The third evolution is to generate outsized value to turn procurement into a profit center. Have procurement not just be a necessary step in a process to install equipment in the field or to buy materials for a plant, but to take the view that procurement has across the entire supply chain and leverage that into a profit center, that actually creates value above anything that we've done before. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. Welcome to episode 79 of the Sustainable Supply Chain Podcast, the number one show focusing exclusively on the intersection of sustainability and supply chains. I'm your host, Tom Raftery, and I'm thrilled to have you here today. A huge thank you to this podcast's, amazing supporters, Kieran Ognev, and Alicia Farag. You folks really help to make this podcast possible. If this podcast regularly brings you value and you too would like to help me keep the podcast going, support starts at just three euros or dollars a month, less than the price of a coffee, and you can find the link in the show notes of this or any episode or at tiny tinyurl.com/ssc pod. Now, you know how everyone says procurement should be strategic, but in practice it still gets treated like a clerical function? My guest today is the guy who's actually fixing that at scale. Conrad Snover helps Fortune 1000 companies turn procurement into a value generator, not just a cost center. He's worked with utilities, oil and gas, tech firms, banks, you name it. What makes Conrad's perspective unique is how he blends old school supply chain wisdom, with forward looking strategy. We're talking resilient sourcing, grid modernisation bottlenecks, the electrification crunch, and why procurement's future lies in becoming a profit center with the tools and mindset to match. If you've ever struggled with getting procurement a seat at the strategy table. Or keeping your clean energy goals alive while waiting two years for a transformer. This one's for you. But before we get into that, in the next few weeks, I will be talking to Saskia Van Gendt, Chief Sustainability Officer for Blue Yonder. Steve Saltzgiver, director of Fleet Success for RTA Fleet, Sam Jenks, CRO of Kodiak Hub. And Paul Byrnes, CEO of Maverick ai. Now back to today's episode, and as I mentioned, my special guest on the show today is Conrad. Conrad, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself?? Sure, thanks for having me, Tom. My name's Conrad Snover, CEO of ProcureAbility. We're a fully integrated procurement services firm, technology enabled procurement services, and we've been around for about 30 years. Tell me Conrad, ProcureAbility, what problem do you solve for whom? You bet. We're a procurement services firm, which means we help companies with all things procurement. We have a range of services that we provide, but in essence, you can think about it like this. Every company buys things. Every company has a procurement organisation of some sort. And it turns out that a lot of companies need help buying things in a more efficient way or at a better price or in a better service model and or their procurement organisation, whether it's a well-defined organisation or maybe a function that's distributed across their enterprise, that procurement function maybe suboptimised and may have an opportunity to be reorganized, restructured, improved the process, maybe some technology enhancements to automate the system and improve the efficiency. Or there may be an opportunity for them to take a more strategic approach to how they view and manage the supply base, how they manage the acquisition of the services and the materials they need to run the business. And we help them do a better job of that. And that can take the shape of many things. It could be a full transformation of all elements. It could be a very surgical level of support for one project and everything in between. Okay, and who are typical customers? Well, like I said, every company out there does procurement. So, in a way, every company is our customer. Now, we do specialise in some industries. We specialise in the energy sector, oil and gas, and utilities. We also specialise in financial institutions CPG, consumer packaged goods, high tech, and a smattering of folks across the entire array of the world from across all industries, because like I said, everybody does procurement. So there's, there's a lot of commonality across all industries you'd be surprised to hear, perhaps. But in essence, everybody's our customer. Great. And what markets are you serving? Is it North America? Is it all the Americas? Is it all the Americas plus Europe? Is it all the Americas plus Europe plus Asia? Is it, you know, something else? So we started our business in the United States in 1996. Since then, we've grown our capabilities and our delivery footprint. It, it was an evolution that went like this. We started in the US we built first a delivery center in India to supplement the delivery of our services for our United States based customers. But we've evolved now to where we serve global customers headquartered in the US and headquartered overseas across, candidly, all geographies. We're part of the Jabal group of companies. And Jabal is a global supply chain and manufacturing company. It's a massive, massive business with 100 plants in 30 countries. And our affiliation with Jabal, our ownership by Jabal allows us to use the Jabal, geographic footprint to provide services in every country. So we've very, very quickly ramped to delivery services in Mexico, Dominican Republic, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and of course we still retain our, our original, very first overseas operation in India. And looking at the big picture, what's the most surprising change you've seen in procurement and supply chain over the last decade or even three decades seeing as you're going back to 96 and, well, the company is at least, anyway? Yeah, I would say the most surprising thing is actually the the lack of change, perhaps Tom. I'm gonna give you the counter to your question. You and I have had some conversations about this in the past, and it's something that we talk a lot about. It's the evolution from tactical to strategic. To truly add the value to the enterprise that, procurement has the potential to add. And we talk about a multi-step process and how to do this. We talk about the potential that's on the table, and the financial leadership in the business wants to take costs outta the equation. We talk about how procurement is there to service the business, not for its own sake, of course. And so procurement's sole objective is to serve the business. And so procurement really needs to focus on customer service and delivering, not just taking an order and executing an order, but delivering true value. You know, thought leadership, and what is it you're buying and why do you need that thing, and how can I give you a creative solution that is maybe more efficient or less costly to accomplish the same objective? How can I do that very, very quickly so that you actually like working with me? So often procurement is seen as a bottleneck and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We spent a lot of time talking about the evolution of procurement. I go back 20 years, I've been talking about this for 20 years. So why is procurement not making the change more rapidly? And I still think the fundamental problem in our industry is that procurement is underfunded. It's under-resourced, and it's under-invested by most businesses. Most businesses still view procurement as a clerical or administrative function to the business, and they miss the opportunity that is right in front of them for procurement to be a value added partner to deliver that value to the business. Now. I will say it's actually most of the time it is procurement's fault for not evolving and building the procurement function to one of a higher level of maturity, to one of a higher level of efficiency, to one that generates more savings and value for the business, so that procurement has that seat at the table. And is able to deliver the value. But to summarise, again, my response to your question of what is the biggest surprise and the change in the industry is I think the lack of change the lack of adoption of that true strategic value consistently across the, across, like your, to your answer, your question earlier, who do we serve? What kind of customers, what kind of industry? This is consistent across all industries and all sizes of customers as well Okay. And for any procurement professionals who are listening, what is it that they need to do to ensure they do get that seat at the table? The key thing for people to think about is that this is earned. The seat at the table is earned. You don't deserve it. You don't sort of pound on the table and ask for it. You demonstrate value and you get invited up the value chain. So that is the key point here that every procurement professional should think about. Oh, I want that seat at the table. Well, you need to earn it. You need to demonstrate value. You need to demonstrate wins. You need to demonstrate savings. You need to demonstrate improved service levels, delivering great cost savings while maintaining, or improving quality and service for the business demonstrating that if you get involved earlier in the buy decision, you can add more value. And through that evolution, the business will see you as somebody they simply wanna work with versus somebody who's an afterthought to write a contract or sign a contract so they get a check mark in the compliance spend category. And, obviously this is the Sustainable Supply Chain podcast, so what does that have to do with this? Well, sustainability means a bunch of different things to me personally. I think at ProcureAbility, we view sustainable supply chain in not just the traditional sense of sustainability, meaning, you know, green or less waste or, but efficient and a supply chain that doesn't break. So removing overreliance on single sources of supply. Diversifying sources of supply from a geographic perspective so that a climate impact, a storm or a geopolitical situation in one region is mitigated by a diversified supply solution that is in available in another region. We've had customers where they purchase approved products from a specific supplier's plant, but not others. And the approved plant had a fire and the supplier says, well, I can't give you products out of that plant anymore, but I've got another plant. Well, that plant's not approved. I can't buy products from that plant. Okay, well, what do you wanna do about it? And It became very, very clear, very quickly that we need to diversify the supply base. So diversifying the supply base doesn't just mean more suppliers, it means more plants with your existing suppliers. It means more geographies, it means more countries. It, means several different things. So sustainable supply chain is one that is resilient. So we really like the word resiliency and resilient supply chain at pro ProcureAbility. So we help our clients with building resiliency. But on the more classic definition, we also just like doing the right thing. Things should be efficient. We should be efficient with the way we work. We should not have waste in the supply chain. Whether it's an inefficient number of steps where it's a very convoluted process, that's a waste of time for everybody. Whather it's we're buying something in a, suboptimal economic order quantity where we're receiving shipments too frequently or too few items in too large of a box or an inefficient packaging scenario where we have all this packaging waste that we have to deal with. Removing waste from the supply chain. Removing waste from the procurement environment is also what we call sustainable supply chain. And what are some major forces shaping procurement today that you think people might be underestimating? Today we're dealing with a lot of different things. Obviously anybody in procurement will tell you their job is very interesting, very dynamic. Today we have geopolitical issues. We have global supply chain issues, you know, coming out of COVID shortages. Then excess supply, container ships blocking canals wars, tariffs, tariffs on a number of different things, tariffs on assemblies. We're trying to figure out what tariffs mean when, you know, at what level does the tariff apply? If you buy an assembly and there's a tariff on one of the metal components that's in the assembly, do you pay the tariff on the metal component? I mean, just put yourself in the mind of a, buyer. Do you pay the tariff on the metal component? Did you specify that that metal has to come from this country or that country? Well, if you specify that it must come from this country and this country has a tariff, does that tariff then flow through you on the assembly or subassembly or the raw, raw material level? I think procurement, to answer your question succinctly, is representing the level of analytical, rigor and business acumen needed to run a sustainable supply chain to be able to ascertain the impacts of all those things we just listed, to be able to create a strategy that creates a sustainable supply chain in light of all those dynamics we just listed, it requires a procurement professional to operate at a very, very different level than we have historically. This connects all the way back to your original question, which is, well, I'm gonna translate, I'm gonna change the, the, the theme is, why is procurement not evolving to the level it should be? What can procurement do to evolve and become more value to deliver more value to the business? The level of business acumen, analytical rigor, global awareness, market intelligence, supply market, and intelligence that a procurement professional needs to bring to the table today is much, much higher than it has been in the future or in the past. And I think the procurement organisation in the future needs to invest to make sure that the organisation as a whole is staying up to speed and through that intelligence and that analytical rigor can deliver that value that the business is looking for. And procurement has very traditionally been just purely dealing with suppliers on a transactional basis. How do you see the need for that to evolve? Or do you? Oh, for sure. I think the, traditional role of procurement was a buying desk to take an order and transact that order. You know, you need 10 pens. I'll buy you 10 pens. You need 10 substation transformers. I'll buy you 10 substation transformers. You need a locomotive engine? I'll buy you a locomotive engine. That is a technically a need that was solved. I need something. Now I have the thing. Let's just call that what it is, it's order taking. I'm taking an order and I'm executing that order. And procurement, fundamentally needs to evolve from taking orders to strategically reviewing the need and ensuring that the order is for the right thing that will address the need. I think very often procurement blindly fills the orders and doesn't ask the question, why do we need it? What are we using it for? Is there another alternative? Are we giving too much business to the supplier? And that's now putting our business at risk because for through financial solvency concerns? Are we putting too many of our orders in one region. Maybe we should diversify our supply base. Is there an alternative product or specification or design that would work more efficiently in our, system? How are we managing intellectual capital rights through this development product to give us what we need long term without without becoming beholden to this, supplier's system. So there's so many different questions that a procurement professional needs to ask about what it is that we're buying to actually add that value, to actually say, yeah, this is what we need. Here it is. Or geez, you know, let's diversify our supply and give you an alternative. Or everybody else in the industry is buying this thing, it's 30% cheaper, why are we continuing to buy this thing that I don't think is needed? Let's evaluate whether it might be feasible that we buy the cheaper or the more efficient or the higher quality level product than what was specified originally. And if procurement is just taking orders, can't do that. But if procurement can actually ask critical questions about what it is we need and create a creative model or so evaluation framework for figuring out what it is we need in the future, then we will earn that seat at the table. And as a procurement professional, how would you balance the need for cost efficiency with ensuring supplier reliability and quality, especially in a world where supply chains are increasingly complex and global? Well, it's a, it's very often an assumption that a sustainable supply chain or a well diversified supply chain, or a, you know, high quality product, or one with, you know, very high service wrapped around it, is going to cost more, and it's just simply not the case. By actually conducting a very carefully thought through category strategy, taking all of your spend in a specific category and deciding how you want to approach and manage that, spend on a long-term basis. Then executing strategic sourcing events to put suppliers in place for that. You will find that creating a scorecard that evaluates cost, quality, service, safety, all of the dimensions that you just mentioned. And against the category strategy. There are, in my opinion, there has never been an opportunity where we haven't delivered a lower cost or lower total cost solution that hasn't improved or maintained quality and service. And you mentioned the energy sector and electrification and grid transformation is now obviously something that's top of people's minds in that sector. The rapid shift to electrification is on everyone's radar. So how is this electrification wave impacting procurement and logistics for utilities and everyone in that sector? This is a, a very, very large issue. Let me help paint the picture a little bit, add some color to your question. The current grid infrastructure that we live in and I think this applies to both us in the United States and you in Spain, and most people in the world, the current grid infrastructure is not ready for mass electrification. And the reasons for that are, there are several reasons. So number one, if you look out the window and you see a pole and wires hanging on the pole and maybe a transformer on that pole, you might see rust, or you might see the pole is deteriorating. Now utilities do a very, very good job of maintaining that infrastructure. So it, it's unlikely that it'll just fall down on its own. But on the whole, our infrastructure is aging. The average age of the utility infrastructure of the equipment in the infrastructure is 125% of its useful life ago. So number one, you've got an old, an aging infrastructure. Number two, the infrastructure was built to provide the capacity of a traditional house. That house probably had a combination of electric appliances and gas appliances. We are seeing houses move away from gas towards electricity. We're seeing people have introduce electric cars. I. And general electrification within their house, like I just mentioned. So accommodating a new load is going to impact the infrastructure as well. It's just like in your house, you know, you have a power strip and the power strip allows you to plug six things into it, and you plug that power strip into one outlet in the wall, and that's probably fine, but you have one outlet in the wall for a reason. You don't have six outlets in the wall. If every single outlet in your wall was all of a sudden multiplied by six, you would, trip your breaker. And depending on your system, you might damage your electrical system. So that's just an, that's just like an an example in your house. Now, you know, increase those voltages and multiply it by every house on your street, and you can see what I'm talking about. If all of a sudden we're using more electricity, we're plugging more things in, we need more power, we need more capacity. The infrastructure that runs down your street is built for a limited capacity and does not have the capacity for everybody to have an electric vehicle in their, garage. The third thing is we're changing to a renewable electricity system. Many people have solar on their roofs. Many people have, and there's also regional solar and then maybe. Many utilities are introducing solar as well. So just as an example, but changing the model where electricity flows down the street to the houses, to one where houses generate their own power and electricity flows back into the grid. That is, that requires an upgrade of the infrastructure. There switches that are needed there. The, the meters need to change. So there are also changes to accommodate this new distributed generation of solar on the roofs, for example. On top of that, these issues that we talked about recently with sustainable supply chain, these are facing the utility industry. There are components like transformers, energy storage systems, raw materials like lithium that go into batteries. There are shortages and supply limitations, manufacturing capacity constraints, production, just delays in logistical bottlenecks that are keeping the material from arriving on a quick as needed basis. So supply chain constraints would be the fourth item, and I guess the fifth would be the raw material that I just mentioned that goes into those. You can see that the utility industry as a whole is facing a constrained future, and so the procurement per professional needs to think about what are we gonna do about it? What role does procurement play? What roles do our suppliers play? How do we structure a supply chain that works in this new environment? On the topic of grid expansion, I've heard a lot about how utilities are facing huge delays in getting critical equipment. You mentioned transformers a minute ago. There's delays I've read of several years in getting access to transformers, for example. How are procurement teams managing these kinds of long lead times while trying to stay on track with clean energy goals? Well, well, the, the I've, I've heard several different strategies on this. Tom. I think you and I might agree that some are better than others. One is just buy a lot and keep a whole bunch of inventory. So, so that, that's certainly a strategy. Mm-hmm. or one approach maybe is a better word, not strategy. But the true answer to this you know, not everybody can afford or should afford to buy a yard and stack equipment in anticipation of future growth because growth changes, needs change, voltages change over time. It's a little bit, maybe not so much in transformers, but, equipment ages if it just sits in the yard. So that's not the best long-term strategy. What makes sense in a situation like this is to really take an integrated supply chain view to implement a level of relationship with your suppliers, where you're acting at a true alliance and you're collaborating on strategic issues. This allows utilities to work at a level of trust and collaboration with their suppliers that allow suppliers to maintain inventory, suppliers to commit to making deliveries. But it requires the utility to do their part, to maintain a demand forecast, to have transparency in the demand signals and share those with the supplier, very generally upstream very far in advance, and then becoming more refined as the time changes to where the order is placed and the supplier know, knew that, that order was coming. You talked about taking orders and evolving the supply chain. The procurement model in, in the past would be: supplier knows nothing about an order until the order shows up or until a bid is executed. In this future world, supplier knows demand signals way, way early on when they're first thought of. Take this utility example we're talking about. A developer is going to build a new neighborhood. The supplier should know from the utility that, Hey, we just got a notice that a developer's gonna build, you know, 500 home development in this area, and it's gonna include this equipment and it's gonna have this voltage system. And this is kind of roughly what we're thinking on this rough timeframe. They should know that immediately when the utility knows it. If the project gets canceled, that's fine, but by then the supplier will have known that the project evolved. Oh, there's a hangup and, oh no, it's accelerating and Oh no, the, the needs have changed. And you might say, well, I don't really want to trouble my supplier and have them sort of get yanked around and get excited that, that we're gonna buy 50 things and then get distracted when we're adjust it down to 10 and, oh no, it's back up to 40 'cause somebody made a mistake and trust me the supplier wants to be part of the process and by building an alliance, a collaborative alliance type relationship with your suppliers, you'll be able to execute without building a yard full of inventory. Okay. And in your work with utilities and other sectors, have you seen any standout examples of companies building truly agile, adaptive resilient supply chains? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. and it's across all categories. It's not just the transformers. I mean, transformers are the, they're the big metal box or can that hangs on the pole or box that sits on the concrete pad outside your house. Those are like the, critical path item, if you will, because that takes the voltage from the street and distributes it to, to a voltage level that's suitable for the, for the homes. And it sort of manages, it does a whole bunch of different things, but that, that's the one thing we talk about a lot. And those are expensive, and you know, they're big and they're cumbersome. But this also applies to nuts and bolts. It also applies to gloves and safety equipment for the, workers. It applies to the trucks that they drive, that they use to install the equipment that are customized and built very specifically for the utilities with boxes on the side of the trucks with their tools are stored and fit some of these nuts and bolts and other smaller MRO pieces of equipment are stored. I mean, even those trucks, there's a shortage in trucks. Because the truck industry was taken over by private equity. It was consolidated and now the truck customisers, there were very few of them and they're very, very expensive. And so now there's a shortage in trucks. So these strategies apply across the board. They apply from the equipment on the pole, the bolts on the pole, and the equipment and the services we use to install the the equipment. So it, it truly is across the board. When we see utilities. When we work with different customers, we see a range, and it's not always the big ones that are doing a great job and the sort of the little small municipalities that are doing a poor, a bad job. In fact, it's, it's not consistently, the size of the utility, it's determined consistently by the vision of the supply chain leader. So it's no different than any other business in any other industry. It's the vision of the supply chain leader that says, how are we going to manage our supply chain? Are we going to be transactional? And are we gonna tell the supplier what we need when we need it? And if the supplier wants the business, then they'll show up and give us the business. Well, maybe the supplier doesn't have capacity and they're not gonna show up. And so what you find is the, the true visionaries that are like, look, we need our suppliers. We need long-term relationships, we need alliance level partnerships. We need a sustainable supply chain. So we really need a supply base that's gonna support us in that. We see a very, very different model in progressive supply chains at utilities than we do in transactionally focused supply chains. Okay. And you mentioned at the start that ProcureAbility has a big focus on technology enablement. What's one digital tool or data-driven insight that you're most excited about right now? Well, that's, it's, oh man, you want just one? That's gonna be tough. I could, I could spend another hour talking about this, but maybe I'll just pick a, a, a pretty unique example, something that we helped build that I, that I'm pretty excited about. I'll lay out the situation. The we wrote a new contract structure for doing construction. So this is replacing poles, this is installing new poles. This is putting new infrastructure up in the air and underground in the utility world. So it was a construction contract. It used to be a, more of a time and material type structure, and we created a unit based structure that would be more transparent for managing costs. Meaning, I don't know if it took you three hours or five hours, and I, I don't know if you had four people or six people, and in fact, I don't care. I want the pole in the ground. I want wires on the pole. I want it done, and I want it done right. And I want to pay for that when it's done. So we created units of work and a unit of work type structure for the contract. And from an academic perspective, from a finance perspective, from a procurement perspective, it sounds terrific. But now put yourself in the shoes of the person in the field who manages the contractor. And the contractor's like, okay, all right, Tom, our crew's done for the day. You know, there were four of us and a truck, and you know, we worked eight hours. Here's our timecard. And you are like, okay, well that's what we did yesterday. So that's what we're doing today. No, wait a minute. That doesn't match the invoice. The, the invoice that we're gonna get is gonna be, we put one pole in the ground, it had a transformer on it. It had two cross arms and some fuses, and some insulators and some other things. So here's your price for that pole. It was this type of, it was an easy pole, so it was like, you know, X dollars. Well wait a minute. I'm used to billing hours and you're used to accepting hours. So, but now I've got a unit there. Well, how do I manage this? The change management associated with teaching the contractor and teaching the field crew and how to manage and accept work was not trivial because now I'm managing a pole. And the pole might have been in nice, easy to dig dirt, so that was an easy one, but the next ones was in rocky dirt and maybe there's water seepage and a whole very complicated. We had to have some adders that allowed the contractor to charge for a more complicated installation. That may have, may, may have happened in the field, and so it wasn't specified in the work order. And so the person in the field needs to approve the work and validate that the adder is was justified. They used to just sign something on a piece of paper. So we created this app on an iPad that allows them to take a photo of the work to accept the work as installed to indicate whether there were any adders and click submit. And that was the work acceptance that tied into SAP that then matched the invoice that the supplier sent. And so the supplier would get paid immediately. Just think about the transition from paper clipboard time sheet submitted whenever convenient to somebody in an office that had to aggregate it into an invoice that sent it into a central office that wasn't sure how many people worked. So they had to go back to the foreman and say, did these guys work this day? How many people were there? Foreman's, like, I don't remember. That was a month ago. To now, pole's in the ground. We paid for the pole. And so the technology component was critical for that. And having that work acceptance tied to the the invoicing system and the accounts payable system so the supplier got paid right away was critical. And the reason it's a procurement and a supply chain issue, not as some many utility folks or many procurement folks would say, that sounds like an operational problem. They need to figure out how to solve that. They're accepting the work, they're managing the suppliers. We say, we put the contract in place. We wrote this contract, we negotiated this contract. Our ultimate goal is to support the business and let them do the work. We're responsible for making sure it works all the way across the the supply chain. And, what's a change you'd love to see in the way organisations approach procurement in the next five to 10 years? I would like to see procurement evolving the use of category planning and strategic alignment with the business to the point that it's not table stakes, but it's something that everybody does every day, and it's not something that we talk about anymore because it's just the way we do business. Once that happens, then procurement can open the door to the next level of contribution. We can turn procurement from a what originally was transactional and then we evolved to a strategic function. The third evolution is to generate outsized value to turn procurement into a profit center. Have procurement not just be a necessary step in a process to install equipment in the field or to buy materials for a plant, but to take the view that procurement has across the entire supply chain and leverage that into a profit center, that actually creates value above anything that we've done before. And this is done through things like rebates, flowing centrally to finance. This is done through things like global supply chain coordination platforms that make life easier for all the suppliers and all the plants. It's looking at the system as a whole, looking for opportunities to actually take waste out, improve efficiency, but do it in a way that actually creates profit for the enterprise. That's the next step. That's the future of procurement. Okay, and what should procurement or supply chain leaders be focusing on now to be ready for that future? Well, number one, we have to, solve the basics. So I'm gonna go all the way back to the tactical and I'm gonna give you a story to illustrate what I'm talking about. You have to solve the basics before you can have the advanced conversation to talk about strategic opportunities or advanced profit opportunities. My example is this. We were hired to, to help a procurement organisation develop category strategies, and there was somebody, like maybe the chief supply chain officer had a goal, and the goal was that 80% of spend would be under category strategy, meaning category strategies would be developed for 80% of the spend. All right. That was a procurement goal. The procurement CPO, or the chief supply chain officer had that goal. They were behind on their goal, so they called us and they said, can you come help us write these category strategies we did. In the very first meeting we came in. So they were in flight, right? They, they've, they've made some progress on this and the very first meeting that we, we came in and we're like, okay, let's, we're gonna go present this category strategy to a, a vp. And it was a pretty good category strategy at that point. And we go in, we meet with the VP and we're like, okay, we wanna talk about category strategy for transformers. I'm gonna use that example.'cause you and I have been talking about transformers. So we're gonna talk about transformers. You know, we want to do things this way, and we need your demand forecast, and we wanna engage with suppliers like this and everything. And the VP goes can I, can I pause the conversation here for a second? And of course we're like, yeah, sure, yeah, sure, of course. And he goes here's a list of requisitions that my organisation has shared with me. And the average age of these requi requisitions is. I'm gonna make up a number, 36 days. I need these products to do my job. My job is to manage the infrastructure and to keep the infrastructure, infrastructure up to speed and, and operational. Without these materials, I can't do my job. You are here. Procurement exists to help me get the materials I need to do my job, correct? Yes. So, until you can fix this, make this list of outdated requisitions go away. Until you can get me the materials that I need to do my job. I'm not at all interested in this shiny object of category management that you're talking about. So can you please go fix my issue. When that's fixed? I'd be happy to have this conversation with you. Everybody was like, oh my God, that meeting was terrible and, and like, what a disaster. And we said, actually it was brilliant because he told you exactly where the burr is under his saddle. You can go fix that burr, you can fix your process, and then you can come back and be like, I hear you. We fixed it. Now let's talk about the next thing. This illustrates how procurement needs to get the basics right. We cannot focus on cool new things that are shiny and fancy, and until we get the basics done. So the basics are gonna be basic procurement, requisition to PO contracts, change orders, all of the things the business needs to operate, the basics, the procurement fundamentals. Then we can evolve to the strategy. Once the strategy is dialed, then we can evolve to the next step. But you cannot skip a step. Okay. Left field. Question for your Conrad. If you could have any person or character, alive, dead, real or fictional as a champion for procurement, who would be and why? I'm gonna say Dwight Eisenhower, the President Eisenhower World War ii, and the reason that I'm gonna say this is Eisenhower took single accountability, took responsibility at a level that is extremely respectful respectable and admirable, and I think sets a, sets a tone for us. That example you know, I'll, I use different examples and when I talk about procurement and I talk about, the VP that kicked procurement outta the office, they wanted to talk about strategy because of tactical issues or, procurement, dealing with supply chain shortages and how we, accountability and responsibility and ownership of the function is most important for me. And so I love Eisenhower's accountability. So where I'm going with this is he wrote a letter to the troops because he was not so sure. That's one way to put it. He wasn't certain that that D-Day was going to be a success. So he wrote a letter to the troops taking full responsibility for D-Day's failure. And he prepared this before D-Day because he wasn't certain it was gonna be a success and it just, and. It epitomises for me the level of accountability and ownership that we need to have and now apply that to supply chain. It is these chief supply chain officers and the chief procurement officers role to make sure that the materials and the services that are needed are always there and there's one person responsible for that. That level of accountability that Eisenhower demonstrated in World War ii. I would love to see all procurement leaders take on that same level Excellent. Okay, great. We're coming towards the end of the podcast now, Conrad, is there any question I haven't asked that you wish I had or any aspect of this we haven't touched on that you think it's important for people to be aware of? You know, Tom, there's, I've really enjoyed the conversation. There's, there, there are a lot of things that, that we could have talked about, and there are a lot, there's a lot more to talk about, whether it's, on the technology example that I gave you or, you know, expanding into AI and how are we seeing AI identify what needs to be done and advance. I think one of the topics that is probably the most pressing for me is how does procurement demonstrate value in a world where procurement has a, rear view mirror view of the business. Procurement can tell you how much you've already spent. They can tell you what you've already bought with which suppliers in which region, and which categories and everything else. Procurement doesn't operate in the future planning world. And that is the other thing that I think we can talk about in a future topic perhaps, is. For procurement to be successful, procurement needs to change the mindset from telling you what you did to telling you what you're going to do, and telling you how to be successful in that future world. So that ties into category management, it ties into strategy, it ties into profit building, it ties into strategic procurement at that most fundamental levels. And it will help procurement evolve from a tactical to strategic role and says, I can see your budget's increasing your, that means you're gonna buy 10% more of these widgets and 30% more of these services. The market is constraining. Let's have a strategy on how we're gonna address that and be proactive and put something in place before you need it. So we're ready to go. That forward looking view is analytic based and there are some tools that we're working on with AI integrating forecast and budgets and other things into spend analysis and some other tools that are giving procurement that platform that I think are one of the key elements of the future of procurement. Great. Conrad, if people would like to know more about yourself or any of the things we discussed in the podcast today, where would you help me direct them? The best place to find out more about us is at procurability.com, our website. On that website you can learn about our services. You can see our team, but perhaps most importantly for folks is you can subscribe to our insights section. If you subscribe to insights, you'll receive notification of white papers, blogs, podcasts. And, and all the posts that we do on topics like you and I talk today and on a whole bunch more from tariffs and logistics and other things. So there's a Insights section to our website at procurability.com. That's number one. And number two, of course, find us, follow us, like us and everything on LinkedIn. That's the main platform where we also share notifications and updates and, and the like. Superb. Great. Conrad, that's been really interesting. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast today. Tom, I enjoyed it. Thanks for having me and I look forward to chatting again. Okay. Thank you all for tuning into this episode of the Sustainable Supply Chain Podcast with me, Tom Raftery. Each week, thousands of supply chain professionals listen to this show. If you or your organization want to connect with this dedicated audience, consider becoming a sponsor. You can opt for exclusive episode branding where you choose the guests or a personalized 30 second ad roll. It's a unique opportunity to reach industry experts and influencers. For more details, hit me up on Twitter or LinkedIn, or drop me an email to tomraftery at outlook. com. Together, let's shape the future of sustainable supply chains. Thanks. Catch you all next time.