Category Archives: Talent

The Emerging Focus on Talent, Part II

This post is going to review some selected insights on the talent topic that emerged during the recent Best Practices Conference put on by the Hackett Group. In particular, it is going to focus in on some of the key points made by Disney, Pitney Bowes, HP, Cummins, and The Hackett Group.

At Cummins, which has more employees outside the US, diversity is a core value. The importance of diversity in a global supply management and / or services operation cannot be understated. A diverse team is able to understand and interact with top talent from different cultures across the globe, which allows the organization to draw from the global talent pool, and not just the local talent pool in its home country or the country of its outsourced service center. And a diverse team is a powerful team. Cummins Global Business Services, which manages IT, HR, Finance, & Customer Care, and which is in the process of adding Procurement, hass less than 950 employees but manages 670 Million in Global spend. That’s more than 670K of spend per Cummins FTE. Now, the number drops to about 270K when you include the resources utilized in partner and supplier organizations for local support, but considering the wide umbrella of services support, that’s still quite impressive. Especially when you consider that more employees are outside the US than in the US and many are in low cost locales (like India).

Disney is a global operation, it needs to be global, and it understands that it needs to be global. As a result, Disney puts a great emphasis on staffing its international sourcing offices with local talent. Disney knows that the best way to identify talent is to have talent in the first place and only people who speak the same language (and understand the culture) are going to truly know the difference between who looks good on paper and who will work good in the organization. There is a strong cultural component to EQ.

At Pitney Bowes, employee engagement is one of the four key metrics that are used to measure organizational performance (with the other three being customer service, financial performance, and innovation). Furthermore, it is one of the four key components that must be mastered to be best-in-class (with the other three being structure, performance, and technology). As a result, they put a lot of effort into defining roles and responsibilities with a clear career path that not only made it easier for HR to find, and hire, raw talent, as they made Supply Management an attractive career option, but made it easier for them to identify what the organization needed to do in terms of training and knowledge management to improve its talent pool.

Tomorrow’s post will address some selected insights from HP and the Hackett Group and then Part IV, the final post in the series, will address some of the first steps an organization will need to take on its talent management journey.

The Emerging Focus on Talent (Part I)

Although it was not a major theme of this year’s Best Practices Conference by the Hackett Group, it was nice to see that a recurring theme in many of the presentations was the importance of top talent in the successful execution of strategy and growth. As you may recall, last month SI put out an open call for thought leadership on three issues and one of them was supply chain education as there is a lack of talent in supply chain (relative to the need). Furthermore, the problem is only going to exacerbate as time goes on if it is not effectively addressed.

In particular, the importance of top talent was mentioned as critical in presentations by Disney, Pitney Bowes, HP, Cummins, and The Hackett Group and emphasized in private discussions I had with Pierre Mitchell and Bob Derocher. What’s really interesting to note is that while not every company that presented was World Class, Disney, Pitney Bowles, HP, and Cummins, in at least one organization, are world class by Hackett Group metrics — which only serves to drive home the reality that employee engagement is a critical part of organizational growth. As per Hackett’s Myths and Realities of Global Growth, not only are talent management leaders 16X more likely to link employee engagement to business impact, but there is 21% higher employee engagement in double-digit growth companies when compared to single-digit growth companies.

However, as pointed out in Sourcing Innovation’s recent posts on why you can’t find top supply management talent and how you find top supply management talent, talent management is more than cobbling a wish-list of desired experience, education, and expertise and throwing it over the wall to HR. It’s a well thought out strategy to identify, hire, retain, and retire that includes careful consideration of growth, career path, and training to insure that you get the most out of each employee from the time they step in the door until the time they step out for the final time after their retirement party. This requires a well thought out strategy that should incorporate some of the lessons learned from your peer group. Parts II and III will discuss some of the key points raised by the presenters and why they are important and the final Part will discuss how a Procurement Organization goes about getting started on its talent management journey.

Lean from Toyota and Put Talent First

There’s a great article over on Industry Week on “Staying True to the Toyota Way During the Recession” which started off with a truism that every manager should remember:

Always remember that management should work for team members, instead of team members working for management. We should always show respect for every individual, and we need to make sound decisions locally because no one knows what’s best for your team members in your own culture better than you.

A productive team member is one that is respected, enabled, and free of distractions, disturbances and road-blocks. A good manager understands that the buck not only stops here, it starts here too. Employees should not waste any time on issues that need management resolutions — those issues should go straight to management. A manager does what she can to make sure her employees have the technologies and resources they need to do their job effectively. A good manager thinks of the success of her team before her own success — not the other way around.

Furthermore, a great company places a very high priority on long-term employment security for its employees as they are not “human resources” to be hired and fired on a whim. That’s why morale is approaching an all-time low and up to 90% of your employees are waiting for the job market to come back so they can high-tail it to a better job, or at least a different job.

And a great company gets creative and looks at its CSR and employment policies in a holistic way. When Toyota couldn’t make cash contributions to the charities it typically supported, and plants were idle, it offered manpower in the form of its engineers instead. And it used their brainpower in creative ways to cut overhead and operational costs to reduce the cost of keeping them onboard. And, most importantly, it retrained them so that, when the downturn started to reverse, they were ready to take advantage of new opportunities.

Put people first and you are more likely to succeed.

How Do I Find Top Supply Management Talent?

So, after reading yesterday’s post, you now know that if you can’t find* top supply management talent, it’s because you’re looking for a mythical resource that doesn’t exist. In fact, you have a better chance of finding a chimera. Wish all you want, but a senior buyer with a PhD and ten years of experience who speaks three languages, has expertise in multiple e-Sourcing and e-Procurement processes and applications, has bought twelve different categories, has sourced from multiple countries in Europe and Asia, has led global cross-functional teams, has participated in NPD, has financial chops and can help the CFO optimize working capital, is an SRM expert, has a high CQ, is an expert in global negotiations, is a master of spend analysis, can manage multiple projects simultaneously, and lead global services team is not someone out there waiting to be hired. You’d have a better chance finding a CEO for a Fortune 500 than finding a buyer with these skill sets.

So what do you do? You stop focussing on the super-resource and start focussing on the team. Yes you need all the skills, but you don’t need them all in the same person. Break the “super” buyer role into an analyst role, a global trade role, an engineering management role, a contracts role, and a set of buyer roles organized around compatible categories. Then, instead of looking for 7 – 10 “super” buyers, you’re looking for five different roles that will be much easier to fill. For example, the job description from the previous post would break down into the following descriptions:

Supply Management Analyst

  • expert in should cost models, TCO models, and global logistics models
  • experienced user of e-Sourcing and e-Procurement applications and expert in e-Negotiations and award optimization
  • expert in spend analysis
  • working capital management skills
  • financial reporting experience
  • expert at market intelligence

Global Trade Specialist

  • expert in negotiations with a global supply base
  • buying experience in Europe and Asia
  • speaks two or more languages
  • expertise in import/export requirements of the US, the EU, India, and China
  • in-depth knowledge of REACH, WEEE, RoHS, and similar regulations
  • high CQ

Innovation Engineer

  • great project management skills
  • risk management skills
  • innovative and capable of leading cross-functional innovation teams
  • NPD experience
  • experience with CSR and sustainability initiatives

Contract Specialist

  • excellent communication skills
  • excellent writing skills
  • experienced in contract drafting
  • familiar with regulatory requirements
  • experienced with compliance programs

Senior Buyer

  • great communication skills
  • bachelor’s degree with 5 years of experience, master’s preferred
  • buying experience in one or more of manufactured goods, services, IT & Telecommunications, legal, marketing, and temporary labour
  • supervisory experience of global business teams and outsourced services preferred
  • implemented multiple successful SRM initiatives
  • great leadership skills

And your chances of filling these positions are much better than finding a mythical chimera.


* Again, only referring to “find”. There are a number of reasons that you might not be able to “hire” such talent if you can find it, but they are not the subject of this post.