So, for those of us who are joining us
on the podcast, if you can drop us a
note in the chat to see where you guys
are calling in from or joining us from,
that’d be great. And also, if you have
any questions at all during this
podcast, please feel free to drop them
in the chat as well. So, today we are
here to talk about procurement
And as a when I started in procurement,
dashboards were fledgling at best,
right? And basically if you had some
idea of how much money you spent with a
supplier or in total, you pretty much
you were there. And we weren’t talking
about contract repository and cycle
times and savings tracking and all the
other good stuff that we do today. With
the advent of orchestration and with the
advent of AI, a dashboards have taken a
life of their own. So today we’re going
to talk about the shortcomings of the
current dashboards, what the future
dashboards should look like, and really
what you’re trying to get out of those
dashboards as you start to look forward.
So with that, Roy, how about we jump
that? Sound sounds good. Let’s make it
So maybe you should talk about some of
these things, right? Because this is
fairly fairly straightforward stuff. So
where do you see dashboards falling
Today, everyone has a dashboard.
Literally, everyone has created a
dashboard. If you can create a graphic
screen, you go, “Oh, here’s your
dashboard.” And you’re colorful. But
I’ve always asked the the suppliers, I
said, “Okay, tell me how I’m using this
data. How am I going to be able to be
take actions based upon this activity?
Is this just a reactive activity? Can I
get into the proactive side of of this
data?” And unfortunately the significant
number of the individuals are saying hey
listen this is just presenting what was
and it’s pretty stale data in most cases
and it’s you could spend a lot of time
on it and over time I my team did but
still it just failed in terms of being
actionable data that I could present to
leadership to be able to say hey this is
where we’re headed this is why we need
resources this is the result of our
activity it wasn’t valuable.
Yeah, I think you’re right. And some of
the things that we always struggle with
is the whole idea of dashboards just
being a picture and it’s not malleable,
right? Like you can’t go deep into a
specific area. So for example, like it’s
great that you know that you have a
hundred suppliers that are considered
high inherent risk, but it sure will be
know sure be nice to know how many of
those are in for example marketing and
have a presence in I don’t know
Southeast Asia and all of a sudden you
can get to something that is actionable
or even better yet if if there’s an
event that you can actually get to the
point of realizing what the impacts are.
So for example, if there is a hurricane
in Southeast Asia, which of your
companies are actually going to
potentially be impacted and that
right those are really the cool things
that so we talk about strategic
questions and being able to interact
with the data by applying filters or
lenses as we call them, right? And with
right? And then there’s real time feeds
that you want to be able to utilize
effectively that trigger activity that
you need to take now. So there like
example when I was the chief procurement
officer at Metife we had 18,000 unique
suppliers obviously that’s a million
second tier suppliers that we were
trying to figure out what how they
impacted our requirements now it is a
financial services company so we’re not
talking manufacturing per se but still
we could be shut down or negatively
impacted and I wanted to be able to get
feeds from risk players and from even as
you mentioned hurricanes weather sites
which of my suppliers are being
negatively impacted that I’ve got to
reach out to them and that’s got to be
real time. That’s got and then be
proactive if we can so that we can be
ahead of it versus always finding out on
Monday morning that something happened
and now we’re in trouble.
Yeah. And the other cool thing too as
we’re learning and getting into more and
more proactive dashboards like people
want to know how many projects are late,
how many projects are sitting with legal
right now, how many things are sitting
on this particular person’s desk waiting
for some for action, those kinds of
But the coolest thing that we worked on
was really about the team management
within procurement because let’s say you
have 15 people in procurement doing
sourcing deals. They’re probably working
on a couple hundred projects at the same
time. And the thing that we always found
interesting is look double clicking on
for example a team within procurement
and seeing how many projects are they
working on. Which two or three resources
are the really good workers that get
gifted work all the time because it’s
always the best people in my experience
who are the busiest because people want
right? And just being able to double
click on a particular person and seeing
all right this person’s working on eight
projects and this person is the
responsible for these 10 supply
relationship in this category. All of a
sudden you get a really good
three-dimensional view of your your
resources, what they’re working on, how
busy they are, and also who are who is
not. Right? And the other thing that we
try to do with the team management
dashboards is some people do this, some
people don’t do this, but have net
promoter scores for their customers,
right? At the end of every project, you
can say, “Did you enjoy working with Roy
Anderson on this project?” Zero to nine
or one to 10. and basically said he’s
doing pretty good on the savings part
when people hate working with him and
again like that could be another thing
look into my file obviously
yeah the one of the things that I really
really liked about this new solution set
is the fact that you start to understand
your internal customers they’ve always
asked what are you doing for me how are
I’m getting a charge because of this
overhead structure you’re a part of this
charge are you doing anything for me are
you supporting my activity now you can
go back to the senior level person
saying, “Here’s all the contracts that
we’re supporting your activity. Here’s
the impact that we’ve had on those
contracts and here’s the internal
customer and the sourcing manager that’s
supporting your activity.” So, you start
building this reputation as being
someone that delivers results and can
then document that clearly and go
through an auditable process so that
everyone feels like these aren’t made up
numbers. This is where it was. This is
where we are today. Here’s the
Amazing. Let’s go to the next slide. And
when we’re talking about the dashboards
of the future, right? It’s not enough
anymore to just have a uni-dimensional
data set that just shows you what
happened last month, right? And I think
as we get into it, like we need to have
data that fuel insights that lead to
action and then outcomes and everything
is tracked soup to nuts. And I think
that’s really where we need to get to
where things are basically actionable as
and when needed. And you could have a a
supplier event. For example, you have a
supplier failure or a subcontractor
failure that could then impact your
suppliers. And then say, “Hey, something
happened here. Here are the 10 suppliers
that could be directly impacted by this
failure of a fourth party. Now, here are
the actions you should be taking.” That
is real and that’s actionable. What are
you seeing out there Roy in terms of
things you can add to this discussion?
So from the amount of dynamic nature
we’ve seen, of course, tariffs is in the
news every minute. The relationships
with our countries, relationships with
our suppliers inside of those countries.
This is a very dynamic situation. And
the idea is a sourcing effort or a
contract that’s in place is being
impacted by these realtime events.
Frequently you get these contracts that
sit there for three years and no one’s
really acting on them even though
there’s a risk being built inside those
contracts that don’t get looked at for
three years. If you have a holistic view
and your portfolio is not only of your
sourcing activity today, which is in
real time adjustments and decisions that
need to be made, but also the contracts
that are in play and how they’re being
impacted, you want to be able to know
when and how you have to take actions in
order to mitigate risks that are
developing. And having that insight is
crucial for you to be able to be
responsive and not have to be called in
to the CFO or CEO’s office and say, “Why
didn’t you know about this? Why didn’t
you take actions on this opportunity?”
Where what I love to do is be able to
say, “Hey, we have information. This is
how it’s going to impact you internal
customer and these are the actions that
we suggest to take in order to be able
to mitigate the risk before it actually
happens.” So you are proactive, you’re
responsive to your internal customer,
you can actually create that value
proposition that becomes very real and
visible to your internal customers and
management of the company.
Yeah. And one thing we double click a
little bit on is the whole idea of role
based, right? So the thing that I always
love about starting with a new customer
is seeing what they want to see as part
of their dashboard, right? Because if
you don’t really know who your suppliers
are, what risks there are, what you’re
spending, what the opportunities are,
knowing about fourth party suppliers and
negative news assessments of fourth
parties, it’s less relevant for you,
right? So you have to crawl, walk, run.
So the whole idea of having a role-based
view and showing people what is
important to them rather than saying
this is best in class, that could be
very overwhelming for someone who’s just
starting out. And it’s fun to do and see
how things progress as people mature
into the procurement function.
Yeah, I love the role-based concept
because I’ll tell you right now, you
have a meeting with your finance team,
whether it’s the budget people up to the
CFO, they have a different perspective
on the risks and issues that they want
to take take into consideration. You go
into the advertising and marketing
group, they have a whole different
perspective of what they want to see and
the actions they want to take. You get
into your audit team, totally different
response. the internal customer or the
production line or the engineering
teams, the marketing teams, they all
have different perspectives and a
different view of the exact same
contractual situation. So you have to
understand their role. And the fun part
is as you start to add in more AI
visibility into this and the data starts
to become more digital, AI can take
better action on it. And then as you get
to tier two and tier three, which just
explodes your footprint, you need to
have those AI levels and those
role-based views in order to be able to
be actionable and to get through all the
junk to get to those pieces where you
can take appropriate action effectively.
It also really highlights the need that
the supply chain talent needs to grow
and develop significantly away from
their transactional nature and into more
strategic, proactive, forward-looking
100%. So let’s move on to the next slide
here, Maya. So what should a dashboard
do today? And we’re focusing a lot here
on negative stuff. So if a KPI is read
or risk identifier or supply cyber
event, yeah, we need to definitely
action those things too. But this also
could be true for let’s say a savings
opportunity shows up or a new project
comes in or whatever the case may be,
right? So all of these triggers could
still be a positive thing, not
necessarily a negative thing. And we
talk about the whole idea here of
something happened and now you have to
do something about it. And today
for example we can come up with
corrective actions to say all right
there is a hurricane in Southeast Asia.
Here are your direct here are your
direct suppliers that could be impacted
and here are you second tier suppliers
that could be impacted and hence your
first could trigger an outage. So then
what are the corrective actions? You
should probably pick up the phone and
call somebody or send an email right and
assign ownership to who needs to follow
up and then escalate and those kinds of
things right? The whole idea now of
having a dashboard that sort of just
stares at you is not good enough. You
actually need to do something when
things are happening, right?
Yeah. It’s interesting. We tend to spend
our time on how do we find negative
activity. But actually the golden nugget
from that conversation was we need to
spend a lot more time on where new
information comes in that creates
opportunities for innovation where we
have a supplier that has oh unveiled a
new capability a new solution set and it
is in those not only your first tier but
your second tier suppliers that are
saying I’ve got something new and if you
don’t see it obviously you can’t
favorably impact your internal customers
but as do start to get those feeds of
information not about just negative but
all the new positive innovation things
which realistically I think is the 70
80% the 10 20% is the negatives the
80%’s the possibility of being more
innovative with your supply chain and as
I I tell my class all the time I said
for every revenue dollar anywhere from
40 to 70% of that revenue dollar is
going to your suppliers that means You
need your suppliers to be more
innovative and be the source of an
innovation engine that’s going to be
able to feed your engineering groups,
your production groups, your design
groups, R&D groups because that’s where
your innovation is going to come from.
So where we need to spend more time on
the positives, the opportunities, the
innovation of this of this dashboard
Yep. 100%. And the last bullet point
last two actually is dynamic feedback
loops and surfacing bottlenecks. So one
of the things that we do a lot of focal
point is process obviously right but in
every organization there’s always the
folks that are not all that expeditious
in executing tasks right so the whole
idea of why does a sourcing process take
x amount of time being able to lay that
out in a dashboard way and say legal 80%
of the time takes this long and
henceforth they’re on the critical path
and being able to identify where things
are and I think having the ability to
have a visual to say we had 200 100
projects last year and on average this
is how long it takes by gates by
stakeholder. It’s a very powerful thing
and it’s not anecdotal anymore because
you actually have the underlying data to
support it and you can actually make it
look pretty whisbang, right? So, it’s
yeah, I think your the idea of
bottlenecks your internal customer
thinks that they say, “Okay, I’m being
told I I need to use this sourcing
function or or they got an audit hit
because they don’t utilize that sourcing
capability the way they should.” And
then it goes into this black hole and
they go, “How long? Why does it take
three months to get something done? I
could have gotten it done by next Monday
by just calling my friend and the
supplier and coming to an agreement.” So
they see this whole and they think it’s
all the sourcing team doing the work.
But in actuality, once you go through
the process, you have risk reviews and
audit reviews and legal reviews that all
take time to make it a much better
solution. But we all have to realize
that process has to be both visible to
the internal customer so they see it.
Also visible in terms of the value
that’s created and be very reasonable
and saying this is taking too long but
now we can target the areas that take
the time how what actions can we take to
speed that up or to eliminate it
entirely. Concepts I’ve always used is
simplify eliminate automate simplify the
process and not do the steps because
you’ve now digitized it. So you don’t
need to do the manual steps. Eliminate
all those things that don’t add value
and then automate the entire structure
Hallelujah. If we eliminated all the
nonsense, it would be free up a lot of
So we’re going to jump into a couple of
examples of reporting now. And
ironically, this is not one of ours.
This is a rapid ratings financial his
financial stability assessment of a
specific supplier. And I like this
because it’s basically it tells you
everything that you need to know on one
slide. Shout out to Rapid Ratings for
this one, right? But here you can see
that a supplier is being evaluated and
the financial health rating is green and
it’s right in line with the sector
average. So that that’s really good. And
the same thing here with the core health
score. Again, the really good line with
expectations of the sector. And I like
the visual on the right because it tells
you whether a supplier is an A, B, C or
D. And basically the whole idea here is
if it’s not, let’s say that you have a
fairly advanced risk program and you can
say if a supplier shows up in C or D,
then you need to trigger a workflow to
do a secondary review. Maybe you collect
balance sheet and income statements from
the supplier for your own propeller
heads to look at it. Right? So to me,
this is a great example of once you
actually get to learn what you’re
looking at here, it’s very easy to say,
“Yep, this provides value.” And I don’t
really have a lot of improvement
opportunities for these guys. It’s it’s
a great partnership for us. We love
dealing with them, but it’s a great it’s
a great piece of piece of work right
here. Well, what I like about Focal
Point is that it’s an open system and
the fact that it can take data from
third parties and present it versus
being just in internal only activity.
So then we’re going to go into a a
customer report that we built for a
customer. So this is the third party
risk management dashboard. Right? And
you can see here you have six widgets.
You have the first widget on the top
leftand corner shows you the
distribution of the 20 suppliers between
the risk categories. Right? So red is
bad. Right? And orange not so good.
Green and yellow are okay. Right? So
this is inherent risk in terms of high,
medium, low and high. And then you can
see the infosc posture of the suppliers
on the bottom left, the privacy risk
posture on the next one. And then you
have legal risk and then you have
financial risk. So basically it’s a risk
dashboard where you can look at things
and you look at the distribution of
where you potentially could have risk,
right? So just because somebody’s
inherent inherent risk score is high
doesn’t mean that they’re a risky
supplier. It just means that they are
performing risky stuff, right? that that
you probably need to monitor, right? So
again, this is what the customer wanted
to see and we are performing inherent
risk and followup on infosc on privacy
on on legal risk and all those kinds of
things so that the risk propeller head
can have a look and see what actions
Nothing super sexy here. It’s a lot of
underlying data that goes underneath.
But if you click one down, you you click
on that red top leftand corner thing and
you get to see okay, who are my top two
suppliers that are critical, right? And
here you can see again this is fake
data, right? Reser took it. But if you
double click on that now, you get to see
who the two suppliers are. You get to
see the total annual spend. You get to
see how many contracts you have with
them. And then you get to see who the
supplier owner is. And you get to see
the status of the supplier, right? And
of course, if you click further into
this, you can see everything that’s
moving with these two suppliers. You can
see how many projects they’re engaged
in. You can see how many contracts that
are coming up for renewal. You can see
when the next QBR is, like all those
kinds of things. So, it becomes really
deep and you can go into the minute
details of this specific supplier. And
again, it starts with the dashboard and
then you go deep deep. And if you then
clicked on the the next one and you can
then see if you clicked on the infosc
posture ones then you get to see all
right those suppliers that had a red
infosc posture how are they looking
overall. So you get to see here to the
extent to which you have sock twos or
how many of them are current how many of
them are expired how many of them are
coming up for renewal and again the ones
that are yellow and red there’s an
action that needs to be taken relatively
quickly. So with focal point obviously
if you’re yellow we would then say
automatically ask the supplier to update
their information but if it turns red
you probably need to do more manual
follow-ups. Again, you make it very
actionable and you follow up where you
have to follow up. Again, this is just I
don’t want us to do a clickthrough of
the system. I just about show you the
art of the possible. Any comments,
questions, concern with that?
No, I love what I like in this scenario
is the fact that I can see myself
sitting down with my internal customer
and being able to show their role,
showing, hey, you own this type of
activity. You’re one of three customers
for this supplier. the suppliers getting
into difficulties, we suggest that we
put this out to bid, finding a second
supplier or move the work entirely over
to another supplier base or supplier
footprint in order to minimize this risk
that you have. So now you can drill into
any of the suppliers of that internal
customer. How big of a player are they?
Are they the small fish in the bigger
pond or are they the Goliath that’s
actually driving most of the spend? And
then how do we take actions in order to
get better results, better innovation,
lower risk, better cost structures for
them, the internal customer. Having that
at our fingertips makes the procurement,
the supply chain data come alive for the
internal customer. as we nerd out on
some of these things, right? Like one of
the things that I love doing with with
customers that are signing up for for
our supplier management platform is the
whole idea of risk with second tier
suppliers because basically you you’ll
be amazed how many of your suppliers use
AWS or Azure or Google and you don’t and
even like you don’t have direct
relationships with those suppliers,
right? So having the idea of
concentration risk with secondary
suppliers just is really interesting and
it’s something that we really enjoy
doing because to me as a as an old guy
doing procurement now it’s amazing
information that you can get even with
organizations that you don’t have
and without a dashboard it’s hard to
get. So last this last slide of the day
here is going to be our sales stick
right. So how do we fit into this? What
I would like to say here is the value of
the dashboard is not really what it
shows but what the hell you can do with
it. And as you look at a supplier or a
stakeholder or the or a category, right?
The whole idea of being able to see
everything that’s moving within that
category supplier or stakeholder and how
are you going to interact with that with
this with that system? how you’re going
to interact with that data so you can
figure out how to save money, mitigate
risk, get real work done and track
progress against it. And the whole idea
here is stop looking in the rearview
mirror and move towards continuous
improvement so you can actually add
value to the business. And that’s why we
started the company and we love doing
this stuff, right? As you can tell, we
are procurement people throughout nerdy
about it. Anything to add to that? What
you know what I find really interesting
is you understand the people putting it
together. Where are they coming from?
Are they the science people? Are they
the data people? Are they the process
flow people? Or are they actually the
former users that had real problems to
solve? And how do they go about solving
it? And the results are very different.
And you can understand when someone
something’s being developed by a person
that ran into these problems and needed
a solution for it. All of a sudden, you
find the tools that they develop create
solutions that work. So, I just get a
kick out of it. I love having former
procurement types driving these types of
All right, we wouldn’t we wouldn’t let
you guys go until we slug the next
episode, which is on February 18th. So,
there’s two QR codes here. One is to
register for the next episode
and we also have some homework for
people who care to take do this, right?
So the second QR code is is a link to a
procurement dashboard and the
effectiveness scorecard. So basically
you get to download this information for
yourself and see how well you guys are
doing in your organization on
best-in-class procurement dashboards and
driving actions there from. So guys, as
always, my name is Andrew. You can find
me on LinkedIn and all the socials.
And Jeremy, I’m pretty sure we can make
this available to you. We’ll get Maya to
do that. And yeah, guys, please reach
out to me directly either on LinkedIn or
email. And Roy, thanks again for
spending another perfectly good half
You probably could have used it much
more productive elsewhere, but thanks
