Heidi Landry is the Vice President, Chief Procurement Officer (CPO) for Enterprise Supply Chain at Johnson & Johnson. She joined the company in January 2019 and is responsible for Procurement Enterprise Supply Chain Teams and reports into Len DeCandia, CPO for Johnson & Johnson. Heidi has nearly 30 years of experience in sourcing, procurement, and contract manufacturing with some of the world’s biggest, most recognizable household names. She has led procurement, strategic sourcing, and source-to-pay organizations for DowDuPont, the Dow Chemical Company, and the Dow Corning Corporation, including a seven-year stint as the latter’s CPO. Heidi has also spent more than half of her career living and working abroad for Kmart, IKEA, and Novartis, and witnessed first-hand the rise of outsourcing to China and India. She graduated summa cum laude from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst with a Bachelor of Arts in International Trade/Economics, has a degree in Mandarin Chinese from Beijing Normal University, and has completed graduate-level courses in finance and marketing at Harvard University’s Extension School.

Heidi will deliver the first keynote presentation of CPO Rising 2019 on driving “Procurement with a Purpose” – on how the procurement function is uniquely positioned within many enterprises to drive positive social and environmental change across global supply chains. It’s a topic on which Heidi is well versed, having lived and worked abroad for so many years and having experienced globalization from both sides of the world. The following is a conversation between Heidi and Andrew Bartolini, in three parts, that has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Andrew Bartolini: Back when I started working in the technology sector (late 1999 – early 2000), global sourcing meant sourcing from China, right? But now it no longer means just China, right? There are pockets of capabilities in all these formerly-developing or currently-developing countries. That having been said, do you think that it is easier to do global sourcing now because the suppliers are more sophisticated? Or is it harder because you have so many more potential competitors or potential suppliers and regions to source from? More broadly, when you think of global sourcing back when you were right there with your feet on the ground until today, what are some of the things that have changed in that process and in those relationships?

Heidi Landry: Well, I would say, as with most things, Andrew, that it’s a bit of both. I think if I take what’s become easier, there’s a lot more data and information sources available to find new suppliers and to assess their financial viability then there ever has been. On the flip side, the demands on the suppliers have become increasingly complex. It’s certainly not a matter of just delivering their goods and services; it’s much more around the total value that they deliver, including their innovation capability, their level of sophistication, and social responsibility issues, their capabilities to offer added-value services, whether it’s managing inventory, just-in-time services, or local warehousing. So while it’s easier to find those suppliers and it’s easier to access them, at least at a preliminary level through the technology that we’ve got, the set of demands we’ve put on those suppliers has really increased.

So, for our suppliers, there’s a lot of complexity in developing that to meet our company’s standard, especially with a company like Johnson & Johnson, which has a huge footprint in social responsibility. We really pride ourselves on our “Big for Good” efforts in the sourcing arena. We want to work with suppliers who meet certain criteria, or at minimum are willing to develop and expand in certain areas, particularly focused on our social responsibility goals. And that’s already table stakes, along with having very strong quality systems, robust management systems, strong supplier reliability, et cetera. So, those demands have become very complex; and of course we work in a highly-regulated industry, which has increased the complexity of identifying and qualifying the correct trading partner.

So again, looking back it used to be quite simple of a task: five or six years ago we did not have an awareness of the impact we could make on social issues through procurement, but today we do. And we strive to put our spend to use according to the principles of how we behave as our own company.

AB: Yeah, that’s right. There was such a big shift that happened about 20 years ago in global sourcing, and it continues; but the shift is back within the enterprise. And what procurement has now is an ability to amplify its linkages to key corporate initiatives, like CSR; or in some cases they become much more directly tied to revenue.

Now let me ask you this: when you think about procurement in the 2020s, what are some of the things that get you or keep you excited about working in this field?

HL: Well, I’ve never gotten tired of procurement. I know I’ve been doing it for almost all of my career, and I find that it evolves very rapidly. We’ve just been leap-frogging forward in terms of our capabilities to automate basic transactions that allow us to focus much more on where we add value in the strategic sourcing space. So as I think forward a decade from now, clearly that will continue to accelerate.

I think that we’ll enter much more deeply into partnerships with some of our key suppliers, especially in the space of co-innovation, exploring higher-enabled innovation and additional value opportunities. Our collaboration with some of those strategic suppliers will become much deeper.

And then I think we’ll become much more expert on balancing and managing our risks and our external environment. So I think we’ll see many companies pursuing a more asset-light strategy, and therefore becoming more reliant on the procurement team to provide effective management of external manufacturing networks, understanding suppliers’ unique competencies, getting the best value. And so as we develop more in that space, I think we’ll see procurement move to more of an alliance-management role versus a more standardized supplier management role, in addition to the more traditional procurement roles we play in Direct materials and Indirect/Commercial arenas.

AB: Yeah, that’s great.

Join us next week as we complete the conversation between Andrew and Heidi on the changing nature of global sourcing.

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