The 6th annual CPO Honors Awards are today and it is an exciting time for everyone at Ardent Partners! Last week, we announced the complete list of finalists across the seven distinct awards.

As we approach the CPO Honors 2021 Awards Ceremony (click here to register), I wanted to share some of the details and great achievements of this elite list of CPOs, procurement executives, teams, and technologies. Let’s look at the The Leadership Award or CPO of the Year finalists.

The Leadership Award (CPO of the Year): This award is presented to the CPO who has driven new performance heights as a result of their direct and exceptional leadership and management.

The Finalists:

Len DeCandia, CPO, Johnson & Johnson

Len DeCandia  is Global Chief Procurement Officer at Johnson & Johnson, a $92 billion maker of pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and consumer health products with 140,000 employees around the world. As Chief Procurement Officer, he is responsible for all global procurement policies, including supplier base strategy development, practices such as relationship management, and functional headcount. He also serves as a member of J&J’s enterprise governance and corporate governance councils. Among his achievements are centralizing procurement as a center-led function and driving $5.2 billion in cost savings as part of a comprehensive digital transformation. During the pandemic, Len’s procurement team was involved in the development of clinical labs. They sourced more than 150 critical vaccine ingredients and partnered with R&D to develop a data-science tool that helped identify virus hot zones and variant threats to determine the most ideal areas to stage vaccine trials.

Mike Morsch, Vice President of Procurement & Supply Chain, CDK Global

Our first two-time finalist, Mike Morsch has been a impactful executive at CDK Global, consistently exceeding aggressive performance targets. Mike spearheaded a digital transformation of end-to-end S2S process that resulted in multimillion dollar cost savings and spend compliance rate of 99%. As part of leading a great team, Mike hosts a Procurement Analytics Summit internally within CDK to promote the value of data-driven decision-making for procurement and its benefits to the overall community of business stakeholders. This helps build team morale and unify the vision for CDK’s digital journey.

Jose Turkienicz,  Chief Procurement, Real Estate and Global Business & Customer Services Officer, UPS

Jose Turkienicz has led the global transformation within the procurement function for UPS by more than tripling the amount of spend under management and driving more than $1.4 Billion in cost savings and another $2 Billion in working capital savings. While Jose led the transformation of the Procurement function, he also advised in other transformation efforts at UPS expanding his initial role to become the Chief Procurement, Real Estate, and Global Business Services Officer. He not only over sees our more than $25B in annual third party spend, but he responsible for our over 4000 properties around the globe. He has also developed a top-performing team and taken an industry-leading role in increasing supplier diversity and helping diverse businesses scale and grow.

Please join us in extending our congratulations to these great teams on their achievements and outstanding performance!

Who will win this prestigious honor?

Click below to register and find out:

 The CPO Spectacular, CPO Honors webinar today at 2 pm ET

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