Elevating the Supplier Experience – The Mondelez Journey @ WPC 2020
During my 10 years in the Procurement advisory and events space I experienced first-hand how hard it can be to identify innovative practices that aren’t already mainstream, or just not that worthy of the spotlight in terms of impact and novelty. Another Source to Pay Suite implementation, for instance, springs to mind for the first category.
Every once in a while, however, a new topic does gain traction and take hold. A good example of this over the last 5 years is sustainability, a topic that emerged from the CEO-level at progressive companies like Unilever. The best procurement teams took full advantage and have successfully managed to add sustainability initiatives to their performance scorecards – to the extent that it has now become a second nature capability, something that ‘they just do’.
The New Kid in Procurement Town – Elevating the Supplier Experience
With that in mind, there is another new topic emerging on everyone’s lips, a “new kid in town” so to speak, which we call Supplier Experience Management. It is one area that really will represent a long-term trend, and one that’s set to revamp our whole approach to suppliers and supplier management.
We have all, of course, become familiar with customer experience management and its associated mantra of ‘The customer is king.’ Similarly, in the same vein, employees have been recognized for the value creation that they can bring to an organization, with similar types of HR-related and employee-centric platforms becoming available in a space that is growing fast. There are even, nowadays, well built out platforms designed purely to manage relationships with shareholders and the media.
This begs, then, an obvious question: where’s the corresponding enterprise platform for suppliers? A single place for them to manage all aspects of their relationship (or relationships) with you as a customer – and vice versa. Instead, suppliers are met with a myriad of systems and entry points in their dealings with you, which adds cost and frustration across the supply base. This is the experience delivered to a stakeholder into which enterprises invest on average some 70% of their income!
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A new and proactive way forward – led by early innovators like Mondelez
There is the growing recognition that the value suppliers bring is higher after we have contracted with them, not before. To capture this value, we need to transform our mindset on how we treat our supply base and the tools we use to interact with them.
For Mondelez, a key initiative that speaks to this very topic is Supplier Central. We are delighted therefore to announce that their story will be told at the upcoming World Procurement Congress 2020, which takes place as a virtual event between 2-6 November. Please join the plenary session with Mondelez’s Global P2P lead, Stephane Sacherer, who will be interviewed by David Rae, and which takes place on Friday 6th November at 3:30 PM GMT.
During this session, Stephane will outline Mondelez’ digital procurement vision and strategy and dive deep into Supplier Central as one of their major initiatives to drive closer relationships and improve their competitive position within the supply base ecosystem.
One of the hardest digital challenges is to install solutions that will be used by the entire Enterprise, so Stephane will also shed light on how they are managing the change aspects, as well as the success metrics behind the project, both soft and hard.
Register here for the World Procurement Congress.
If you are not attending the congress but would like to dial into the interview, please let me know and I will make arrangements (no cost).
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