On January 4, 2010, Ardent Partners launched CPO Rising as a new resource to procurement leaders around the world. The site tagline then (and now) was (and is) straight and to the point – “The Site for Chief Procurement Officers and Supply Management Leaders.”

Over the years, the firm, this site, and our community have grown exponentially. And, as we’ve grown, we’ve expanded our discussion, sometimes going beyond the topics that are core to the CPO and their procurement leadership teams. In 2022, we’re changing that and heading back to our roots with a renewed focus on the topics that matter to CPOs. There will be fewer articles, but if you are a CPO or aspire to the role, CPO Rising will remain your destination of choice as we cover the themes that matter in procurement in 2022.

Hand in hand with this announcement is the launch of a new series – “Procurement Experts on CPO Rising” that will aligns perfectly with this announcement.

Today’s article features an excerpt from my Procurement Rising Podcast episode with Brian Roche, a Procurement Expert and the Chief Procurement Officer at Westfield Insurance (click to listen to the full interview). Note that this excerpt has been edited for readability.

Tackling Source-to-Pay with Procurement Expert, Brian Roche

Andrew Bartolini: Brian, tell me about your approach to bringing technology into the organization? 

Brian Roche:  Very early on it was obvious that we lacked the basic building blocks of procurement technology including spend analysis and analytics, Master Data Management, and integration with the downstream financial systems in the ERP. I think I wanted to do two things really want to do improve our own supply chain intelligence. So, within the procurement team, how could we get smarter and bring that intelligence to the business and clearly, without having those foundational pieces of technology, it was very difficult to do that, very time consuming to do that. I also wanted to focus on improving the business experience. So, probably hear me say that a few times today really being acutely focused on the business’s objectives and their experience and working with us as an enabler for them to execute on their goals is what was really important to me continues to be.

Furthermore, I thought about other initiatives and tried to think, further downstream and long term, building this foundation would help support other initiatives that I knew we were going to think about executing and partnering with the business on. So, we took a suite approach to the technology.

So, we had an idea of what our source to pay technology can enable us to do and we’ll make adjustments and iterate that as we go forward. So, I think for us in the early years, which is really just the last couple of years and implementing some procurement technology, and choosing to leverage a suite to do that, there’s a bit of pick and choose that happens. Now that has parameters from around it.  There’s, being in a financial institution, and one that is, as you know, and many others know, heavily regulated, so there’s got to be parameters for what you pick and choose the risk management routine, for example, is one that we must carry out properly. But let’s not be too rigid, if the technology is not showing up in a way that the business is viewing procurement as adding value, then we need to make some adjustments. So, we’ll do that as we go forward. Until our implementation has been great, and the technology is working and supporting the efforts that we have, but it absolutely, comes with an opportunity to make some improvements and go forward.

AB: So, talk a little bit about what did you choose and what were some things that are still a work in progress from how you’re using the technology. If you can, share an example.

BR: Sure, so I think the one that’s easy and fairly routine in nature is our third-party risk assessment process. So, we’re leveraging technology to start with a fairly high-level set of questions to screen that level of risk with the business. So, the internal business partner would complete this process, 15 questions to help us understand whether we’re sharing data, to what degree the business function is reliant on the vendor to execute those kinds of things. Once we have right-sized assessments go out through the technology to the vendor who completes those and allows our team, as well as the subject matter experts, we have aligned to the third-party risk management process and opportunities to go in and review those results.

So, good examples, information security, they can come in and look at the results of those InfoSec assessments and help us understand where we think there are still gaps. So, that’s a fairly routine, you can call it probably higher level of screening of all of the security layers of technology and domains that we want to understand at the onset of the relationship.

Sourcing, for example, has been, I would say we put that in the pick and choose column, where we can run sourcing events with the technology, we’ll do that, where it makes more sense to not use the technology, meaning use the actual sourcing technology in the source to paid solution. We’re allowing folks to do that. We have some other collaboration tools inside the organization that folks in the business are used to using and we find to be effective. So, there are some things we’re doing in the sourcing process around some of our selection processes that would allow us to share information and collaborate effectively with a business and they’re going to a place that they’re used to going to. So, we’re trying to pair that with the technology that we use in procurement to create a solution that works with both. So, again, not being too overly focused on, we must use every aspect of our source to pay technology, if there’s something that’s working, and it’s complementary to what we do, and it still allows us to maintain the rigor and rhythm of what we do around sourcing and risk management that I think that’s a win.

To hear the full conversation, click here – Procurement Rising Podcast – Brian Roche, Westfield Insurance

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