Last week, I attended iValua’s biennial user conference, “iValua: On Air” in Paris. iValua is a French-based solution provider with a full source-to-pay suite. The event offered a blend of iValua executive presentations and skits, roundtable discussions, and customer presentations. Today, I will highlight a presentation made by Blaine Hurley, Senior Director, Sourcing Excellence within the Global Strategic Sourcing group in Whirlpool.
Enhanced Supplier Repository
Blaine Hurley took the stage and, after a quick interview by event host, Gérard Dahan, (that included some good-natured ribbing) launched into a presentation of Whirlpool’s plan to utilize iValua solutions to manage all of its supplier data. Blaine began with a quick introduction and discussion of Whirlpool’s business. Whirlpool is the world’s leading manufacturer and marketer of major home appliances, with annual sales of approximately $18 billion in 2012, 68,000 employees, and 65 manufacturing and technology research centers around the world. Blaine joined Whirlpool four and a half years ago after a lengthy career in the automotive industry (Honda and Nissan) including lengthy stints in Japan. If the automotive industry is one of organic growth, Whirlpool could not be more different, relying on major acquisitions of different companies and brands to drive its growth in recent years.
The result from these acquisitions, Blaine found, was that Whirlpool was comprised of numerous and different back-end systems, supply bases, cultures, manufacturing processes, and data standards — all of which contribute to a high level of complexity. This complexity created numerous challenges that the Global Strategic Sourcing Organization had to address when it decided to undertake a transformation effort. This transformation had two phases: (1) Get the house in order – process standardization, organizational alignment, capture metrics, etc. and (2) automate the house- deploy a full suite of solutions.
Since we were at a solution provider’s user conference, it’s no surprise that Blaine’s story focused on phase 2 and that Whirlpool selected iValua to provide its full suite of solutions (eProcurement, eSourcing, Spend Analysis, Contracts, Buyer Portal, etc.) to Whirlpool. What is surprising (to a degree) is that Whirlpool launched its technology initiative with a focus on the development of a global vendor management process (GVMP). Then again, maybe it’s not so surprising that Whirlpool started here because as Blaine said, “The success of sophisticated tools is dependent on the quality of the data that drives it.”
Prior to the GVMP initiative, managing suppliers was performed regionally and in a fully-manual way. Whirlpool actually began work on supplier data with the deployment of an MDM system that was helpful in getting the company started on its supplier information management journey, but was limited in its functionality and was inherently unstable.
What Whirlpool wanted and needed was to move to a global system using a global process while reducing duplicate vendor records and improving security – for this, they chose iValua.
Whirlpool’s plan is to move all vendor data into iValua and use it as the source of truth, making changes in iValua that then publish into other back-end systems of record. This will eliminate Whirlpool’s reliance on outdated systems, improve stability and global reporting while making the process simpler and better with improved functionality.
Blaine believes that this initiative is critical to the overall procurement transformation initiative because accurate and current data is key to reducing risk and potential conflicts and that quality data is critical to improving internal and external capabilities, including the use of the full iValua suite. There’s much work to be done, but under Blaine’s direction, the GVMP will soon be whirring!
