Anu Gardiner is a procurement and supply chain professional with more than 15 years of experience working in enterprises of all shapes and sizes, serving the technology and healthcare sectors. Currently, she runs global procurement at DocuSign, a late-stage Saas startup that has a presence in multiple countries. Previously, Anu was responsible for technology procurement at Kaiser Permanente, which is a $50+ billion, integrated healthcare provider in the US. At Kaiser, she supported the CIO and his staff in all hardware, software, and telecom acquisitions costing approximately a billion dollars a year. Prior to that, Anu had a supply chain role at Cisco, where she was responsible for a technology category and supported 34+ business units. Before entering the supply management world, Anu was a management consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton (now part of PriceWaterhouseCoopers), and began her career as an assistant professor of Systems Science and Industrial Engineering at the State University of New York, Binghamton.
I had the pleasure of speaking with Anu a couple of months ago on the state of procurement today, how it has changed, and where it’s going. What follows is a facsimile of our conversation, which has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Andrew Bartolini: So, given your extensive background on the practitioner side, how have you seen the role of procurement evolve within the enterprise?
Anu Gardiner: It has evolved in a big way. The shift is a direct result of technology megatrends – cloud, mobile, social, and big data – that started in 2008. While in the past, it may have been acceptable for a Chief Procurement Officer (CPO) to justify the lengthy and unfriendly procurement process with the resulting cost savings, today’s CPOs and their customers know that cost savings and an enjoyable experience can coexist (as a result of some of those same tech megatrends).
For example, in the past, if internal customers had problems with procurement, they’d come to your desk to share feedback. That was fine; it stayed between you and them. But today, these same people are chatting on Yammer and Chatter, and sharing their feedback on Glassdoor.
AB: Do you see a relationship between things like social media and the growing technological sophistication? Do you see what’s happening on the social side as ultimately having benefit on the procurement side?
AG: Absolutely. CPOs have had to evolve their practices to delight their internal customers as a result. And the industry will be better for it. Social media has become a critical part of our daily lives, and the expectations of speed and best-in-class user-experience are spreading across the enterprise. Now, to your point about where we have expected procurement technology to be and why it is not there, there are other business and economic reasons for it. If you look at the install base, the market share held by the major providers is significant. Their customers are somewhat insulated from the social phenomenon because those platforms have not shifted as fast with the macro trends – cloud, mobile, social, etc.
But those toolsets are coming, even within the established players. What’s more, your internal customers have experienced better procurement processes at their previous companies and are bringing their expectations of how it should be to your company. The insulation from these macro trends and their benefits won’t last much longer. And those CPOs who are already incorporating cloud, mobile and social into their processes will be ahead of the industry – and in high demand for their expertise, skillsets and approach.
AB: So what are the drivers that will get procurement to the next level? What do you see as continuing to push the procurement function forward over the next few years and into the future?
AG: This is a two-part answer. In the enterprise world, sourcing has been a productive function. They’ve been earning their keep, they’ve been delivering well. Yes, there is the talent vacuum that we talk about often. But in spite of all of those problems, sourcing has done reasonably well with the available tools. The big push forward on the enterprise side is going to come from the transactional end of things. But most importantly, the CPO of the enterprise has to have a viewpoint on technology, and it’s no longer just about a platform. You really have to think of your tech stack at the portfolio-level. Are you going to make some bold bets on, for example, trade financing or transaction engine or user experience? You might do some nifty things with just the user experience, on top of the existing P2P. The CPO really has to think about that portfolio of technologies in the enterprise.
The small and medium businesses (SMBs) are where the bigger shift is going to happen with respect to the wider eProcurement toolset. First, because the barriers to entry are lower, there are a lot of options that are available to SMBs regarding the kind of tools that are available in the cloud for a small subscription fee. The CFO of a small company now has the ability to acquire some simple tools and appoint a senior-level analyst who can start bringing together stakeholders. Procurement technologies in the SMBs are in for big growth, whereas up until now, that hasn’t been possible because you needed a lot of scale in order to be able to deploy the available technologies.
AB: Great. Any final thoughts or things that you haven’t mentioned yet that you’d like to share?
AG: One thing that we haven’t talked about is culture, and it affects just about everything across every organization. Every company has its unique culture. For the CPO, paying attention to culture, creating a dialogue about it, and being completely in step with it is very, very important. If you talk to people who have been successful in the role, they acclimated to their culture. The CPO needs to actively engage in a dialogue with the CFO to ask: “What is our culture? Are we happy with it? Do we want to change it? What are the ways that we are going to change it?” Based on my own experience running procurement at a tech startup, this not a function that is well understood. I also work with several new technology companies – teams looking to get started with technology in procurement – and when they try to raise money and they talk about sourcing and procurement, a lot of times they get a blank stare. People just don’t know what procurement is, and that’s why it is even more important for the CPO to understand and focus on culture for success.
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