchange, real time exchange, of information point to point, oftentimes I think consultants used to be, just because of our positions, we used to be the arbiters of that information. And now, like I said, the a-ha mom was like, 'Whoa, that's all happening organically outside the four walls in a way we've never ever seen or conceived of before'.
Katherine McCleery 34:46
And this is a question for both of you. Would you say that data literacy is a huge gap to fill and is getting filled right now, is that the key here, in the next phase of procurement and supply chain success with data?
Dr. Elouise Epstein 35:04
Well, I'm glad you mentioned that because that's going to be one of the topics in my next book that I'm currently writing. Because I think we have a data and analytics literacy problem. And I don't say that pejoratively, I don't say it negatively, I'm not trying to create, you know, a problem that doesn't exist. I think as society, we have this problem. And I don't think we, at least in America, I don't think we understand just how pervasive our data is being used. It's being collected without our consent, it's been used without our benefit, on and on and on. And I don't think we fully understand how we as consumers are being manipulated by our own data, and the lack of attention around that. Like, among the issues that should be consuming the media cycle, that should be up there. And I don't think it's even a Top 20 problem for Congress or even beyond. And I think it's different in the EU, and certainly different in APEC, but I think what it points to me is that we have a data literacy problem and an analytics literacy problem. And I think understanding what algorithms do, how they operate, not just saying big data and AI, I hate hate hate buzzwords. But understanding that, and really, when you talk about data, what is data? Defining what it is, and making it applicable to people. I think most people in general don't have the requisite level of literacy that we need in this. And I'll tell you just a little anecdote. So, because I sit in a lot of meetings where there's a lot of charts and a lot of PowerPoint of charts, you watch people's eyes, and you can watch their physical cues and behavior, even on Zoom you can watch this, because the attention span, usually after the second or third chart, just wanes, just... And I bet if you were to test the comprehension, I think you'd find that people are not absorbing the data in the way that we think they are, we hope they are. I think a select few are. And I think they're assuming that everybody is.
Stephany Lapierre 37:17
Yeah, I would add to this when - and this is a conversation I had with Chris Sawchuk at The Hackett Group - because when they came out with their top focus for CPOs, data was not one of those focus. When I confronted him, I know Chris, Chris is also a good friend, I said 'I'm gonna challenge you, why is this not one of the most important pillar in your chart?'. He was like, 'Well, we have insights and analytics'. But data enable all these pillars, like it enables savings, it enables your sustainability goals, it enables enablement, it enables better supply performance management, it enables your insights, your analytics, if you have bad data, and you put Tableau, you're not going to get great analytics because you have an analytics solution. And so that's been my argument for a lot of the trends that I'm seeing, is data is not at the core and data should be foundational to a digital transformation. And we haven't, it's always like, 'Oh, I'm going to implement the system and figure out the data after' versus thinking like, 'Hey, if I get my data upfront, and I can feed that data into my new system, the time to value of that system will be significantly faster'. The quality of information across 100% of my supplier should drive better compliance and performance of those systems. But we have this kind of notion that data has been so hard. And I'm talking master data, mostly, right? But it's all data. It's been so hard to do. That's almost like the acceptance of garbage in/garbage out, portal potties. Like if only we could fix this master data problem. What I'm most encouraged about is that being out again, at conferences, and speaking to procurement teams, I find them to be more literate than they were even a year ago. Like we're talking to procurement teams that are bringing people in their organization that are asking the right questions. They're smarter about the question that they're asking around what type of data, you know, what's the quality, what's the provenance of your data? Which attributes are you doing better than others? And it's more realistic that, hey, you're not going to get perfect data, doesn't exist. And you're not going to get best data across all attributes, like what attributes are you mostly focused on that enables a use case or one of our corporate objective, right? It's a much smarter, much more tangible conversation than we have before, because the expectation of procurement a year or two years ago, one they didn't necessarily understand how or if it was possible, and then they were hoping for this, like, you know, perfect state of data. And so anyway, I just, I'm seeing a big change and it's really encouraging.
Dr. Elouise Epstein 39:50
I think that's a fair point that I think it is changing, but I think we have a long way to go. Because I think if you walked up to, you know, 10 people and ask them what data is, a large percentage would probably reference, like their visual idea of data would be numbers in a spreadsheet. How much we spent or, you know, budget numbers. And that, data is so much more than that. And if you want to conceptualize the supplier golden record, this is back to our conversation a few minutes ago, well, what is it? Is it my, you know, address information? Is it my banking information? Well, yes, and it's all my subsidiary information, it's all my or my parent information, it's all my warehouses, it's all my, like, its this conceptualization of data that cascades, it's this risk data, it's all the sourcing events that you responded to, on and on and on. Then we have a much different conception of what data is, and I think that's what I'm pushing for.
Katherine McCleery 40:52
So I think that you've kind of answered this question in a roundabout way, Steph. I definitely think that you just painted the picture of what data unleashed means. But Dr. Elouise, if you could give us, you know, your future vision. What does data unleashed look like to you?
Dr. Elouise Epstein 41:14
Oh, I'm gonna try and say this without sounding cliche, so bear with me. I think I'm gonna have to think out loud on this one. But it's data becomes that foundation to change how we operate in the world. And in just building off of my risk and sustainability and innovation, we throw those terms around like, of course, well of course, we're doing risk management. But are we really? And are we really helping the planet? Like, I think I would argue we are on our way. When we talk about risk today, we're really talking about risk elimination. A good thing to do, but risk management is far different and far more complicated. Same thing with ESG, we're sort of reporting our scope two, three, emissions, whatever are doing, you know, ratings on companies. Good, nothing wrong with that. But that's not changing how we operate. Like, we need to be able to see the data, to see - I like to use as an example Everest Labs, they have robotic arms in recycling centers, and I think its a great thing because once you put cameras on the conveyor belts and recycling centers, you start to see what's actually happening in recycling plants. Remember, I said greatest risk and the greatest opportunities come from the places that are hardest to see? Like, how many people look at what goes down a recycling conveyor belt on a daily basis? Almost, if you don't work in the waste management, nobody's looking at that. And so if you were to look at it, you'd start to see the amount of recyclable aluminum going just straight into landfill. Like, that's the problem. I don't care about, I mean scope three emissions, you know, reporting good, yes, good. But phase zero, let's figure out how we can reclaim more or, you know, reclaim more from the recycling center, you know, then a lot of the work. In packaging, reducing packaging, eliminating packaging, and reusable packaging, like we need to get to that level of conversation. We need to do the same on risk, by the way. The only way we can do that is through data. Because data, when we understand, when we have a visual - optical sensors that can tell us that this many aluminum cans went straight into the landfill, or you have this many industrial controllers that are at risk for this kind of virus, or this kind of hacking attempt - when we get to that level, that's when we're going to start to get to risk management. And it's all going to be driven by data. And this, like I was explaining, this larger conception of what data is. That, to me, is when data will become unleashed to change how we operate.
Stephany Lapierre 44:02
I think you said something that resonates with me, is that you get the most impact on the things that are really hard to see or access. And that's when I think, I know we're both passionate about supplier diversity, and I do think, you know, if I combine that thought with improving supplier experience, like to get visibility and ask small, diverse businesses, which are 1000s. Right there, the long tail is usually where you spend the most money across small businesses, it's not the biggest spend, so you may not be paying attention to it. And also you're asking these small organizations that probably don't have the resources and the time and the infrastructure to maintain hundreds of portals with their requirements. Meanwhile, it's where you can introduce risk, it's where you have the most innovation, it's where you can make the biggest impact, from a small diverse spend into also their communities, their employees, right? That social economic impact. It's where you can also help businesses that are doing things that are sustainable, that can introduce your organization ways to change your operations, or being more sustainable, as well as support these businesses that are operating with sustainable practices. And that's where I think data becomes really important. Can you get visibility on those 1000s of small, diverse businesses, because that's where you can drive some of those corporate objectives at the speed and a scale that traditionally you just focus on those large organization. That's why I think the combination of bringing visibility to those organization, and then reducing the demands on those suppliers to pay 1000s of dollars to be certified, to maintain hundreds of different portals with the same information they call the black hole, because it doesn't give them an ROI, doesn't give them more business to do this, right? And so how can we make it better for them? And that's where I think democratizing the data that they have to distribute, that's often available anyways, if you're able to accelerate and make it more automated for them. And we talked about the digital wallet, you and I, in our pre call, is that ability for supplier to own their information and be able to distribute it and validate it, right, enhance it, and then distribute it across all of their customers, not just for the benefit of updating information. But what's also the benefit back to them? Like, how do you build that social currencies, you know, so that they can maybe monetize their data? We talked about that concept, we went way out there, we can definitely continue on that topic, but mostly is, can we give back to suppliers a way that they can actually leverage that derived insight to generate more business, get more visibility, focus on customers that are more alike, right? Understanding budget trends, timing, reducing the burden on them to do business with those large organizations so that they can win those contracts, right? Grow their businesses employ more people. And so that's a full circle that I think we haven't quite successfully leveraged today. Like, if I look, you know, across the industry, we're still very much putting a burden, and still don't have nearly enough visibility into small businesses.
Dr. Elouise Epstein 47:10
Well, I think the book right now is taking more time, because it's top of mind. And it's stuck in my head, and I need to get it out, but it's really driving at these concepts around data and analytics, literacy, how we learn, how we learn or more specifically how we do digital, because it's tied back into how we do risk, how we do sustainability, how we do innovation. That's really top of mind. And then, sort of related to that are two concepts that one, Steph just alluded to, is talking about the digital wallet. Because I think it goes in line with this, is that as a supplier, I should own my data, and I shouldn't have to pay. If I start my own business as a trans woman, I should be a diverse supplier.
Katherine McCleery 47:57
Yeah. What I love is that both of you are speaking the same language, and are on the same thought here about data and what data unleashed looks like. The data foundation. It's just incredible to be a part of the conversation that's happening in real time live, that is going to be so impactful. And watching everything unfold the last couple years has been really cool. And seeing the both of you, kind of at the center of advocating for data, and supplier data specifically, has been really cool. And Dr. Elouise, I know you have some really interesting projects coming up, you alluded to a book, what else do you have cooking this year?
Dr. Elouise Epstein 48:46
Okay, so I am working on two concepts that, one Steph just alluded to, one is the digital wallet. And I think increasingly, that's going to get to a trend where we own our own data as consumers, and especially as suppliers. And more importantly, we benefit. Because if I'm going to spend all this time putting all this information about myself as a supplier, then I want to be able to distribute it quickly and efficiently, but I also want to benefit from it. Because it's very likely that others will benefit from my data, and so I should get some benefit from that. And to build on a point Steph made a few minutes ago, is if I start my own business as a trans woman, then I would be a minority owned business, and a women owned business, and I'm not going to have 1000s of dollars to go through that certification. And so I should be able to state that and have that put into a system and not get rejected because I don't have that $3 or $5,000 certificate. Similar thing with, I think, would be true with sustainability in who's certified in various pieces. And I think what happens is certifications become a business of themselves, and a gating factor to progress. Because there's a difference between progress and a difference between certification - that doesn't mean certifications are bad, it just means you have to have a certain financial threshold. So I'm looking at this whole idea of digital wallet as a proxy for suppliers owning their own information, and how that comes to pass. The other piece, which is, I think you all will appreciate, is I am going to take down big ERP. Well, I should rephrase that, because I don't think I'm going to be successful, but I'm going to start the conversation that will move us beyond the ERP era. And one of the reasons that I think big ERP fails - and there's a lot of reasons why, they're big, they're complicated, they show very little ROI - but I think one of the big failures is to look at, if you look at it architecturally, what's missing? Data. Data is, and more importantly, third party data. And in an era where we are syndicated with third parties in our supply chains, the fact we don't have this strong data backbone is like the fundamental red flag that says the ERP era is over. And now, I'm going to be long retired, I'll probably be long dead by the time we have get past ERPs, because they're such an entrenched bureaucracy. But I'm starting that conversation, because that's the next conversation we need to have.
Stephany Lapierre 51:35
I think with ERPs - I was having a conversation recently with someone fairly senior at one of the large ERP - and the biggest challenge they have, it alludes a little bit to what you said earlier on, is that data privacy is that they're more so on the conservative side, and they've been in business for so long, and they have contract with customers across different modules, or maybe through acquisition, that doesn't allow them to share this data. And so they have a data limitation of how much they're actually able to leverage, even though if you could democratize that, it would be amazing. They just can't legally do it. And so I think there's opportunities - not necessarily because the ERP in itself, there's a, and we've argued this, but I do think that there's some benefits that are well beyond data in the ERP that is needed for the organization. And maybe some process over time that would be eliminated through data, I agree. But I do think that if you marry a good solid data foundation with whatever system - that its ERP or source to pay or the latest new RFP tool or the latest new contract management system - if you can connect them through data foundation, you can get the best of both. You can feed the data that's required for those systems to actually deliver on this promise. Because a lot of the ROI that is being justified as a way to invest in those systems, assume good data, and it's never the case. So you're always discounting the ROI of your system by, I don't know, 50% I would guess. So I'm a little less on the 'let's kill ERPs' versus how can we actually make that investment, you know, better. But hey...
Dr. Elouise Epstein 53:08
But I think, back to this silo problem that you just described to the person you talked to, again, if I own that, connect that to the digital wallet, if I own that data, then I can control the syndication, and then you as the ERP provider can do that. But the other piece about the big ERP, and the reason they're the impediments, they're the problems in that discussion you just had - I agree with everything you just said - problem is they're charging 10s and 100s of millions of dollars, and if they're not providing the whole totality of the solution, then we're going to have some uncomfortable conversations. Because why should I pay for the data foundation, when they're supposed - again, that's another big gigantic, this would be the colossal lie, not the big lie - the ERP is supposed to have all this information, and increasingly they don't, and they're getting exposed. And instead of, like, admitting it and actually solving it, they're sort of doing the obfuscation. Because if I pay TealBook or whoever does data, you know, a million dollars, its like, well then the - and I'm cheap paying $100 million to the ERP provider - there's going to be some uncomfortable questions. Why would I pay $99 million for a transactional system? When the data is the valuable layer? I still contend that data is the tail that wags the dog.
Stephany Lapierre 54:36
Well, so I'm, you know, I love that statement for many reasons. I still think having a data foundation into your investment in software is almost like an insurance that you're going to have a better outcome out of the investments. But I think, again, you're always moving light years ahead of me. So I'm thinking, you know, what can we do today for our customers to leverage both technology, the data plus software equals digital procurement success. You're like, you know, 10-15 years out thinking, like, we don't need all these systems. But I think we have some ways to go.
Dr. Elouise Epstein 55:07
I mean, you're running a business, you're solving today's problems for people, and you're doing a great job of it. I'm trying to solve and get ahead of tomorrow's problem. Because fundamentally, every supply chain disruption we have today is because of design choices we made 10 or 20 years ago. And so if we don't start to make the change the thinking for the next 10 to 20 years now, we're just going to keep pushing that timeline out. And we're going to go from one disruption to another, all we're going to be is the disruption responders. And I want to get us beyond that as a profession.
Stephany Lapierre 55:44
I think everybody does share that. And I cannot tell you the number of customers who have used that spider chart to sell their investment in TealBook, because they've pointed to that middle and they're looking at their Frankenstein of an architecture saying how can we move to this more agile, flexible, interchangeable. And so I think it helps them articulate the value proposition of data foundation. So I'm incredibly grateful. And, you know, I'll keep watching as your middle layer evolves, because I want to make sure we are relevant, and we are considering all the different pieces that are important to our customers. This and I always love spending time talking with you, as you say, we could sit for hours and hours. And there's so many things that I want to unpack today that I was, like, 'Oh, I want to go back there', and, you know, and limitation of time and bandwidth for people to listen to both of us rant, I'm gonna close this out. But I just am so grateful for your thought-provoking ideas for pushing our industry forward, for your friendship, for welcoming my oppositions and feedback at times, even when it's self centered around our position in the market. Because I always usually do a claim of this, I'm always conscious of it. At the end of the day, I think we're both very passionate about moving this industry forward into the next century. And to your point, making procurement that value add to the organization and not always reacting to market changes that are pushing, and then we're following, and trying to find answers. That we're so ahead of it, that we have the infrastructure, the data, the mindset of procurement, to be that change agent for the organization. Because it's truly a unique position. And if we can, as a procurement function, get in front of this, we can get that seat at the table that we've been, you know, as a function begging for a long time. And with data, with information, with insight that are relevant, with predictive also, you know, now we're talking a little bit further down the line. You know, how powerful would it be to be able to start being more predictive to your organization on what are the trends that are going to impact your business, your revenue, some potential risk, etc. So we're in a really fun, exciting, I think, function and time. Even though it seems daunting and scary and creates anxiety when you're going to bed. I know a lot of our our customers and procurement leaders are feeling the same way. So thank you.
Dr. Elouise Epstein 58:06
Thanks for having me today and for being a thought partner and challenge partner to me. And I've enjoyed this conversation, and I enjoy our friendship and our debates. And so thank you for going on this journey.
Stephany Lapierre 58:20
And thank you, Katherine, for bringing us back to reality and make it more tangible for people that are listening.
Dr. Elouise Epstein 58:24
Yes, thank you Katherine.
Katherine McCleery 58:26
I'm just glad I can be a part of it and get to ask questions to both of you. It's a privilege. I'm looking forward to the next conversation because I still think that we have a lot to unpack, like you said Steph, with digital wallet. We ran out of time today, but just so our audience knows we will return with an another installment of Dr. Elouise. So look forward to that, and thank you both, this has been incredible. And Dr. Elouise, I wish you continued success. And yes, thanks again for your time.
“In today's world, suppliers are a great source of growth and innovation. And suppliers are a great opportunity for you to amplify and extend your strategies around good. Around making a difference in the world. And I think procurement organizations are well positioned to be able to make that difference.”
- Len DeCandia, Global Chief Procurement Officer at Johnson & Johnson
Len DeCandia sheds light on how the combined strengths of data and technology alongside reframing procurement’s role in building elevated supplier relationships has worked for Johnson & Johnson - and, in fact, enhanced their COVID-19 responsiveness.
DeCandia believes true enterprise-wide diversity can be driven through procurement, and he’s emphatic that supplier diversity can affect real community change. It just takes a bit of innovation and a real commitment to collaboration.
With a direct line of sight through the value chain, DeCandia describes how procurement has the opportunity to help their organizations make the transition from disjointed and disrupted supply chains to a more collaborative and innovative partnership with suppliers to help weather the next significant global event.
Show host Stephany Lapierre takes listeners into a deep-dive of Len DeCandia’s leadership experience and his team’s learnings through a global pandemic. Through this episode you’ll learn:
- How procurement teams can evolve to an influential, enabling function of the business and not just a cost-savings service
- Why procurement should be teaching budget owners how to manage supplier relationships to get the most value from suppliers
- How to make supplier diversity a company-wide initiative and not just a "procurement thing"
About Len DeCandia:
Len DeCandia is Global Chief Procurement Officer at Johnson & Johnson. Len rejoined Johnson & Johnson in 2014 after a previous tenure from 1982 to 1996. As Chief Procurement Officer, he is responsible for all global procurement policies, including supplier base strategy development and practices such as relationship management and functional headcount. He also serves as a member of the Johnson & Johnson Enterprise Governance Council (ESG Focus) and as Executive Sponsor of the second largest Employee Resource Group at J&J, the Alliance for Diverse Abilities.
He spearheaded an enterprise-wide digital functional transformation from a decentralized procurement system to a center-led model, covering all categories of spend for Johnson & Johnson globally. He also led the deployment of the world’s largest cloud-based procurement technology, which processed more than $50 billion in spend for a $5.2 billion cost savings in the first three years. In his tenure, Len has also led the global expansion of the diverse supplier/citizenship program, increasing impact spend by 70%.
Len DeCandia was Chief Procurement Officer and Senior Vice President for Estée Lauder from 2009 to 2014, and Senior Vice President, Supply Chain Management, at AmerisourceBergen from 2004 to 2008. Len is the founding chair (2002) of the Rutgers University Center for Supply Chain Management, and he is currently the Vice Chair of the Advisory Board at the Rutgers Business School.
Links:
Stephany Lapierre, TealBook: website | twitter | linkedin | youtube | instagram
Len DeCandia on LinkedIn
Len DeCandia on Rutgers Business Review
Johnson & Johnson
“The COVID-19 Data Plan: 3 Innovative Ways Johnson & Johnson Is Using Data Science to Fight the Pandemic” article
Transcription:
Katherine
Welcome to Data Unleashed, a podcast that brings you insights from procurement's most innovative visionaries. Alongside incredibly brilliant guests, show host Stephany Lapierre explores the power of data, how it challenges us, and how you can challenge the status quo. You'll be inspired. But more importantly, you're getting actionable advice in every conversation that will help you unleash the power of data in your own organization. Welcome to Data Unleashed, Steph. How are you?
Stephany Lapierre
I'm great. I'm so excited about this episode today.
Katherine
The official first episode and our guest is somebody that you've known for a while, why don't you tell the audience who we have on today.
Stephany Lapierre
We have the chance to interview Len DeCandia. I call them the CPO of CPOs. That actually may be his title at Johnson & Johnson. And to your point, I've known Len for a few years. I had the opportunity to meet through the controller of Johnson & Johnson back in the days when Tealbook was very early. And he's very inspiring. You'll hear today's visionary, very inspiring leader. And you can tell why Johnson & Johnson has been in the forefront of this digital transformation, and are doing some incredible things that are quite tangible, and delivering on a lot of the goals that Len set up when he joined into this role at Johnson & Johnson.
Katherine
I can hear from his voice the passion that he has for people, the community, not just Johnson & Johnson people, because obviously that's a given, but the communities that are impacted by supplier diversity and all of the amazing things that they were doing through the pandemic. And so I think the best part of this conversation, and I think the audience should listen for this, he will tell you exactly how digital transformation happens and how the key to doing that is from the inside out with the heart of people, and connecting those goals, and aligning those goals with the human condition and with people themselves. So I hope that everybody enjoys this episode. I know Steph and I had a ball on this one. And really we were just sitting with some incredible leadership and enjoying it.
Stephany Lapierre
I think when you hear Len, you'll be really inspired. As I mentioned, he's a visionary. And so I do want to balance it, though, because I think that when you're talking - because we are talking and working with their team - there are some real challenges. As they've gone through this transformation, Len has this vision, he articulates it incredibly well, but it hasn't come without challenges. When we talk to any procurement teams, they are real challenges that it's data, that it's people, that it may be processes, technology alignment. I think they've done an incredible job, they are always in the forefront of digital transformation. And he has incredible talent as well. I think from the early days when I spoke to him, his vision really landed with me. He talked about things like democratizing supplier diversity, make it to biodiversity. Equitable, right. It's not just about diversity, it's about equality, it's about access, it's about impacting those businesses and using that as a pipeline for innovation, and the impact he has not just on the company, but on their organizations and the people in those organizations and the community around those organizations. So he's really, really passionate about supplier diversity. There's a bit of a special thing about Johnson & Johnson, and the reason I wanted Len on the podcast, one because he's so visionary. He's so inspiring as a leader, I think it will inspire a lot of procurement teams when they're hearing how he's approaching his digital transformation. And two, people know the binder story of Tealbook that was at Johnson & Johnson. So the inspiration for Tealbook happened 15 years ago, I sat in an office with a customer who was flipping through this two inch binder.
Katherine
It was 15 years ago?
Stephany Lapierre
15 years ago.
Katherine
Oh my goodness.
Stephany Lapierre
My first daughter, who's now turning 15, was born. And this client went through this binder and flipped through business cards that were falling, you know, everywhere because she had collected this binder for last 20 years and found a business card of a company that was really innovative, that was a startup, and wanted me to have their contact information. And I remember leaving Johnson & Johnson thinking 'This is crazy, she has this wealth of intelligence in a binder that no one has access to'. And it's not benefiting the startup that's really innovative driving value, even if they have a contract with Johnson & Johnson that institutional knowledge is not easily captured, especially at the corporate level when there's a big mandate to consolidate the supplier base. And for me, that was a bit of a contradiction, because you want this pipeline of new startups. Meanwhile, you're trying to reduce your supplier base and you're doing that without having a lot of insights. So that was the original catalyst for Tealbook. The second one was when we started building our data platform, and we sat with Len's team, and we were talking about all the use cases that would come out of improving the quality of data and access to data over time. And his team had come up - you'll hear that a bit in the podcast - but his team had come up with about 100 different use cases, like what would data enable their team to achieve. And then when we narrowed it down to the five most important ones based on Johnson & Johnson's corporate priorities, it was a unanimous one to focus on supplier diversity. Because the leadership cared so much, they had such a big commitment to supplier diversity, and very aggressive goals. And they said, if you can reduce the manual time it takes for us to report, which on average takes six to eight weeks, we do this every quarter, any automation and reduction of manual time would be a win. And if your data can uncover 50 to 100 net new suppliers that we may have under-reported, because if we're collecting their data through a portal and those small businesses have not come to the portal, we feel like we may be missing. And it gave us the opportunity to learn. We had never focused on supplier diversity before that. But we wanted to see if our machines could, in fact, find certificates if we could unify it back to a profile and match it against the master data. Then what would be the impact? And so, as probably most of people that know Tealbook know that supplier diversity is a use case that we care very much about. And we are able to deliver quite some significant results for our clients. And that was with J & J, when we had come back from that exercise not only we had reduced the reporting time by 75%, we'd also uncovered 800 net new suppliers that were under-reported in their own data. And so that was a massive win for us, and one that we're now, you know, are very well known. So they started, basically, supplier diversity for Tealbook and the offering we're able to now deliver across, you know, hundreds of companies that are Fortune 1000.
Katherine
So this is a really special episode and it made sense to me to make this our first episode to open this series. And I think that you've just tied the knot on that. It's definitely a special journey for Tealbook and J & J and really getting that mission set from the first early days with them. So I hope everybody enjoys this one. This is a great, great opening conversation. Great episode. And we will jump right on into it. Thanks, Steph.
Stephany Lapierre
Yeah, get inspired.
I am very excited to have with me today Len DeCandia. I call Len the CPO of CPOs. And so I believe that may be the correct title. You know, there's a few reasons why I'm so excited to have Len here today. But the reason for this podcast is because we have so many amazing conversation happening with CPOs, thought leaders, founders, investors, and I felt that these types of conversation where we're speaking about the future of procurement, the value of data in the open so that the community could get a chance to have access to this content. Len is an inspiration to me, J & J is an inspiration to me, for many reasons that we'll get into it, but first I'll let Len introduce himself and give us some background.
Len DeCandia
Oh thanks, Stephany. That was a very nice introduction and I'm really happy to be here as well. I am the chief procurement officer, the Global Chief Procurement Officer, for Johnson & Johnson. I've been at this supply chain thing for about three decades now. So it's been an exciting evolution. I spent the first 10 years as a C-Level, as a Chief Supply Officer, for a couple of other great companies at Roche and AmerisourceBergen. But over the past dozen or so years, I came into the Chief Procurement Officer position for both Estée Lauder, and now back at J & J, for almost 8 years now. And I started my career there, don't tell anyone, but about 40 years ago. So it's been a bit of a journey. But I love the procurement side, you know, the supply chain side was exciting, it was great, I spent a lot of time in manufacturing plants, building them, running them. But we really live in a world, and we've evolved to a world, where collaboration is everything. And procurement has really spread its wings around the value that can bring to an organization. Around better collaborative environments and relationships, both upstream and downstream. So, happy to be here with you and sharing some of those experiences. And maybe we can chat a little bit of what we think tomorrow will bring.
Stephany Lapierre
You know, that's an exciting topic. To give context, because I think a lot of people in my world have heard of the binder story. So about 15 years ago, I was at Johnson & Johnson, and I was sitting with someone who was heading one of the business units, and she said, 'Steph, you know, you need to meet this awesome company who just started out'. And she proceeded by going under a desk and grabbing a two inch binder filled with pamphlets and business cards and flipped through that for about 10 minutes. And I remember 10 minutes because I had a flight to catch in New Jersey. And so after she proceeded to go through this binder, she finally found this card, gave it to me, and she said 'Write their contact information because I don't want to lose the contact. But this is a great company. It has really moved our business and you should know about them'. And she put the card back into her binder, the binder back under a desk, and I left Johnson & Johnson thinking, 'You know, this is crazy', because one, it took her to see me in person to remember this amazing company, right? Spend 10 minutes looking for contact information. And how do we leverage this data, this goldmine of information across a company the size of J & J. And so why J & J - and this is such a special part of, you know, my story - is that that's where the inspiration for Tealbook has come. We met through that journey. So again, a lot of really innovative things that I think Johnson & Johnson had been in the forefront. And I'd love to hear from your perspective, because when we look at the gold standard of procurement and some of the initiatives that are being done by your team, what do you think has supported all this innovation and trying to move the needle for Johnson & Johnson, and moving procurement in the future?
Len DeCandia
Yeah, that's a great analogy. It's almost my job description that you just basically said, right? You know, J & J has been around, I think, since 1883, and for the first 130 or so years it really evolved around what they would call a decentralized model. The J & J that I joined back in the 80s was really around optimizing a network of smaller companies, that being a great way for them to stay close to the customer, and their ability to be agile. They were way ahead in their thinking, as well as some of the conglomerate-like companies. But I think the mission for our team, when I came back, was, you know, what were we missing through decentralization? And I think what we found was we were missing the ability to be able to leverage insights, knowledge, understanding, not only to leverage it, but to scale it. So as we became larger and larger, you know, we had pockets of innovation, but in reality we couldn't integrate that innovation and really bring it to the patient, or the customer, as quickly as we should have. And so the responsibility that I had in leading that change was, how do we go from 130 years of decentralization and creating an environment that would allow you to be able to have access to that type of knowledge, and make that knowledge available to the 100,000-plus employees around the world of Johnson & Johnson? And I think the great enabler was the cloud and digital technology, right? We've had, you know, years and years of investments and heavy ERP systems. But what we found with cloud technology, it could really create that environment where information could be put in a common place, and use the term democratize data or insights, and that data or those insights could be used by our colleagues around the world. Not an easy task. We operate in over 60 countries, and every country had its different view of what good procurement was. So good procurement was defined in many, many ways, over 200 individual systems, over 85,000 suppliers. But we also recognize that the majority of our spend is in what some traditional procurement people would call non-inventory, or indirect spend, that represented 70-plus percent of our spend. And that's where the majority of the missed opportunities were. You know, in areas like research and development, and marketing and commercial patient insights, customer insights, following trends, being able to integrate innovation and bring those innovations to unmet needs that were out there. So our main focus was really to create this digital centralized backbone, and really centralize knowledge and insights, but not really centralize the organization. Although, for the first time everyone who had a procurement title reported into my office, we really didn't want to break the spirit of empowerment at the point of spend or execution. But we did want to empower people with better knowledge. And, you know, it's an interesting journey. When we started, we had about 85,000 suppliers, about 5000 of those suppliers were traditional supply chain, direct side, and 80,000 on the other. You know, here we are 6 years later, and we have 45,000 suppliers, right? But we're fully integrated around the world. And those suppliers now represent relationships that not only meet the needs of those individuals who are working in the company in any part of the world, but they also bring us governance around making sure that those suppliers are aligned with our strategies, our supplier responsibilities, their accountabilities. And then we can start to introduce bigger, broader strategies, like ESG strategies, when you have a framework like that.
Stephany Lapierre
Yeah, I mean it's pretty impressive when you think of the monumental effort that you've put together. And since you've come back into this position, so you said in the last 6 years, to move such an organization through transformation - and I know we have a lot of CPOs and VP of Procurement right now who have this task, who seems quite daunting - but the fact that you have successfully been able to centralize and bring that kind of level of insight across Johnson & Johnson globally, what has been the biggest challenge, even from a people perspective, or from a data perspective, since we're on the topic of data?
Len DeCandia
Well you know, data is always about master data and accuracy of data, and making sure you have common sources. And I think, you know, that is an ongoing challenge. But every year, we're better at that. And I think the beauty of our model, and the thing that I enjoy most about the digital environment, having grown up in the early phases of what we would call supply chain, you know, where we went from 14 column accounting sheets... I was running a plant in the 80s on 14 column accounting sheets, right? Introducing the computer into manufacturing - and we all have worked in these heavy, very rigid ERP systems - but now, with cloud based technologies, you can use a best-in-class approach. And we have at least a dozen different tools that we use within that environment. And it gives us an opportunity to test and learn with small deployments, and then translate those small deployments where we have success, into broader scale around the corporation. At an enterprise level, we have what we call our procurement garage, which is a little part of our organization, where we do a lot of pioneering and test work with technology and with various tools, and we put it through the paces. And if something looks like it's going to work well, you know, within a year we're fully deployed around the world. And if something isn't ready for our environment yet, we give great feedback to the entrepreneurs, or the companies, people like yourselves who have brilliant visions and great ideas for the future. We give feedback in hopes that, you know, you can learn in those experiences with us and make that tool a better tool. And I think part of our responsibility in this space is really to, when we can and where we can, share those positive experiences and learn from each other. And that's what I love about the CPO community. It really is a community that loves to share and learn from each other. We recognize where there's confidential information and competitive issues, but beyond that, I think we're all invested in each other's success. We really want to, you know, elevate the value of the function in a way that the organization doesn't have some of those traditional views of procurement as just a cost saving area of the business. The reality is, yes, we always have to make sure that we're bringing, and helping our business partners bring, the greatest value in what they invest the company's resources in. But in today's world, suppliers are a great source of growth and innovation. And suppliers are a great opportunity for you to amplify and extend your strategies around good, right? Around making a difference in the world. And I think procurement organizations are well positioned to be able to make that difference. But data and technology are really the enabler that allows that to happen.
Stephany Lapierre
I remember seeing Joe Agresta at Procurement Leaders, maybe five years ago, on stage saying, 'You're so lucky to be in procurement because you have a window into the world'. And it's, you know, a big part of why I've been so passionate about procurement for so long is that opportunity to drive value to the organization, because you have that visibility across the organization and within the industry. And I agree with you - to have CPOs coming together, there's a lot of similar challenges, similar commonalities, and some of the thinking and some of the requirements that are put upon CPOs today. Everyone's navigating some pretty difficult times, right? 10 years ago the challenges were there, as we're now looking over the last couple of years, the amount of disruptions and demands and requirements on organizations.... I don't know if you have any word of advice for CPOs who are navigating these sort of challenging times, and seeing how can we, we already had a challenge in our transformation, even having, I often say, it's even challenging to get information on your tier one suppliers. And now you're being asked to start looking at tiering visibility, which, you know, adds a whole level of challenges to those organizations.
Len DeCandia
In the 25-plus years that I've been at this kind of CSOs, CPO level, you know, we've had issues that we've had to deal with, whether it's a climate issue, war, you know, economic issues, but many of those issues are localized or regionalised. And what we had then, or continued to experience, is something at a global scale. And this is something that, you know, many of us, I know I haven't seen anything at this level. And then you add to that a lot of the broader economic dimensions that are happening today. You know, we were fortunate because by putting our integrated model together - we called it kind of being future ready, in terms of just having some of that resilience built into the organization by being so well connected around all of our suppliers around the world, and visibility to all of our spend, on being able to respond to issues - that if we hadn't made the investments that we made in technology, in process, and in people, leading into the pandemic, I don't think we would have been as successful as we have been in being able to be resilient through all of that. But you know, listen, I mean, we're the largest healthcare company in the world. And, you know, when you're facing the greatest healthcare crisis of our lifetime, you need the largest healthcare company in the world to be ready to respond to all of that. Examples, and I have many, but even when it just started, we have a - China's our second-largest market for medical technology business - and we were involved early with the pandemic. And the number one issue was personal protection equipment, PPE, right? And we were getting requests not only for our sites that are based in China, but we were getting requests from local communities to help. Now, you know, immediately because we had a fully integrated network of buyers, we were able to put about a half a dozen of our buyers around the world in place to go ahead and purchase PPE, keep our sights open to help the community, and the health care sites open, and our ability to respond that quickly was something that we maintained throughout the entire pandemic. Because what we learned in the pandemic - I think we all learned this in the pandemic - is corporations and companies, yes, we've always been responsible to our employees, but now we really were responsible for their health and welfare. Whether that was having to have our people come in to the factories and be able to work, and work in a safe environment, and we were able to do that. We also were critically involved in the health and welfare of our patients and customers. So we had to help hospitals and healthcare workers with access to that type of equipment. And guess what? Guess was just as important as our employees and our customers? Our suppliers, because we couldn't run without any of our suppliers up and running. And so we work very closely with our supplier network around the world, and not only keeping their facilities safe through PPE, what other measures we work - first time ever in my career I worked this closely with our government affairs organization. As the pandemic evolved around the world, around certain parts of the world, and, you know, classifying our suppliers as being critical to the healthcare crisis, and keeping them open and sharing with them practices, materials, and so on. So, basically, through the pandemic, it was the health and welfare of everyone associated with delivering value to our patients and customers. And procurement has a line of sight to everyone in that value chain. And so it really elevated the critical importance of being connected, not only internally, but being connected externally. And I think it really represents a, I think, a transformational time for the work that we do. Because, you know, this is a pretty significant event. And if you look at history, significant events cause significant change. And so if you look at things like world wars, and look at me, if it weren't for a world war, and my family not being Italian refugees, I wouldn't be an American citizen, right? But people's lives are changed. And I think, you know, having lived through when I started my career, you know, the Berlin Wall was still up. And we didn't have the amount of free trade that we've had for the past 30 years, and I've lived through the entire era of globalization. But now when you go through something like this, and you recognize that these issues are very local, is it a time for us to revisit how we work with our customers and patients, and how we work with our suppliers, and how we work with these various communities around the world? And I think it is a transformational time. And I think procurement is right in the middle of being part of helping organizations make that transition.
Stephany Lapierre
It definitely felt like procurement's time to shine and drive true value for the organization. You know, even in my world when we talk about supplier data, five years ago it was not nearly as interesting. And suddenly, you know, luckily for us, we were perfectly positioned over two years ago when COVID happened, and what we've seen is an acceleration in the conversation around data, the criticality. We've always, you know, we've always admitted that data was not great, we always admitted that we needed better data, but it was sort of this dirty, hard thing to do. And so we've almost accepted the garbage in/garbage out, portal potties. You know, if only we could fix the master data, it would give us an opportunity to truly unlock the value within procurement. And I think we've now reached a point where it's at everybody's top of mind and conversation. And there's also more opportunities to not accept the status quo. And so I'd love to hear from your perspective. So it all sounds amazing, right, that you have information, accessible across teams globally, so that they can respond to the needs of the business and work closely with suppliers and stakeholders and to the benefit of patients. What is the biggest challenges that you still see, or the biggest opportunities when it comes to operationalizing that data across the organization?
Len DeCandia
Yeah, so you know, you get into the change management aspects of it, and the adoption aspects of it, right? Because at the end of the day, you know - and I tell this to our CEO all the time - procurement doesn't pick any one of the suppliers, right? Procurement is really a function that is enabling function. And it's a function that should create the environment and, you know, be stewards of the process that allows those budget owners to pick the right supplier, or the right collaborative partner, for the problem they're trying to solve. And initially, I think the change had to start with my own team. They grew up for so many years with, 'I'm going to run and I'm going to save the most for you, and whatever you want, I'm going to do'. And so they were very, very overly service oriented. And the reality is, it's hard to influence anyone when all basically you're doing is just reacting to their particular needs. But if you can kind of reframe your relationship with them as someone who can help them be successful, and recognize that, you know, organizations have to make very important decisions, right? They make decisions around what capabilities am I going to invest in internally in terms of what people I hire, and teams that I build, and tools that I give them to be very good? And then what capabilities do I need that are complementary capabilities that are going to allow me to achieve my objectives? And so I think, you know, with our team, it was really about understanding your business partner, what they're really good at, and also understanding what they're not so good at, and then being able, in partnering with them, and trying to understand what they're trying to accomplish. Because then what you can do is instead of waiting for them to reach out to you to get help, you can better understand the problems they're facing, but you also bring to them the world, you bring to them the world of capabilities outside of their own that can help them achieve their objectives. So then for procurement now, you know, you have to have this ability to influence, you have to have this ability to maybe ask the right questions. More importantly, what we spend a lot of time on with our procurement people, is become better storytellers. So being able to tell them the story of what you've learned, in terms of other experiences, introduce them to how other people have solved problems, introduce them to some different and unique thinking, and do it in a way that allows that budget owner to better understand and appreciate and connect the dots around, 'Hey look, maybe this might be something that I could possibly use to help me with my issues and with my challenges'. And so what building a good infrastructure does, it allows and it frees up your procurement people from having to do a lot of the work that we've kind of become very, very good at, and you're asking them to move into a place that they might feel uncomfortable. But, in essence, that ability to influence really comes with a lot of empathy. So it's putting yourself in the shoes of your business partner, it's really understanding the pressures that they're feeling. And that's hard work when you've been very good at going ahead and negotiating a good deal, or doing an RFP, right? At the end of the day, I think what we're trying to accomplish at Johnson & Johnson is, if we can make the process as easy as possible for the budget owner, we get great adoption. So we do a lot of work around employee experience. And we have great net promoter scores. We didn't start with great network net promoter scores, but we do now and that's critical. So if I'm going to do something fundamental, that should be quick and easy, right? It shouldn't take me, you know, three weeks to go from having a problem and then getting a supplier to solve it. It should be three hours. And that work we have done. The piece now is how do we take those competencies around managing a supplier relationship and embedding them into our internal business partner and budget owners? Because personnel teaches our people how to be good people managers, and procurement should be teaching our people how to be good supplier managers, because in essence, we all, in any organization, are given two tools to be able to achieve our objectives. We're given people or talent, whether direct reports or project team, and we're given budgets. And the majority of those budgets are spent with suppliers. So just like HR creates a process for hiring, and you can't really give somebody an offer until HR kind of approves it, procurement should be teaching our business people and giving them tools to be able to manage those relationships to get the most value. And so it's really reframing procurement's role as being the tide that lifts all boats around getting the most value from your financial resources around the world, as HR is the tide that lifts all boats to get the best value and the best insights and innovation from the talent that you find. Very different role for procurement, but that concept has really gotten a lot of traction with our executive committee. And that's why the great sponsorship that I've been able to get from our CEO and in our executive committee has been around the recognition that we're not centralizing procurement, what we are doing is we're elevating the organization's professionalism in the area of working with external third parties. And the data and the tools, you know, that's the superhighway that we use to put all that power in the fingertips of the budget owners around the world. Maybe I'm getting a little philosophical here, but I'm hoping that you get it.
Stephany Lapierre
You're describing the Holy Grail as true enablement, right? And so the ability to enable, to build procurement as a strategic function that can scale, enable, generate visibility across the organization, across spend, while mitigating risk, while enabling the organization to achieve their corporate goals. And at the end of the day, the business doesn't want to go through a seven step process, right? They don't want to go through a series of data collection to result a decision. They want to have the information in front of them so that they can make the best possible decision and then get the best possible outcome, and procurement can be a catalyst. That's the reason I've been so passionate about procurement for a long time, because I saw the opportunity of procurement to do that. What I saw the biggest challenge to be in achieving true enablement, was the data piece. And so I've been focusing, obsessing, you know, how do we solve the data so that we can then serve as the information that procurement, or the business, requires to be able to achieve those goals. But I want to change topic a little bit because I know how passionate, personally, you are about supplier diversity and inclusion. A little short story, when you talked about working with founders like me - and I can attest to this because J & J again, you know, from the binder story, to the multiple conversation we had when Tealbook was just still at an infancy stage - and I remember we talked about if there was an opportunity to improve data over time, what would be the use cases for J & J that we could focus on? And your team had come up with about 100. The question was, initially, what's the process today for the business to be able to get the suppliers that they need to get the job done? And it was a long, you know, seven years ago, it was a long process. It was a lot of tools, a lot of places that they needed to go. And I remember your team specifically saying, like, what if we could do it like this? Right? What if all of that goes away, because we have the information. But specifically, supplier diversity was by far the most - out of 100 use cases - unanimously your team had voted for supplier diversity, because it was what the organization cared the most about. It was still quite manual. And we're talking about 100s to 1000s of small businesses that had already been going through the diligence process, had been onboarded, had been championed by Johnson & Johnson employee. And so that got us really excited. One, because when you talk about data it's not as sexy, but when you're talking about data for a great cause, to improve access to diverse suppliers, to bring more equality within the supplier base, and championing these businesses like the one that was in the binder of Kimberly at Johnson & Johnson. And so, you know, you guys were really the catalyst in looking at, hey, can we do this? Can we find net new suppliers that are in your data that you may have not reported. Because when you're depending on suppliers to come to a portal to put their certificate, if you have 50 to 100 to more coming to a portal and they don't do it, you're missing that spend. And I remember when we shut down the entire organization, we were a small team at the time, and said, 'Hey, can we do this for supplier diversity?' And we came back a couple of weeks later with 800 suppliers that were net new in your data that were qualified certified. And that was a massive win for the organization. It's what made us now invest so much in supplier diversity. And we now have grown across 16 sectors and are winning many clients, showing them a way to automate and unlock a lot more value out of their diverse spend. So I just wanted to give context because it is J & J who was the catalyst in helping us develop our capabilities. And so I just want to talk more about why are you so passionate? Where do you see supplier diversity? Because you guys have been at the forefront of supply diversity for 20-30 years. And where do you see this space going in the future?
Len DeCandia
Obviously as more organizations become more aware of their positive impacts and communities and ESG, I think we're seeing more people interested in this area. Before I came back, I think the big goal for J & J was to be on the billion dollar round table. And J & J was the first healthcare company on the billion dollar round table. But I also noticed, my first 2 years back, that we didn't really see any progress. We kind of hit that in 2011 and we were kind of at the same level for about two or three years in a row. And so when I moved into the CPO role, I knew there was going to be a significant amount of change associated with what we were trying to do, not only with my team but as well with business partners. And for me it was very important to make sure people recognize that there were many dimensions of value associated with this change. I think the initial thought was to go back to 'Okay, great traditional leverage, they're just going to have us all work with the same supplier to get the best price', and that's really not the message that at least I wanted to share with the organization. The message I wanted to share was, this is going to enable us to do great things beyond what you're thinking. And so I put kind of a challenge out to the team around the fact, let's double this, let's be able to make this bigger and better and show the broader organization that this is really strategically important to who we are and what we're about. Now the one thing you learn in having done a number of transformations in some other great companies are, you really can't change organizations from the outside in. You can only change them from the inside out. And the only way to connect with the inside is you have to find out what the heart of the organization is. And I think that, at least in our space, you know, J & J's commitment to the community, and J & J's leadership role in these types of areas like, you know, supplier diversity, is really a way to connect heart and mind and to really enlighten the organization around the value of the change. So what did we do? A couple of things I think we had to do. One was we really couldn't make supplier diversity a procurement thing. We had to make supplier diversity a J & J thing, right? And so we really looked at some of our processes associated with doing it, and it was really about how do we make it part of our budget owner strategy to do more work with diverse suppliers? And literally, you know, a couple of things that I thought was very importan were, you know, we revisited and redefined the supplier standards. And guess what, you know, J & J Global company, it was only in English. So I'm like, well, guess what, my parents don't speak English, they speak Italian. And we work in 16 countries, this should be in multiple languages. So we turned it into multiple languages, and we updated it around the world. And the other thing that we talked about was, you know, how do we better connect our budget owners to our diverse suppliers, so that they can understand the impact that they have if they work with them? So we had one of these think tank sessions, where we had a number of small teams come together, and I stood up early in the morning and I said, 'We're going to double this, we're going to make a difference, I'm going to come back in six hours and give me some great ideas'. And we had a number of internal team, external team... so you come back, and you sit through it, and then one team stood up there and said something that was so obvious, and they said, 'Listen, we're building this whole e-marketplace to connect our suppliers with all our buyers around the world. Why don't we create a marketplace within the e-marketplace dedicated to diverse suppliers?' And I thought that was just a brilliant idea. Everyone else did as well. It seems so obvious now, but you know, here we are in 2016 and it didn't seem so obvious. So I engaged the leader of a technology provider and said, 'What if we did something like this', and they were like, you know, 'This is a great idea'. And I said, 'Look, we'll be your pilot, we'll develop it with you. And we want you to make it available to all of your customers once it's developed'. Because what we want to do is create a platform that could change the world. And we'll prove it first and let the rest do it on their own. And so we did, then we created Buy Diverse. And so Buy Diverse is a marketplace within the marketplace, which literally empowers every one of our budget owners, right? And so it brings, you know, those companies that you help us certify and classify, right to the budget owner. So when they go in and want to have a buying experience, they can get a choice. If there is a preferred supplier that is in our Buy Diverse, we basically give them the option, 'Hey, if you want to use this particular supplier, please feel free because they're great. And they make a difference. Oh, and by the way, if you want to learn more about them, here's their backstory'. So we allow them to put their backstory there, and it talks about how they're making a difference in their communities. And so in essence, you know, data really is about empowering the budget owner, empowering the person who has a problem that needs to be solved through the supplier. I'm making us an easier customer to work with, because we've been talking about the employee but one of the other issues we had to deal with was decentralization created a lot of friction for suppliers to work with J & J, like your experience. Somebody would say, 'Hey, I had a great experience with Len at J & J. How do I have that experience with other J & J people?' And Len would be like, 'I don't know, I'm, maybe you can talk to the person down the hall, or maybe somebody that's in my affiliate, you know, in Germany?' But now, you know, that's where innovation, agility, and scale come, right? Because if we have one good experience in the organization, through this data connectivity and this level of insight, we can then make that experience available to other J & J business budget owners around the world who might have a similar need. And I think that's what happened with this Buy Diverse, as well as it happens in other areas. What we saw in Buy Diverse, not only did we see a huge uptick in use of diverse suppliers, but we had more people wanting to be requisitioners, usually, you know, they were kind of delegating it to someone else and not wanting to do it themselves. And then they're getting the stories from the other folks who are going in and requisitioning for them, and they're like, 'You know, let me go in there. I want to be part of this, you know, I want to be part of the choice and make a difference'. And so it's a great way to do that. The other piece that I think is really, really important is we also want to change minds at the top of some of these terrific suppliers that we had. And so one of the other requirements that we put in place, when we started this, was every top to top conversation that we have has 15 minutes dedicated to DEI diverse suppliers. Because we really believe - and I think, you know, you mentioned before how things have been accelerated and amplified, I think one of the other issues that we really have embraced and learned through the pandemic, is that globally, we suffer from a challenge around health equity, around getting marginalized communities greater access to healthcare. And I think that's one of the responsibilities that we really embrace as Johnson & Johnson. And so when you're working with diverse suppliers who create better jobs in their communities, those individuals who have better jobs are able to have an opportunity to create better home life for their children, and then children can eat better, sleep better, get better educated. And then within their community there's more investment around healthcare, and so on and so forth. So it's really this multiplier effect that we really embrace around supply diversity.
Len DeCandia
And me personally, it's a big deal for me. You know, my parents were immigrants. I grew up here in J & J's home state of New Jersey and my grandmother lives in the projects. So, you know, I grew up in a very diverse community. And I was very fortunate to get the chance to be able to get a good education. And my mom and dad worked really hard for me to be able to do that. The only reason I was able to do that was that my father was given a good job that he could provide for us. So, for me, it's very emotional, because all we want in our lives is a chance. Right? And I think, you know, corporations are seeing this growing responsibility, we shouldn't get involved in a lot of things but we should get involved in commerce and business, and what commerce and business is all about is around working with innovators and people with great insights and individuals who not only care about, you know, the work that they do, but they care about their employees, and they care about their employees' families. So, very proud of what our team and what our organization has been able to do, and hope that through these experiences others will also embrace it. And you know, we've got a great model just here locally, coming through the pandemic the local governor here in New Jersey asked the CEOs of eight companies that are based here in New Jersey to help with some of the issues that we saw in the pandemic. And so I sit on a steering committee with companies that are based here like Merck, Prudential, Becton Dickinson, Verizon. And what we're trying to do is increase local, diverse spend with local, diverse suppliers. And we're working with the local university here at Rutgers because they represent the cleanroom environment. And we're sharing best practices, we're sharing data, we're sharing insights, we had a five year goal. And through year one, we're already 80%, towards our five year goal. So that's how things happen, right? When people come together and collaborate, and have a common purpose and a common mission in wanting to make a difference. And it's incredible, Stephany, you would really appreciate the database that these students have put together, if you haven't been exposed to it.
Stephany Lapierre
It sounds like we should.
Len DeCandia
You should! But it's an incredible tool for these companies to have - confidentiality is managed through all of this - but the ability to provide access to those companies that are right around the corner from them, that is an opportunity for them to use those companies. And then the great thing is those companies are growing. And when they grow, they need to hire locally, right? And so since we're connected with the local university, Vice Chair of their advisory board, but I'm also excited because it's creating a number of opportunities for their new graduates. And it's the second most diverse university in the United States. So, you know, you start to see how we're all connected, right? And we all can make a small difference. And then, you know, the power of teams is absolutely amazing. But without the value of that highway of data and information that enables the ability to share and learn, it doesn't work. It doesn't work. So organizations like yours are incredible enablers. You take the model I just talked about here in New Jersey, you can do that anywhere in the world with that information.
Stephany Lapierre
When it comes to democratizing information as we, you and I have sort of bonded over the first conversation we've ever had. Because there's so many amazing initiatives that have happened in silo, right? Databases, organizations, groups coming together with such an admirable vision and efforts. And so how can you do this at scale, it does require organizations like Johnson & Johnson to be at the forefront of those initiatives. One of the things that shocked me the most as we did research and start developing our capabilities in this space, is that 95% of businesses that do qualify, are not certified. And so I know that we're equally passionate about how do we bring more equality and getting those organizations that are women owned, veteran owned, African American owned, excetera, to understand the value of being certified to their business. And that's something that we're pretty passionate about as well. And so looking forward to do more great work together with your team. On some closing thoughts.... I mean, there's a lot that I heard, and my brain is a little bit still post-COVID so I feel I'm trying to catch up with all the thoughts. But what I'm most excited about to hear today is how you enable information, sort of decentralize, democratize this data, this insight, to enable teams around the world to drive greater strategic value to the business, and really align with the goals of the organizations. Empower them to partner with suppliers so that they can reach better outcomes for the company. I'm hearing a lot about people within the company when you enable them to drive change, and they're directly responsible for impacting small businesses and making a difference in their community. And, you know, I'm sure it's the same as what you've seen, is employees are looking for different, they want to make a difference, they want to make an impact in something, a vision and a commitment to driving that kind of change. I'm sure it's incredibly positive for Johnson & Johnson employees and everyone that touches the organization. Again, I really appreciate you sharing all your experiences. You know, what does 'data unleashed' mean to you? Because, again, data is now at the forefront of everyone's conversation, and I'd love to hear some final thoughts.
Len DeCandia
Yeah, I think data unleashed for me is really about how working from common insights and common information allows you to make better decisions. And allow you to feel comfortable in making decisions. Because sometimes organizations get so caught up in overanalyzing, or not having the right information, that they don't make decisions because of fear of making the wrong decisions, how can you have enough information to make the right decision. And there's an incredible amount of innovation that resides within that data in the introduction and greater use of data sciences. And really, you know, we talked about suppliers for good. And we're really putting a lot of chips on suppliers for growth. We just had, last week, we celebrated what we call our Supplier Innovation Award Ceremony. So we have a tool that allows us to manage innovation with our business community, and actually our business partners selected the winner, right? I'll share with you at least the innovation, supplier innovation, that won for last year, and it's very data oriented. So for all of us, and you're dealing with it now, you know, COVID has been has been a very traumatic, terrible experience around the world. And on top of everything else, we wanted to be part of helping with the deployment of a vaccine. So now, the learning of that experience, obviously, is going to be translated into other critical life-saving drugs and being able to do that. But that's using data sciences, our key supplier, our own, to be able to solve a problem that could have really taken years to solve and allowed us to solve in weeks or a few months. And so, you know, that's the power of data. And that's the power of collaboration. If you're working from a common set of data and you're using that information in a way to drive common goals, and knowing what each party is bringing in terms of value to the table, you can accomplish incredible things. And so for us, I think that's where data becomes so important. And we're learning and we're teaching ourselves how to be good customers. We're also using tools and empowering our budget owners and being better in defining what they want. So, you know, when they go in and do a scope of work, we don't get involved. We use, you know, AI and data to give them a chance to answer a few questions. We use AI and data to be able to manage risks so that we know exactly what we need. Do we need a contract? What kind of contract? Can we leverage a PO? So we're using that information, we're constantly using that learning and new information, to make it easier for our community. And we're seeing great results. You know, 90% use of preferred suppliers, 90%, use of preferred buying channels, that's agility and that's resilience, right? People are trying to define agility, people are trying to define resilience, and for me it's how quickly can I help my business partner solve their problem. For me, it is really agility and, you know, and what we hope for the future is we'll see more of that. We'll use that information, we'll use tools from brilliant leaders like yourselves, to keep making us better in our ability to provide greater access for people around the world to the very difficult challenges. Because, you know, every week you're hearing about a new challenge on the healthcare front. We live in very complex times. And so data is really the source of our ability to take experiences and knowledge, with incredible creativity, and hopefully make a difference.
Stephany Lapierre
Well, then you are an inspiring leader. I can feel the passion coming through the screen and in your voice. And it's all incredibly well said, that the future state of procurement is incredibly exciting. It has opportunities to impact many, many lives, and make us all better. And so thank you very much for joining me and taking the opportunity to share with us your thoughts and experience. I really appreciate your time.
Stephany Lapierre is the CEO of Tealbook, a supplier intelligence platform with the power to revolutionize the way buyers obtain supplier data. Data Unleashed is an unscripted, authentic, and candid discussion between Stephany and the customers, chief procurement officers, influencers, top leaders, partners, entrepreneurs, and investors who inspire her every day.
These amazing people are passionate about leadership and advancing the procurement function and the impact of data and achieving digital procurement success. While most are still looking for answers and hearing from peers, Stephany has decided to open some of those discussion to share them with our community.
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