Greg Tennyson is the current Global Head of Corporate Services (Sourcing, Procurement, Travel, Real Estate/Facilities, Security and Distribution) at VSP Global. Greg has been a procurement leader and practitioner for more than thirty years, and we are fortunate to welcome him to Boston this October 29 and 30 where he will share his procurement knowledge as a keynote speaker at CPO Rising 2019 (click to learn more and register — tickets available now!). The following is a conversation between Greg and Andrew Bartolini that has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Andrew Bartolini: What drew you to procurement? Or, if you weren’t drawn to it, how did you end up in procurement?
Greg Tennyson: Interesting story. I landed in procurement purely by accident. My first role after graduating was in sales. What drew me to sales was solutioning with the customer, the interactions. What I realized however was selling a product with minimal upside into a difficult market segment was not going to be profitable. I pivoted and landed in an administrative role where contracts and procurement were an element of the role. I realized that I thoroughly enjoyed procurement and wanted more. I went seeking opportunities that were more focused on procurement and contracts management. My first procurement gig was at Lawrence-Livermore Lab (an R&D center founded by Edward Teller, who was part of the Manhattan Project). I gained extensive experience at Lawrence-Livermore Lab. I went back and got my Master of Science in Management with an emphasis on procurement contracts. I got credentialed by ISM and NCMA and have been thriving in the space ever since. I saw procurement as a means to get into a leadership role. So, again, it’s more by accident than by design that I found myself in procurement, and I have thoroughly enjoyed it for the past 30 years.
AB: What are some of the large changes that have occurred since the early 1980s?
GT: Technology has fundamentally changed the role of procurement enabling it to become a trusted advisor to the business. When I was at Oracle in the late 90s I witnessed the advent of self-service purchasing. Oracle introduced self-service purchasing to compete with the likes of SAP, Ariba, Commerce One, et al. Other events like Enron, Sarbanes-Oxley and more corporate oversight would change how company’s bought goods and services. Difficult economic factors would drive procurement teams to take a more holistic view of what was being bought, how and the resultant money left on the table. Procurement teams were taking disaggregated data and trying to make sense of it to strengthen their negotiation position. Fast forward and Salesforce.com drove everyone to the Cloud. Now your data is managed by your provider and it can be enriched, amalgamated with more thoughtful analytics provided. Compound that with what is happening now with AI, RPA, machine learning, block chain, etc. and procurement couldn’t be better positioned to be that trusted – strategic – advisor to the business.
It’s interesting though you have had this titanic shift in technology, but the procurement function’s skillset has been lagging behind. I’ve seen, just in the last five-to-ten years, the skillsets catching up. A greater focus on soft skills and ironically solution selling into the business are bridging the gap. Today depending on the maturation of the procurement team and business needs of the company procurement has morphed into an advisory role. We’re more consultative than we were 10 years ago. My point is that the technology led the way, and the skillsets are finally starting to catch up.
AB: Technology has been a big part of your career – both on the usage side, but also in your work with some pretty progressive companies. You seem to have been an early adopter of solutions from some newer companies. Is that a mindset of looking for innovation, or does that have something to do with the companies being nearby, and you getting comfortable with them? I’m thinking about Coupa and Scout RFP. What has drawn you to those companies versus, say, some of the more established companies?
GT: It’s interesting, Andrew. The Interest kind of spawned, grew, and flourished when I was at Oracle. Oracle was a relational database provider back in the 1990s. It was dabbling in the application space, and really started to develop a suite of products around source-to-settle. The leadership team there sought out insights and points of view on how to evolve the product. I guess that was my first real experience sitting on an advisory board and contributing to a product roadmap. So, it started there, and that’s what created this interest that has allowed me to partner with Coupa. When I was at Salesforce, we were really the first major brand/logo to go with Coupa, and it was because we had the opportunity to influence/persuade how they evolved the product (and we were driving a lot of their product innovation at Coupa at the time). And, similar to Scout, right? I look at Scout’s product offering, and I’d like to think that the interactions that we’ve had with Scout’s leadership led to their intake and pipeline, and to some of the capability of the RFX tool and its contracts-lite functionality.
I’ve always been open to new opportunities to invest in companies and influence their product development. When I look at technology companies that are in that early-stage startup-mode, I really look at their leadership. If there’s a good chemistry and a similar mindset, I’ll take the leap of faith and invest. I’ll look at the product and ask, “How can we influence it? And does it meet our needs?” I’ve done that with Coupa, Scout, and CXO Nexus; with Suplari (a spend analytics provider); and with Fairmarkit (whose solutions manage tail spend). I mean, there are quite a few companies out there like these. I enjoy that entrepreneurial approach to evolving a solution and solving a problem. So, it’s been a lot of fun.
AB: Given your long-standing career in procurement (30-plus years), when you look out over the next decade, what are some things that are emerging or starting to take hold?
GT: Let’s continue the thought on technology. The procurement professional, based on my vision of the technology and where the skillset is going, will no longer be involved in conducting or managing transactions. They will no longer conduct analysis, run sourcing events, or even form sourcing-wave strategies. They are going to be purely focused on soft skills, and on being advisors to the business. The business driven by technology will have sourcing opportunities presented to them, and procurement will partner with the business to decide if they want to run a sourcing event that will already be queued up based on a very deep spend analysis that is tied to a sourcing event.
Imagine walking into your office, opening your computer and having a conversation with it on running a sourcing event. Maybe it’s some type of Alexa that asks, “Greg, do you want to run a sourcing event today?” Then it lays out the economics of the event and the options to consider based on current trends in the industry. Think back to the day of Mattel and the red paint coming out of China. They didn’t have the supplier intelligence to say, “Don’t use this supplier because of trends in the marketplace, or their social aspects (like sustainability, quality, etc.). In the future, you’ll get that aggregated view of the opportunity just queued up for you. And you’ll have that exchange with the computer wherein you’ll say, “Yes, run the sourcing event – what do you suggest we run it for?” It’ll just fire it off and you’ll get the results. We’ll use more decision-based systems than transaction-based systems. That’s where I think procurement is going.
AB: Yeah, that’s great. I always say, “There’s no better time to be working in procurement than today,” just with the potential impact on the profession in general. Thanks for your time today.
GT: It’s my pleasure, Andrew – looking forward to seeing you in October!
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