In our previous article, we introduced, “friend of the site,” John Sorci, our first CPO on the Rise in 2011 with a set of duties and responsibilities that have expanded well beyond procurement. Today, we’ll look at his role in procurement (his fourth “hat”). As much as John’s career in becoming both the (de facto) CPO and COO of Symantec Corporation is an example of a newer trend (trend = CPOs taking on larger roles),  John’s path to CPO is also one that I believe more and more new CPOs will start to follow.

John began his career in engineering, before moving into management roles where he led business units; later he worked as a consultant. This broad-based, market-facing set of experiences had prepared him well when he joined Symantec about 20 years ago to support its software manufacturing and warehousing operations. Soon after joining, John found himself in charge of direct material sourcing and procurement. A few years later, he picked up complete responsibility for the indirect side of the house too. John’s growth in responsibilities has mirrored the growth of Symantec over the years; John notes that one of the interesting aspects of the company’s evolution over the past two decades “has been the transformation of little company people into big company people; our fast moving industry requires us to evolve or die.” To that end, a few years ago, John made a significant decision to evolve the current operations from internally managed to one that was fully outsourced.

Procurement BPO

In John’s early days as the de facto Chief Procurement Officer, procurement at Symantec was in John’s words, “like the Wild West,” with significant maverick spending and no category management. But over the years, John drove the procurement department to evolve and gain traction within the enterprise. That success notwithstanding, several years ago, John and his team decided to outsource the Source to Pay process and selected Genpact to manage the transactional procurement and accounts payable operations while ICG Commerce has responsibility for strategic sourcing of everything over $100K. According to John, the team selected Genpact because of “its process orientation and its culture,” while ICG Commerce was a logical choice because of its category expertise and its partnership with Genpact.

Since going live roughly two years ago, the sourcing process has not changed, but it has been improved with more expertise and visibility. Additionally, John feels that “there have been big successes in labor arbitrage; now the opportunity is to realize a transformation.” To drive that transformation forward, the combined teams have collaborated on 26 different projects that are designed to “simplify, reduce, and save.” The impact of these projects is expected to begin this fiscal year under Genpact’s Smart Enterprise Processes (SEP) that analyzes the “end to end” source-to-pay process. The SEP team recommends changes to improve both the effectiveness and efficiency at each step along the way utilizing value stream mapping, lean, and six sigma techniques.

Procurement Priorities in 2011 (FY ‘12)

John reports directly to the CFO and is part of the finance team. In 2011, he has two main goals as the CPO:

1. Savings (the primary objective)
2. Stakeholder Satisfaction (a secondary objective)

John has the support of the CFO and the executive team in “increasing the amount of spend under management and working to change the culture.” But, since Symantec operates with a soft procurement mandate, significant work lies ahead in driving engagement and change. John believes that having a third-party heavily involved has helped and will continue to help accelerate these initiatives across the larger enterprise. John continues to champion the message that “it’s not about the cost, it’s about the value” to different stakeholders as a way to change behaviors and the view that some stakeholders have of procurement. John also has several complex categories of spend in his sights this year.

John Sorci, COO CPO on the Rise in 2011!

I’d like to tip my hat to John for his time and support of CPO Rising.

Tagged in: Case Study, Chief Procurement Officer, CPO, CPOs on the Rise, From CPO to..., People