Last month at CPO Rising 2018 in Boston, we were very pleased to award Dennis Silva, Chief Procurement Officer at BCNET, British Columbia’s Shared Services organization for higher education, with the prestigious Innovator of the Year Award. Dennis (pictured below) along with Client Services Director, Clarence Lee, were in attendance to accept the award before a crowd of 120 of their peers at Boston’s historic Harvard Club. We had a chance to sit down with Dennis after the event and learn more about him and his background, the trajectory of his career, his thoughts on innovation, and where he believes the procurement industry is heading in 2019.
Charting a Course for Procurement
Like many of his colleagues, Dennis found his way to procurement by way of other fields of study and professions. He earned a B.A. in geography from the University of British Columbia (UBC) in 1992, and upon graduation, began working in retail at Future Shop, a retail electronics company akin to Best Buy in the U.S. A few years later, Dennis moved on from sales to procurement because he thought it would be more interesting – particularly vendor management, supply chain forecasting, cutting costs, and driving quality, which he “owned.” In early 2000, Dennis was asked to stand up a centralized procurement organization to drive indirect procurement operations for all Future Shop locations in Canada. In doing so, he became the first Senior Manager of Central Purchasing for Future Shop, which would become Best Buy Canada in November 2001.
Moving on Up
In 2009, after 17 years of climbing the senior procurement leadership ladder at Future Shop/Best Buy Canada, Dennis became the Director of Supply Management at his alma mater, UBC. Although “the context is different, the issues are the same” in higher education as in retail, “the differentiator is that the approach is in how you deal with them,” he said. For instance, there is greater emphasis placed on internal customer relationship management: building relationships, engaging stakeholders, and applying processes to get things done were central to his success at UBC.
Dennis’s role quickly expanded to cover other projects. For example, he spearheaded and delivered UBC’s online payment tool, which was one of the first initiatives he undertook to implement new technology changes. In Canada and especially in British Columbia, the maturity of SaaS solutions and sensitivities around privacy laws precluded him and his team from pursuing cloud-based solutions. As a workaround, they customized an online payment tool using PeopleSoft technology. They created an automated workflow, digitized expenses, and linked them to the University’s Travel and Purchasing card. As a direct result of his and his team’s initiative, the volume of indirect spend managed increased significantly and they created a revenue opportunity for the University due to the rebates earned on the card. The tool has been so successful that it is still used today.
Another example: between 2013 and 2014, when the Ministry of Advanced Education and Skills Training initiated the Administrative Services Delivery Transformation Initiative, Dennis led part of that effort in building a collaborative procurement model with the 25 Public Post-Secondary Institutions. He worked closely with his peers within the sector and began planning and building what they have today, BCNETSource, the Procurement Division of BCNET.
After a job well done, Dennis left his role at UBC to take on the CPO role at BCNET. Since taking the helm in April 2016, Dennis has built and driven collaborative procurement opportunities that benefit all 25 Public Post-Secondary Institutions in British Columbia. He and his team make it all look easy.
“Higher Education is a complex sector,” he said. “Our universities, colleges, and institutions are focused on a wide range of activities from the delivery to teaching and learning to applied research to innovation. Every day we are making an impact locally and globally. My role as a CPO is to support these endeavors by delivering exceptional value though collaboration.” He goes back to his experiences at Future Shop where he had to deal with and qualify customers; he has to apply that every day at BCNET when he engages his counterparts and leaders.
Primed for Innovation
One of the things that keeps Dennis motivated is that there is always an opportunity to improve and innovate. “At no point in my career have I been static,” he said, adding that he’s never been content with the status quo. In procurement, he said, there is so much opportunity – technology, leadership, business challenges, etc. – to continually drive improvements. As Dennis sees it, CPOs are a rare breed and it is exciting to see more procurement leaders becoming a key part of the c-suite decision-making process – a transformation that’s been happening over the couple last decades in Canada in many sectors.
Innovation, he said, starts with people; and it starts at the top. That’s the opportunity now for Dennis, where at BCNET brings together “25 [procurement] leaders that have complex organizations to support while have them collaborate together to build collaborative procurements together. l.” Dennis created “category councils,” which allow leaders to work vertically and horizontally within their organizations. It is also a collaborative, conversational approach that enables them to “identify common threads that they can work together and galvanize around common procurement challenges.”
With that established, the next step for Dennis and his team is to figure out how to collaborate to apply process and technology innovation in a successful and cost-effective manner. From his experience, driving process innovation goes a little faster than technology adoption and innovation. There’s an opportunity to standardize how they approach work, and applying category management processes. Dennis believes that technology innovation will follow process innovation; and that when the opportunity presents itself, they will make those technology investments.
“There are great tools out there,” he acknowledged. Dennis believes that there is an argument to be made for implementing Procure-to-Pay technologies to enable end users to access goods and services more effectively, improve decision making with better data, and improving the user experience. And more importantly, he believes that technology investment can increase staff talent through shifting activities from tactical-transactional activities to more strategic and consultative work. Dennis thinks we need to shift that state in order to effectively meet the future challenges and demands
Where are We Going?
According to Dennis, the days of the paper-based procurement are gone. Today, the expectation among stakeholders is to have an Amazon-like experience: seamless, three-clicks-and-a-buy. In turn, it creates an exciting opportunity for the profession to move to the next level. Procurement leaders need to have not only a strong procurement background, they also need to be strong facilitators, be analytical and build consensus and trust within their organization.
However, we need to attract people in those roles. “As a profession, we can do a better job in drawing people in the role. People do not grow up wanting to be procurement officers. There needs to be a better articulation of what a CPO does and the impact that can be made. When a procurement professional is identified, we need to nurture them.” Dennis thinks that the exciting part of being in procurement is that this could be a great strategic role for someone who wants to stretch their imagination, but also loves to collaborate with others; those are key attributes of CPOs.
Final Thoughts
Whether in higher education or in other industries, Dennis believes that procurement adapts easily within organizations. The 2008 financial crisis, which still reverberates in Canada and certainly across the business world, demonstrated how procurement leaders can work at the strategic level within higher education. Therein lies a great opportunity for procurement to take its profile and performance to the next level. In fact, Dennis believes that Procurement’s time to shine is now.
RELATED ARTICLES
Webinar! The Year in Review: Procurement Innovation, Agility, & Uncertainty
Best-in-Class Procurement Leaders Recognized for Outstanding Achievement at the CPO Honors 2018 Gala
Recognizing Scott Singer, the CPO Rising Hall of Fame’s 2018 Inductee
Reflections on the CPO Rising 2018 Summit (Part I): Third Time’s a Charm
That’s A Wrap on the CPO Rising 2018 Summit!
The Importance of People and Talent: Reflections from the 2018 CPO Rising Summit
