Art of Procurement

My guest today is Chandar Pattabhiram, the new Chief Marketing Officer at Coupa. We sat down and recorded this podcast during the SIG Fall Summit in Carlsbad, California, which explains all of the interesting background noises you may hear. I took that opportunity to get his fresh perspective on how procurement can elevate its role in the organization.

My guest today is Lawrence Kane, a Fortune 50 strategic sourcing and functional excellence lead. Lawrence and I sat down to talk at the SIG Fall Summit in Carlsbad, California, where our conversation focused on what he has learned during his three-decade career.

Hi there everyone, and welcome to this week’s Art of Procurement interview, which is powered by SIG. My guest today is Kate Vitasek, a member of the graduate faculty in executive education at the University of Tennessee, and the creator of the Vested model. Kate and I have recorded several podcasts together, but in this case we connected in person at the SIG Fall Summit in Carlsbad, California. We took that opportunity to discuss the Vested model and how procurement (after long delay) is embracing the mindset. We started our conversation by getting caught up on what has transpired in the world of Vested since the last podcast.

Hi there everyone, and welcome to this week’s Art of Procurement interview, which is powered by SIG. My guest today is Chris Camejo, the Director of Product Management and Threat Intelligence at NTT Security - probably the scariest sounding title I’ve ever had here on Art of Procurement. Chris and I connected in person at the SIG Fall Summit in Carlsbad, California, where we had an opportunity to talk about what threat intelligence means and what role procurement can play in strengthening a company’s security risk level.

Welcome to today's Art of Procurement interview powered by SIG. Today's show is part of a mini-series of six different episodes that I recorded live at the recent SIG Fall Summit in Carlsbad, California. Being a live recording, you'll hear background noises like baristas making coffee, venue employees taping wire to the carpet, and lots of other little sounds in between. We actually had a booth set up in the main corridor of the conference venue, so you're sure to get the atmosphere from the event from those interviews. Today I'm delighted to be joined by Alan Holland, the founder and CEO of Keelvar. Given that Alan has a degree in computer engineering, a PhD in artificial intelligence, and has worked as a research fellow and a lecturer, he is probably one of the most qualified people in procurement to answer my first question, “What really is AI?”

My guest this week on the pod is Tim Cronin, the CPO of GuideWell, a not-for-profit mutual holding company in the healthcare industry. Tim and I connected live at the SIG Fall Summit in Carlsbad, California, where we had an opportunity to talk about his journey with Sourcing Business Models in a presentation with Kate Vitasek, founder and lead researcher for the Vested business methodology. What I really enjoyed about our conversation is that Tim shared putting the theory of ​​Sourcing Business Models into practice - what worked, what didn't, and what lessons were learned along the way.

You will notice from the title, that this is not an ordinary Art of Procurement podcast.  In fact, it is not an AOP podcast at all. As regular listeners will know, I have been working very closely with Kelly Barner – we partnered on The Procurement Revolution, co-founded Palambridge, and Kelly helps me behind the scenes to keep the wheels on here at Art of Procurement. Kelly has been hosting a procurement and supply chain podcast for over six years, and in fact it was one of my inspirations behind starting Art of Procurement. We announced yesterday that Kelly’s show – Buyers Meeting Point – or BMP Radio – will be produced by, and hosted on, the Art of Procurement Network. Today, as an introduction to BMP Radio, I am including today's episode in the AOP feed. Kelly's guest is Jonathan O'Brien.  Jonathan is the CEO and Owner of Positive Purchasing, an international procurement consultancy and training provider. He is also the author of four books, the most recent of which was just released this year, titled ‘The Buyer’s Toolkit: An Easy to Use Approach for Effective Buying.’

Hi there everyone, and welcome to this week’s Art of Procurement interview, powered by SIG. My guest today is Christian Lanng, the co-founder, Chairman, and CEO of Tradeshift. I’m really happy to welcome Christian back to the show. He first joined me in August of 2016, all the way back in episode 80! It was one of my most enjoyable interviews because Christian has strong views on the future of procurement, and the intersection of technology and supply chains. In today’s conversation, I wanted to follow up to see what, in his mind, has changed since we last spoke – is technology evolving as fast as predicted? How does Christian see organizations starting to adapt? I was also interested to learn how Tradeshift determines which ‘future technologies’ to invest in, and why they recently became members of the Hyperledger project, a global, open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies.

Today, I am joined by Gene Zaino, the founder and CEO of MBO Partners. MBO Partners are at the forefront of the gig or the project economy. I was delighted to welcome Gene onto the show to discuss a little bit more about the gig economy - particularly in the context of knowledge-based workers. We discussed how organizations can start thinking about taking advantage of an on-demand workforce. And if they already are, what are some of the things that they can do to take it to the next level? So, my first question for Gene was if he could share a little bit more about what MBO Partners actually does.

I am joined today by Antonio Humphreys, the Senior Manager of Global Procurement at Adobe Systems based in California. I’ve actually seen Antonio speak before, and he has always been high on my list of practitioners that I wanted to interview and so I’m delighted we were able to make it happen.  We were connected by the team at ProcureCon, as Antonio will be speaking at the upcoming ProcureCon Marketing conference in New Orleans at the end of November. Antonio has enjoyed a career that, after an internship with NASA, actually started in sales before he jumped over to the other side of the table and joined procurement.  He worked for organizations such as Shell, Hewlett-Packard, and Gap before joining Adobe. He has a deep background in procurement organizational development and marketing, and those two topics were the focus of our conversation. I started by asking Antonio what keeps him in procurement after spending time in both sales and procurement...