The ABCs of New Procurement Tech

AI: On AI, I gave some backstory on the term, and sought to clarify what AI is and what it isn’t, including some popular definitions and distinctions – like how there’s Narrow AI (like machine learning, natural language processing, and robotic process automation), and Artificial General Intelligence (like deep learning, neural networks, and fully-autonomous, self-learning systems). I then gave some examples of procurement use cases for AI – like guided buying and predictive purchasing.

Blockchain: On Blockchain, I again gave some historical context (it was invented only a decade ago), and really tried to explain what Blockchain is – a distributed, decentralized database that acts as a ledger for all transactions, changes, and movement. Everything you do on a blockchain is permanent, cannot be changed, and is open to others to see (especially on “open” blockchains). So it drives great transparency into transactions – especially those across extended supply chains. On that note I shared a couple of use cases for Blockchain, such as supply chain track and trace, and smart contracts that are written into the Blocchain’s code that automatically execute and fulfill.

Connected Devices: On Connected Devices, or what we also call the Internet of Things, I talked about how advances in sensors, processors, and transmitters enable them to be embedded within everyday items, machines, and products – like thermostats, utility poles, gas/electric meters, commercial equipment, and so on. This enables the automatic transmission of critical business intelligence point-to-point, or machine-to-machine. They’ve long-been used by manufacturing, and use cases for procurement have started to emerge, like helping procurement teams get ahead of managing maintenance, repair, and operational services (MRO) spend, and syncing with Blockchain digital ledgers to link the physical and digital supply chains to enhance track-and-trace.

Summary

Artificial intelligence for procurement has already started to become a reality, even if for now we’re still applying “narrow” AI to the discipline. Blockchain use cases for procurement, such as supply chain track and trace, smart contracts, and now supply chain financing and payment reconciliation, continue to be modeled, explored, and piloted, although the technology has some issues of scale to work out, like high energy consumption and effective aggregation of disaggregated commodities (like bulk coffee).

For their part, connected devices / IoT continue to collect and transmit vital operational intelligence to procurement, manufacturing, and services, allowing these departments to get ahead of MRO and budget accordingly. If industry can iron out some integration and deployment issues, IoT-integrated Blockchain can be the missing link for linking the physical and digital supply chains and enhancing track-and-trace.

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The CPO Honors were established to celebrate the procurement function and recognize the accomplishments of the profession’s best leaders and teams. These awards have quickly become the procurement industry’s most prestigious series of awards. CPO celebrities and prior winners played an active role in the ceremony which was hosted by Tradeshift’s CPO, Roy Anderson.

The CPO Rising Hall of Fame Class of 2019

Established in 2016, The CPO Rising Hall of Fame inducts up to three procurement leaders each year who have differentiated themselves and their organizations by a blend in leadership in innovation, executive stewardship, process excellence, and dedication to their craft. This year’s inductees are:

James L. Polak, former Director, General Purchasing, PPG Industries, Inc.

Uldis Sipols, Former CPO Gillette, Danaher, AMP, Sonoco; Executive at P&G and Ford

CPO Honors 2019: And the Winners are…

The CPO Honors were presented in 6 categories. The finalists and winners (in bold) are noted below.

The Innovation Award Finalists: This award is presented to the CPO and team that have used new and innovative strategies and approaches to overcome significant hurdles.

• WINNER: Anu Saxena, Senior Vice President and Global Head for Hilton Supply Management (HSM) and the HSM Team
• Sprint’s Procurement Team

The Technology Excellence Award Finalists: This award is presented to the CPO and team that have leveraged technology solutions to impact procurement operations and performance.

• TIE – WINNER: Andrea Greco, Chief Procurement Officer, CBRE
• TIE – WINNER: Jorge Martín Torres Pérez, Strategic Procurement Director, Coca-Cola FEMSA

Best Team Performance Award Finalists: This award is presented to the procurement department that has excelled across the full scope of procurement operations to make a significant impact on overall enterprise results.

• WINNER: Highmark Health Global Procurement & Payables Team
• Endurance’s Procurement Operations and Business Intelligence Team

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

• Kai Nowosel, Chief Procurement Officer, Accenture
• WINNER: Greg Tennyson, Head of Global Corporate Services,  VSP Global
• Mike Morsch, Vice President Global Procurement & Supply Chain, CDK Global

Innovative Solution of the Year Finalists: Presented to the solution provider who most significantly impacted the market with innovative solutions.

• WINNER: BuyerQuest
• Fairmarkit

Best Technology Partnership Finalists: Presented to the best partnership between a solution provider and their procurement team customer on to a technology deployment.

• WINNER: Scout RFP and Biogen
• Ivalua and Whirlpool

Ardent Partners extends its congratulations to the CPO Honors finalists, winners, and new CPO Rising Hall of Famers! Watch for more details about those recognized last night.

About Ardent Partners

Ardent Partners is a leading research and advisory firm focused on defining and advancing the supply management strategies, processes, and technologies that drive business value and accelerate organizational transformation within the enterprise. Ardent’s analysts have decades of experience publishing primary research that help business leaders in procurement, supply management, and financial operations make smarter technology decisions and improve their performance. Ardent hosts its annual CPO Rising Summit in Boston each fall. To learn more about the company, visit www.ardentpartners.com and www.cporising.com

BOSTON, October 29 — Today, more than 140 Chief Procurement Officers (CPOs) and other procurement executives convene at Boston’s elegant Harvard Club to discuss best practices, learn about emerging market trends, and collaborate with like-minded peers. The fourth annual “CPO Rising” Summit and executive symposium, hosted by prominent research and advisory firm Ardent Partners, will feature an unrivaled lineup of speakers and presentations, all of which will serve to push the procurement function into a new era.

This week’s event, which will feature nearly two dozen procurement luminaries from large corporations around the globe (and across many industries), will tackle a vast array of exciting topics within the world of supply management. These executives, from Johnson & Johnson, DuPont, Rio Tinto, and many more, will speak about:

• Expanding Procurement’s Value (this year’s event theme)
• Data-driven procurement strategies
• The role of innovation in today’s procurement function
• Designing and building the optimal procurement operation (and procurement transformation)
• The Future of Work
• And much more!

“The procurement function of 2019 sits on the edge of an incredible transformation in its ultimate quest for business agility and enterprise-wide value,” says Andrew Bartolini, founder and chief research officer at Ardent Partners. “Today’s procurement executives have the power to leverage innovation, intelligence, and transformational thinking to become a truly agile business function. The CPO Rising 2019 Summit is the ideal forum for procurement professionals from around the world to learn how to achieve these goals.”

This exclusive summit is sponsored by Tradeshift, Concord Contracts, Jaggaer, Scout RFP, Guidant Global, SAP Ariba, scoutbee, Sievo, and SpendHQ. For more information on the CPO Rising 2019 Summit, please visit events.cporising.com.

About Ardent Partners:

Ardent Partners is a research and advisory firm focused on defining and advancing the supply management strategies, processes, and technologies that drive business value and accelerate organizational transformation within the enterprise. The Ardent team has decades of experience publishing primary research that help business leaders in procurement, supply management, and financial operations make smarter decisions and improve their performance. To learn more about the company, visit www.ardentpartners.com.

At the dinner reception, Ardent Partners will present awards for outstanding performance and execution in the last year – “The CPO Honors” – to a variety of high achievers including Chief Procurement Officers and other procurement leaders, procurement teams, and new this year: procurement solution providers and/or other experts. A new class of CPOs (two names will be announced next week) will also be inducted into the CPO Rising Hall of Fame based upon career achievements.

With a record number of nominations this year, the competition for the CPO Honors 2019 awards was extremely competitive. Making it to this far should be considered a huge achievement, in and of itself.

So, without further ado…

The CPO HONORS 2019 Finalists are:

The Innovation Award Finalists: This award is presented to the CPO and team that have used new and innovative strategies and approaches to overcome significant hurdles.

• Anu Saxena, Senior Vice President and Global Head for Hilton Supply Management (HSM) and the HSM Team
• Sprint’s Procurement Team

The Technology Excellence Award Finalists: This award is presented to the CPO and team that have leveraged technology solutions to impact procurement operations and performance.

• Andrea Greco, Chief Procurement Officer, CBRE
• Jorge Martín Torres Pérez, Strategic Procurement Director, Coca-Cola FEMSA

Best Team Performance Award Finalists: This award is presented to the procurement department that has excelled across the full scope of procurement operations to make a significant impact on overall enterprise results.

• Highmark Health Global Procurement & Payables Team
• Endurance’s Procurement Operations and Business Intelligence Team

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

• Kai Nowosel, Chief Procurement Officer, Accenture
• Greg Tennyson, Head of Global Corporate Services,  VSP Global
• Mike Morsch, Vice President Global Procurement & Supply Chain, CDK Global

Innovative Solution of the Year Finalists: Presented to the solution provider who most significantly impacted the market with innovative solutions.

• BuyerQuest
• Fairmarkit

Best Technology Partnership Finalists: Presented to the best partnership between a solution provider and their procurement team customer on to a technology deployment.

• ScoutRFP and Biogen
• Ivalua and Whirlpool

Our congratulations to all of the finalists!  We will see you soon!

Simply put, Gregg “gets” procurement and supply management, having logged more than 40 years of executive and managerial experience across multiple industries, like automotive, manufacturing, and pharmaceuticals. He was the Global eSourcing Lead and a consultant at Takeda Pharmaceutical after serving as Senior Vice President, Market Operations for FedBid, Inc, a high volume reverse auction marketplace serving the Federal Government. Gregg also served as a Senior Advisor for A.T. Kearney Procurement and Analytic Solutions organization following a three-year stint as CEO of Wildfire Commerce. But he is perhaps best known as the former Vice President of Procurement – Global Systems and Operations for pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline, a role that he held for 10 years.

Early Beginnings

After leaving Western Illinois University in 1974, Gregg promptly got to work building his 42-year career in supply management. He started at the very ground floor of manufacturing at an auto parts manufacturing plant and eventually became the head of quality. “Something that I learned very early on was that price doesn’t necessarily correlate with quality,” said Gregg. “There’s no strong correlation between what you pay and what you get. It stuck with me forever.” Indeed, Gregg echoed these comments when he was a panelist at CPO Rising 2016.

Before he switched careers to procurement, Gregg became Director of Manufacturing and Quality at the Gates Energy Products, a division of The Gates Corporation and GE’s former battery business division. The experience taught him the fundamentals about how to consider capacity, efficiency, utilization, velocity, and through-put – all the things that a good manufacturer that has a finite amount of time, space, and capacity needs to make the best product possible. As he got into procurement, Gregg realized that procurement did not quite work this way. “It was still in the early days, it was so transactional but did not have a lot of structure, aside from strategic sourcing,” he said. It was very event driven; each event took a certain amount of time; work never seemed as “planful” as what a good manufacturer would do – how they would do their future planning.

Finding His Way in Procurement with eSourcing

Gregg left The Gates Corporation in 1990 and found his way to GSK, where he would make the leap to procurement and also spend the next 16 years of his career. Between 2000 and 2005, he saw procurement technologies, particularly eSourcing platforms, grow in popularity. Gregg worked hard at GSK to illustrate how a small staff could conduct many sourcing events using eSourcing platforms. He set up four global sourcing hubs in the US, UK, and India where his staff of 15 ran between 10,000 and 12,000 annual sourcing events; roughly half of them were auctions. He had “an extremely engaged workforce” that was using a new technology, and that added to the excitement of it all. Pretty soon their excitement outpaced their efficiency, but he and his staff eventually learned how to source more efficiently, even for eSourcing.

As a result of his efforts to drive eSourcing at GSK, his team won the “Baseline ROI Award” for the highest ROI for any IT project that Baseline Magazine had ever considered. They returned investment every two or three working days. This wasn’t an accident. As Gregg says, “a lot of the stars were aligned: tremendous senior management support, a real burning platform to take costs out, an executive, CEO-level mandate, and an organization that was designed to help allow work to flow through it.” Other factors that contributed to the success of Gregg’s sourcing team were that he instituted eSourcing at GSK when it “was at the dawn of all the new procurement technology.” He and his team were not only willing to give eSourcing a try, there were excited by it. “When you have all of these things working together, there’s a good chance you’re going to be successful.”

Gregg reflects on his 10 years as VP of Procurement at GSK and calls it one of the best times in his working life – a time in which he saw many senior procurement people – including CPOs and directors – “sprout” while he was there. Still, every good leader knows when it is time to take on their next challenge, and in 2009, Gregg left GSK to take on three. He became CEO of Wildfire Commerce in February 2009. A couple of months later, he assumed a concurrent role as a Senior Advisor at AT Kearney Procurement and Analytic Solutions. More than a year later, he also joined FedBid as the Senior Vice Present of Market Operations, where he would serve for nearly four years.

Taking eSourcing to the “Next Level”

At FedBid, Gregg led a team whose focus was to run eSourcing events, and boy did they run them. At the height of his tenure, he and his team conducted more than 50,000 eAuction events annually for their government clients. At a time when the concept of “Big Data” was starting to be bandied about, Gregg and his team were getting soaked in data. On any given day, they might have had more than 500 auctions going on. He remembers a day at the end of FY2011 where they had 2600 auctions underway, with an average length of three days, and tens of thousands of discrete transactions occurring.

To understand their events and to help them better manage their auctions, they pulled data from the system every 20 minutes and, using their BI analytics tool, organized the data into real-time reports that their “market specialists” would consult. They would give the specialists real-time intelligence to say that they might not have enough suppliers bidding, or that there is not enough competition, or that there are some questionable bids coming in that need to be checked out. “Nobody’s doing procurement like that,” Gregg boasted.

Like his tenure at GSK, this was a really interesting time for Gregg, and the experience has shaped his thinking on how sourcing events will be carried out.

The Future of eSourcing

For Gregg, some of the approaches that procurement is using are getting pretty stale – procurement as a whole is spinning the same cycles year-over-year, and it is ripe for change. The way he sees it, a big change for corporations will be to get away from treating everything like a single event and move towards a marketplace approach where suppliers are pre-vetted. That way, they will not have to be trained because they already understand how the marketplace works, and buyers “just throw” opportunities at them. Buyers can get highly specific, too – they can ask for diverse suppliers, like women-, veteran-, or minority-owned businesses, or highly-specific suppliers to bid on niche projects. Gregg and his staff were able to do this at FedBid and were very successful with it.

Final Thoughts

We’re very grateful to Gregg for continually supporting CPO Rising, the CPO Rising 2019 event, and for being a true “friend of the firm.” He’s a great guy — colleagial and easy going — and we look forward to seeing him once again at the Harvard Club of Boston this week. Don’t be shy — introduce yourself!

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.

Heidi Landry

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: Thanks for joining us, Heidi. Tell me a bit about your background – your early career and how you got into procurement.

Heidi Landry: I started in procurement a long time ago. In fact, it was 1989 when I started working for Kmart Corporation’s procurement organization based out of Hong Kong, in Kmart’s management trainee program. We rotated through all of the functions, so I spent a year as a quality control inspector, which is truly starting at Ground Zero in the organizational structure. Then I moved to become a merchandiser, followed by logistics, finance, and accounting assignments, over a two-year period.   I was then moved to Shanghai to lead the team of sourcing operations there.

AB: Okay, and then you just sort of followed the career path that brought you to Europe and then back to the States, right?

HL: Yes, so I ended up spending seven years in China and I had already studied Chinese for a year at that point, so I spent two and a half years in Hong Kong, two and half years in Shanghai, and two years in Qingdao (which is between Shanghai and Beijing). I was then transferred to India to set up an office in Pune for IKEA, and then I worked two years in New Delhi leading IKEA’s South Asia procurement operations. From there I moved to Switzerland and led the procurement activities for Europe. And from there I moved to Novartis to lead their external manufacturing activities and then their pharmaceutical procurement for a number of years. I moved to Greece where I took a sabbatical – a prolonged maternity leave where I did some consulting. But then I was recruited to go back to the United States for a role with Dow Corning as the Vice President of Procurement & Logistics in August of 2009. I stayed there until 2016 when the company was acquired by Dow Chemical, and then joined what later became Dow DuPont as its Director for Strategic Sourcing for Raw Materials and External Packaging. I stayed in that position for nearly two years before being approached to join Johnson & Johnson.

AB: So, that’s fantastic international experience, which is I think something that is still pretty rare despite the global nature of the procurement function. It’s really something that in the 20 years I’ve been working in it, has really shifted, right? Manufacturing has moved away from the West and to the East and the South. Have you seen the maturation of procurement expertise and sophistication in Asia in the areas where you were living previously? I know you were still sourcing from those areas when you were at Dow Corning.

HL: I have seen of course a huge progression in the function. When I started in procurement, I started as a merchandiser in the so-called Top-Five Brands for women’s garments and we still used handmade sketches, to give you an idea. Orders were placed on paper. Now it seems somewhat remarkable that it was actually only 20-plus years ago, but that was the way it worked in those days. So obviously, our digital landscape has changed dramatically in that time period and the competencies we expect of procurement professionals have undergone a dramatic shift. Back when I started, negotiation expertise was valued in terms of how we were at getting the best value from suppliers, if you were a tough negotiator. Now I would say it it’s a very different set of capabilities that are expected of procurement professionals: certainly people expect you to have a global outlook, a broad understanding of market trends and market dynamics, that you’re abreast of developments that are happening in the digital economy, that you are at all savvy with data analytics, and overall have got very strong analytical capabilities. Category management has been a force through, at minimum, the past 15 years: the development of portfolios that balance cost with risk mitigation, the development of greater supply reliability, things of that nature. So, it’s a very different landscape, and looking back it’s amazing how simplistically we saw the work back when I started (or at least, I will say, I thought quite simplistically).

AB: Right, right. Yeah, so, obviously, if we’re talking pre-internet or pre-large file exchange and really pre-eSourcing, there were going to be communication limitations; and obviously that has greatly improved the ability to source from different parts of the world.

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

I’ve spent the past 17 years of my professional career focused on driving the procurement profession forward. I have been and continue to be very personally invested in this cause too. In this period of time, we have collectively seen the procurement profession take many great strides forward, but also a few steps back or to the side; we’ve even seen a few stumbles. Nonetheless, when business historians reflect on this period, the transformation of procurement and supply management will have its own chapter.

As someone who’s been a first-hand participant, researcher, and advisor in, of, or to this industry over the years, I’ve been fortunate to have many wonderful and great experiences and memories. For example:

• I remember the first time I sat in a conference room as an entire procurement team and the company CFO of a multi-billion dollar company watched an eSourcing event that I designed and managed save 31%. I remember dozens of similar events for very different companies.
• I remember going to audacious company parties in the B2B Internet Boom ‘hey day.’
• I remember helping Microsoft save millions of dollars on its digital media spend and then identifying how a change in its buying behavior could save millions more.
• I remember reading Tim Minahan’s 2005 CPO’s Agenda research report and realizing the great value of insightful and progressive market research.
• I remember Scott Singer telling me how pumped he was about his job as a CPO after reading the intro to one of my “CPO reports”
• I remember the WSJ’s front page article about procurement and Manitowoc Company.
• I remember Tom Linton explaining his amazing approach to his first six months at LG.
• I remember marveling at Shelley Stewart as he described (in a keynote at an event I had organized) how his office at Tyco was located between the CEO and the CFO.
• I remember the leader of a multi-billion dollar global sourcing program telling an audience that his company adopted a strategy that Ardent Partners developed and that it led to phenomenal results (more on this in a future article).

I could go on for days. But, above all else, it has been the conversations that I have had and the relationships that I have developed over this time that stand as the most important and memorable of my experiences. One day I will write a series covering some of these older stories and reflections; but not today. Today, I want to kick off a series designed to share some of the great ‘memories’ or takeaways from our CPO Rising 2016 Summit held last week.

In many ways, our CPO Rising 2016 Summit was the culmination the past two decades that my team has spent working in and researching procurement. When I founded Ardent Partners, I knew that I wanted to host an annual CPO summit, but I also knew that we should wait until we could pull it off on our own and without event partners so that we could clearly establish our level of engagement and influence in the market.

Having organized events of this nature, I can tell you that it is no small undertaking to attempt to bring an inaugural event to market, much less one with so many moving parts focused on an executive audience. So, it is with great pride that I can tell you that across all aspects, CPO Rising 2016 surpassed my extremely high expectations – the speakers, the audience, the sponsors, the venue, and the overall production. In sports parlance, it was an “instant classic” and it is an event that I will never forget. That does not mean it was a perfect event – in fact, we have many lessons learned… and our CPO Rising 2017 Summit will be that much stronger as a result. But, this is an event that is very significant for Ardent Partners as marks the beginning of the next phase in our development and growth. We will work doubly hard to ensure that next year’s event is a very significant one for CPOs and the entirety of this site’s readership. We have many great memories to share with you so, if you missed the  CPO Rising 2016 Summit, you are in luck because in the days (and weeks) ahead, we will be sharing key highlights from it.

Also, we encourage you to visit the official site for CPO Rising 2019, which will once again be held at Boston’s historic Harvard Club in the Back Bay neighborhood. Early-bird registration ends very soon, so if you like what you see and want to attend, get on over to the event site and take advantage of discounted pricing while you still can!

Ardent Partners will present awards for outstanding performance and execution in the last year – “The CPO Honors” – to a variety of high achievers including CPOs and other procurement leaders, procurement teams, and new this year: procurement solution providers and/or other experts. The deadline to submit nominations is September 15th, so if you and your team would like to be recognized for Best-in-Class procurement achievement over the last year, make your nomination today!

The categories for nomination are:

The Innovation Award: Presented to the CPO and team that have used new and innovative strategies and approaches to overcome significant hurdles.

The Technology Excellence Award: Presented to the CPO and team that have leveraged technology solutions to impact procurement operations and performance.

Best Team Performance Award: Presented to the procurement department that has excelled across the full scope of procurement operations to make a significant impact on overall enterprise results.

The Leadership Award (CPO of the Year): Presented to the CPO who has driven new performance heights as a result of their direct involvement and leadership and overall exceptional executive management.

**NEW

Innovative Solution of the Year: Presented to the solution provider who most significantly impacted the market with innovative solutions.

Best Technology Partnership: Presented to the best partnership between a solution provider and their procurement team customer on to a technology deployment.

To make a nomination, visit the event site:

https://events.cporising.com/cpohonors/

“The technology sponsors are all very interesting, the speakers are fantastic, great food, and great people to be around. In my opinion this is the very best conference to attend.” ~ Gregg Brandyberry, the former VP of Procurement at pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline, and 2016 CPO Rising Hall of Fame inductee.

“As one of the speakers at this year’s event, talking about Big Data analytics, it’s certainly ‘on theme’ with one of the key buzz words of future of our business. I shared some case studies of how we use Big Data analytics on bid data to unlock almost a 2x savings rate, which is awesome!” ~ Walt Charles, CPO of Allergan.

“Just the intellectual power in the room is really great to learn from. There are some real thought leaders out there talking about their experiences. And it seems like they are still learning, they talk about the fact that they haven’t sat back, that they continue to be students and learn. And that is inspiring,” said one procurement leader.

“One thing that makes this conference special is the size. Truly you aren’t just a number. When the speakers are done, you can go up and ask questions. The intimate setting that is created at this event is something special,” said another CPO attendee. 

Check Out The Video Below to Hear More

Attendees to the CPO Rising 2019 Summit are certain to depart from this executive conference energized and armed with new ideas to improve their operations. Please consider joining us this October 29 & 30 at the Harvard Club in Boston! To view the speaker panel and the Summit agenda, visit the event site https://events.cporising.com.