Supplier Relationship Failures – Recorded Webinar
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Transcript
Amanda Prochaska:
All right, well, welcome everyone to this wonderful opportunity to learn more about supplier relationship management. I am Amanda Prochaska. I’m the Chief Wonder Officer of Wonder Services. We are so glad that you are here today. I am co-hosting this webinar with my good friend, Conrad Smith from Graphite. He’s going to do a full introduction here in just a moment, but we’re really happy that you could spend the time with us today to discuss a very relevant topic related to supplier relationship management.
The events over the last couple of years have really elevated the importance of SRM in the marketplace. We think this is really timely and relevant information that we hope that you can take back to your organizations and proceed forward in the best way possible. With that said, I am so happy that Conrad is here with us today. Graphite is a wonderful partner of ours at Wonder Services. Conrad, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself. Conrad, I think you’re on mute maybe. There you go.
Conrad Smith:
All right, awesome. Good to be with you. You’re introducing yourself and I’m thinking I need a better title because Wonder Officer is way better. It sounds more like a superhero, which most procurement people need a superhero title. Great to be with you and great to be with the rest of you. I am an enterprise procurement professional, almost 30 years. I started at Intel. When they hired me, they hired me to be a buyer, and I didn’t know what a buyer was. I thought that was someone at Nordstrom. I didn’t realize companies had buyers. That was my introduction to purchasing.
But I’ve just had a wonderful career at Intel, and then left for a little bit to a smaller business that was later required by Adobe and had the privilege of being the head of procurement at Adobe for almost 10 years prior to launching out to start this new business, Graphite, which has been a crazy, fun adventure on its own. It has been quite an adventure. I’m so glad that we’re here talking about supplier relationship management. Almost to the minute, last Thursday, I got an email from one of my board members saying, “Hey, something’s happening with our bank. We might need to do something.”
I thought, what? Actually, looking back, I feel so stupid for the lack of attention I gave to his early heads up warning. But the events of last Thursday and Friday, I mean, we do bank with Silicon Valley Bank, so it was pretty shocking. In our business, I wouldn’t have thought about banking as one of these suppliers that matters. But believe me, by the end of the day Friday, I was thinking a lot about the things that I wish that I would’ve thought about from a supplier management perspective and a contingency perspective and keep the business running perspective.
Thankfully, not just for Graphite. I mean, we had capital in other places as well, and we were prepared to make payroll. A lot of the really scary things that everybody was grappling with over the weekend, we weren’t facing quite that many fears. But oh my gosh, what a rude awakening to the importance of knowing who those companies are that are so critical to your success and figuring out what you need to do to mitigate the risks of those suppliers.
Amanda Prochaska:
Yeah, absolutely. When I was thinking about this, I’m thinking to myself, when I used to go through my supplier relationship management programs when I was a practitioner, we looked at a lot of our strategic direct suppliers, some of our strategic indirect suppliers, but did we ever include our banks on that list or our payroll numbers?
Conrad Smith:
Banking, I never remember doing that. I mean, large organizations have treasury functions that their entire job is to manage risk of FX and interest rates and all these other things that happen in the business. I think in purchasing, we’ve never been drawn into that. But as a small business owner, too many hats to wear every day.
Amanda Prochaska:
Yeah, absolutely. Obviously this is very relevant for you because it just happened to you last week, and I bet a lot of people on the call today have had similar thought process over the last week saying, “Okay, who do we bank with? How does this impact us? You’re going to hear some stories today from both Conrad and myself around why SRM matters, where the downfalls have been in our previous experiences, but then where are the wins actually have been.
SRM could be really useful not only in preventing something catastrophic, like what we were just talking about, but it will also be relevant in maybe even gaining market position over your competitors. We’re going to share some of those stories today, but we wanted to start with a very relevant example that’s on everyone’s minds and Conrad’s recent experience.
Conrad Smith:
Hey, Amanda, are you hearing a beeping? I’ve got a beeping in my office.
Amanda Prochaska:
No, I am not hearing a beeping.
Conrad Smith:
I’m going to mute myself and change my audio. I’ll be right back.
Amanda Prochaska:
Okay. While we’re waiting for Conrad to come back, we’re going to give you some really practical advice today. I hear that now, Conrad. We’re going to give you some really practical advice to how to walk yourself through an SRM program if you’re new to it, or if you already have an existing one today, it might be really great to refresh yourself and learn some additional tips and tricks today. Conrad, would you be ready to set the stage for us on this slide? Oh, and you’re muted again.
Conrad Smith:
All right. Are we back?
Amanda Prochaska:
No beeping, so that’s good.
Conrad Smith:
Yeah, sorry about that. I’m back in the office today after a few days away, and all of a sudden, all the technologies change. It’s the bane of my existence, the monitors, the bikes, the speakers. To me, supplier relationship management is a really foundational aspect of what we do in procurement. I’m sure there’s a lot of people on the phone that have done this day in and day out. It’s a great reminder to step back and say, what are we doing? Why are we doing it? How does it work?
From a procurement perspective, looking at suppliers, I remember so many years at Intel watching our category managers and our supplier managers put in these very, very robust supply chain solutions, everything that they were doing. I left Intel and went to start procurement at this smaller business, and we had nothing. It was a start from scratch experience, and it was really revealing to stop and realize that what we needed in the organization as a small business or as a different business is not the same thing that we needed in the other business.
When it comes down to expectations from a supplier relationship management program perspective, it’s really important to recognize, realize, and understand what you’re trying to accomplish. There’s a lot of really great frameworks out there and processes that we can bring to the table from a program and a process to implement. There’s no reason to start from scratch. I know, Amanda, you’ll talk in a few minutes about the connection and the relationship or the overlap between supplier relationship management and employee management and all sorts of other supplier relationship management aspects.
But there’s no doubt in my mind, whether it comes to managing suppliers or you’re managing employees or you’re managing children, hopefully not trying to manage your spouse, because I found that’s a disaster, don’t try that, but any of those things that you’re managing, it’s really important to have a plan, set goals, set expectations, and actually have a program in place. We can survive. We can get by shooting by the hip. Unfortunately, that’s how some days progress. But when we can step back, set a strategy, set a plan and look into the future, that’s really the best practice.
Now, one other thing to mention, I think we’ll talk throughout our little chat here today, so much of what we’re going to talk about probably is going to sound a little bit overwhelming. I know every one of us are swamped on the purchasing side. I remember when I left into that smaller business, every day someone would walk in and put a surprise on my desk, and it would just disrupt my entire day, my entire week. I couldn’t do anything.
Going and putting a supplier relationship management program in place and everything we’re going to talk about today, don’t let this overwhelm you and don’t think for a minute that your stakeholders aren’t already doing some supplier relationship management as well. Involving them in the process, making it work with them instead of without them is really the path forward.
Amanda Prochaska:
Yeah, absolutely. I think just with anything that we try to accomplish as a procurement organization, it’s being really crystal clear on what your goals are for that SRM program, because it can take various different flavors, if you will, depending on what you need as an organization. There’s definitely not a one size fits all approach here. It really needs to be tied into what your strategic goals are as a company and what is going to create value for you out of this SRM program. It’s a very important step to set the stage and bridge that very crystal clear objective of what you’re trying to achieve.
Conrad Smith:
Amanda, what you’re saying reminds me so much of my core belief about procurement. We as procurement professionals exist for one reason, one reason alone. I mean, we get lost sometimes with our own goals and other things we’re running around working on, but that is to enable the business to be successful. That’s the only reason we exist. If we’re not helping them be more successful, we might as well just pack our bags and go home, because for sure we’re slowing them down if we’re not helping them. We can’t allow that.
The program that we implement, I love what you said, because it has to understand, recognize what they need, and it has to bring those needs into the program. It’s the beginning of that. You might be in a business that needs to do onsite audits and you might be in a business that that is just a ridiculous thing to do. There’s 15 or 20 other things that might or might not be ridiculous that you really need to understand how to make it work for your organization.
Amanda Prochaska:
Absolutely. 100% cheering you on over here, Conrad. Perfectly stated. Let’s move into a little bit about segmentation and how to go about doing that. You want to share some of your thoughts on this?
Conrad Smith:
Yeah, gosh. Supplier segment, this is one of those things that you just need to start with. You show up at the office, you look at your organization, and you go, okay, I’ve got… I don’t know. You may have 1,000, you may have 10,000, you may have 50,000 suppliers in your organization there. There’s no way given the limited time that you have that you can tackle supplier relationship management of 100% of your suppliers or how you engage, how deal with them, how you contract with them.
All those other investments that you’re going to make with the supplier, you just can’t do that with all of them. It requires a thoughtful model and consideration about who are your strategic suppliers, who are your operational suppliers. Most often you’ll see these supplier segmentation diagrams in a two buy two matrix. That’s the one I’ve seen the most and used the most. That’s pretty straightforward. On one side of the axis, vertically, you usually have your span, and horizontal, you usually have your critical to the business matrix.
You can very quickly start pegging your suppliers into one space or another. As you grow, and depending on the size of your team and your organization and your spend, this might be something that you need to do within each of the categories, because you’ll have massive spend in cloud services and that will dwarf everything else that you’re going to do maybe over in facilities or HR management. Each of your key business stakeholders and each of your key spend categories deserves the opportunity to be treated accordingly and identify those suppliers that really matter.
I mean, the bank for me is really critical. You would think on a day-to-day basis, go to the bank, cash the checks, get the money, this is of transactional, until something happens and you realize it’s a lot more strategic and critical than just a transactional aspect of what we do. Looking at it and asking yourself the question, who are the suppliers? I think most procurement professionals are going to err… You might have experienced this too, Amanda, but it’s really easy to do this and then end up with 10 times more suppliers to manage than you planned on when you started.
You end up with 50 instead of five, and you’ve got to start cleaning that list out and going, which are these? If they go away, the business breaks. Period. We can’t have business. Start with those that are so critical that they break the business.
Amanda Prochaska:
I would just add there that I think something that we’ve learned over the last couple of years is when I originally did my supplier segmentation, it was very heavily weighted on spend first and then also the impact to the business. But something that we’ve learned, I think, is also overall risk to the business, really taking a look at it. It could be a smaller supplier that you don’t have a lot of spend with. But if they go down, it has a significant impact on your ability to serve your customers.
It’s been enlightening to see a little bit more of a paradigm shift because of recent events last week maybe, a notable one, although banking relationships are probably a larger spend item too. But we’ve also had some smaller suppliers over the pandemic where all of a sudden you’re like, they weren’t a core supplier or a strategic supplier, but we are transactional with them. But if we don’t get this ingredient or if we don’t get this part, we can’t produce.
Conrad Smith:
For sure whoever ends up high on that critical axis has to get attention, right?
Amanda Prochaska:
Yes.
Conrad Smith:
You have to pay attention to those that are critical.
Amanda Prochaska:
Yep, absolutely. One thing that came up yesterday when we were talking about supplier segmentation and just in our conversations leading up to this was it’s very interesting to have supplier segmentation of what we think the supplier’s role is in our relationship with them. But customer segmentation is also something to keep in mind as you’re moving forward with an SRM program. The main question to ask yourself is, how are your customers segmenting you?
Conrad Smith:
It’s funny, they’re doing it. They’re doing the same thing on the other side, right?
Amanda Prochaska:
They are. They are. They’re segmenting you. If you think you have a strategic supplier, but they’re putting you in an operational or a sea bucket, if you will, you’re going to have inconsistencies in that supplier relationship. The more transparency you can get around how you are being segmented on the customer side could be really enlightening to the overall relationship. I’m going to share a story here that was eye-opening to me. I was at an event last week, sitting around a dinner table and we were sharing war stories of what happened over the last couple of years.
One of the gentlemen sitting beside me was talking about how he was working at a company that was providing parts, very, very important parts, to Caterpillar, Kubota, John Deere, et cetera. They were drastically impacted by the chip shortage. They could not produce what they needed to provide to their customers fast enough because they couldn’t get the chips. The conversation went on to say, so what we did was we started segmenting our customers. Our A customers, those most strategic customers, got the part, but the B customers, the C customers, the D customers, those middle two, they were rationed.
We gave them some supply, but not a lot of supply. And the D customers just didn’t get anything. The follow up question was, well, how did you segment your customers? What does that look like? And it came down to margin. Are we making good margin with this relationship, which is a totally different thought process for procurement, because usually we like to reduce margin as much as possible that the suppliers are making. But margin was number one. The relationship that we have, is it long-term?
Are we co-innovating together? Do we have mutual neutral respect for each other? Do we believe that this is going to be a long-term relationship, was number two. And then as you got further down into that D category that he was mentioning, it was like, we don’t make a lot of margin and they’re just super tough to work with. We don’t see a long-term relationship with them, and therefore, they got sentimented that way. It’s really an important thing to be looking at as you’re building out your supplier relationship management program is, how are your suppliers looking at you?
Are you doing everything you can to be in that A position with your most strategic suppliers, so when there is a supply shortage or other things that are going on, that you can get the best value and have that best strong relationship with that supplier?
Conrad Smith:
That is such a great example. I mean, all of us can think back over the past couple of years of COVID and all of these supply chain disruptions that we’ve had. When there is a buyer favorable market, we charge in like a bull in a China closet sometimes, and we’re like, oh, it’ll always be this way. And then it turns around the other way, and immediately you can begin to see the impacts of how you’ve treated the supplier, both in the negotiation and the process, but also in building the supplier relationship. We’ll talk a little bit more about how that relationship matters as we go here. Amanda, we’ve talked now about how to understand who your suppliers are, which ones are most important to your business.
Now it comes down to saying, well, how are we going to go work with them? You may have five, you have 10, you may have 20 key suppliers that you go, “Hey, I need to manage these suppliers to support the business effectively.” Now we get into a place where we’re saying, these are the kinds of things that we implement. When you look back into examples that you’ve seen, what are the key things that are the building blocks of that engagement and communication strategy?
Amanda Prochaska:
I will say, again, this has to be tailored to what your ultimate goal might be with your SRM program and how that adds value to your organization. There could be instances where you have a strategic supplier where you’re going to do a quarterly business review, have a very strategic conversation with them, maybe have some joint goals put in place for the year, understand their strategies. But it could go to an extent, and I’ll give you an example at Kraft that I experienced.
When I started at Kraft, gosh, eons ago now, but when I started at Kraft, there were some brilliant people there who were implementing a very strategic SRM program where for those top handful of suppliers, they actually became embedded into our organization. What did that look like? It looked like a very long-term contract with them, and it looked like co-investments into adding capacity to lines or different things that we need to accomplish together to drive innovation. There was language in these contracts about leveraging capital across the supplier relationship. There were also things like their teams, the supplier’s teams, actually sat on site with our teams.
They were actually literally part of the team. The reason why Kraft was doing that was because, A, they knew the importance of the capability that those suppliers could bring into our organization to supplement the brilliant people that were already there at Kraft, but then they also realized that if we work together in a long-term supplier relationship where we’re not just thinking about the next contract renewal, we could get a lot more done collectively. That was probably the extreme of that engagement, but it worked phenomenally well. Because of this relationship, they were able to launch new innovative products at a much more rapid pace than what we were before.
That is an example that’s like the shining beacon of how to do this effectively. But if you don’t have that need as an organization, it can be definitely tailored to more of that quarterly engagement or even a weekly engagement depending on the need.
Conrad Smith:
Yeah, for sure. If they’re in your business that closely, they may actually literally be in the business. But at the same time, for sure there’s suppliers where meeting with them once a year, setting expectations, reviewing, understanding how you turn those dials and how you do this at the right level for efficient use of your resources, their resources and time, no problem at all doing that. We know who the suppliers are. We start to put together a strategy. By the way, I don’t think this is something we should do in isolation, particularly with those most critical suppliers.
If you’ve got someone like your example with Kraft, sitting down with them and saying, “Hey, this is what we’re seeing. What do you think about an approach like this? How can we do it differently,” usually the one-sided strategy and design doesn’t work, and then you end up being the B customer, right? Back to the customer segmentation stuff. A really important part of the framework and the engagement is understanding how to manage performance. There’s good performance, there’s bad performance, there’s all sorts of things. My favorite example, you won’t be able to read this, but I dug it out of my box this morning, this is my Intel badge.
Now I look at this compared to what I carry to work every day and this is really thick, but it has this management task cycle. In the management task cycle it, I really learned from them how to manage from an employee perspective. Number one on the management task cycle is setting clear goals and expectations. Number two is planning a problem solving. Number three is facilitating the work of others. The things that we were doing from an employee perspective in terms of management was a big breakthrough, was phenomenal. For me, performance management is all about proactive, clear expectations, planning and problem solving and facilitation.
When we get to a place where we feel like we’re doing performance management and corrective action plans, most often we’ve dropped the ball in those early stages of what performance management needs to look like.
Amanda Prochaska:
It’s definitely a two-way street here. I also like to think about this from a practical standpoint. If you’re looking at doing performance management with suppliers as part of your SRM program, you can learn an awful lot about how you are managing your employees effectively, assuming that’s an effective process for you, which I hope it is. But you can reapply a lot of what you do in that space to your performance management of suppliers. I will just add in here, Conrad, sometimes people get focused on just the core performers. All of a sudden, we’ve shift our focus. We do this with our teams sometimes.
We do this with our suppliers. We shift all of our resources and focus on those poor performers, but we cannot forget those really great high performers. High performers also need investment in your teams and with your suppliers to really drive value and help develop them, provide them new opportunities, et cetera. Just a note of caution here, it’s so easy to get sucked into that red performer, but we need to make sure that we’re thinking holistically and really driving investments and time and resources to those high performers too. I’ll give you an example here, Conrad, if I can.
We had yet another conversation with some brilliant procurement people that I know in the industry, and she was telling me that over COVID, they had a very unique need. They were providing healthcare medical clinic services to a very specific market that had very specific needs. She started seeing the writing on the wall saying, oh my goodness, we’re going to have all these supply chain shortages, particularly in PPE, and we need that for what we do just on a day-to-day basis. As part of her performance management process, she didn’t look at just how they were performing transactionally or operationally.
What she was looking at was overall capability. Instead of going out and trying to find a 3PL or something like that, she looked at her existing suppliers and she realized that their promotional goods suppliers, who react to last minute requests all the time, who have a lot of warehouse space typically, she decided to partner with that promotional goods supplier to build out a 3PL for her organization and prebuy a bunch of the critical items that they needed as an organization. It was working a relationship in a different way, understanding the capability that they brought to the table. What happened, Conrad, because she did that, they crushed the competition in the marketplace.
They were able to take over more accounts because their competition couldn’t provide the needed services that were out there and that were needed in the marketplace. That to me is the ultimate story of performance management and not just understanding how transactionally they’re working, but the overall capability that you have in your supply base.
Conrad Smith:
To me, I think a lot about this as… I mean, you can almost get rid of performance and say value management. How do we optimize the value? If they’re struggling to bring the value that we need or that we expect, let’s figure out how to make the changes in the relationship and whatever to get the value up. But for sure, those highest performing, highest value suppliers have, in many cases, so much more potential to help us than… I got so many stories. I know we’re short on time.
Amanda Prochaska:
Yeah, we’re going to go.
Conrad Smith:
There’s so many opportunities to do more with the people that you have. Anyway, I got to hold myself back or we’re going to be here until lunchtime.
Amanda Prochaska:
We could write a book.
Conrad Smith:
A big part of that, getting to value, you just gave an example of continuous improvement as it relates to scope and value, but a lot of times we have suppliers that whether the value level is failing or whether it’s mediocre or whatever’s happening in the relationship. Before we jump into a supplier example, I just want to say, the program, supplier relationship management program, unless you’re some sort of a superhero and you can flip a switch and stop time, you can’t turn this thing on and make it work like magic, like it’s working everywhere.
You’ve got to start simple, you’ve got to start basic, and you’ve got to grow your program, along the same principles of continuous improvement as you would expect of your suppliers themselves. Tell me a little bit about a supplier maybe that you worked with where you saw continuous improvement as really important.
Amanda Prochaska:
Yeah, absolutely. I’ll give you an example at MGM Resorts. This was an area where we were opening a new property in MGM in Springfield, Massachusetts. Springfield, Massachusetts is not a large metropolis and a resort property in that area was very new. Instead of looking for a supplier who could fit the immediate need, which was commercial laundry services and dry cleaning for our guests, if you go into a hotel, you can get your clothes washed and pressed. In that particular area of town, there were no commercial providers of this service at that moment in time.
What the team did, they were brilliant, they actually went in and found a provider who was doing this for residential use, so for your day-to-day services. They actually invested time and invested basically capital, well, not physical capital, but our knowledge capital into this organization to transform her business from your day-to-day laundry provider to a commercial business. That included opening a new location, getting new vans, hiring more people, and we helped her put together this entire plan to make that happen.
Doing 24-hour turns on laundry and dry cleaning services was a big new thing for her too. You can look at an existing supplier and really grow them, or a non-existing supplier that’s just not quite there, and you can use continuous improvement opportunities and tools to grow them into what you need.
Conrad Smith:
I love that example. I’m guessing this was a small woman-owned business. It could have been one of these diversity businesses. We spend so much effort trying to chase down and find a diverse business that can do something, and then so often we overlook the opportunity to actually give them something else that they could really excel at. It’s such a great example. I think as we implement the methodology and we start getting into performance and continuous improvement, we’re lifting the value, you talked a little bit about being a preferred customer of the supplier.
When you look at supplier relationship management and the relationship, particularly when you think about some folks on the phone I’m sure are smaller organizations, smaller teams, working with bigger suppliers, we may have some folks on the line here that are… I started at Intel and I always just thought, oh, this is amazing. Everybody on the planet wants to be a supplier for Intel. They were all bending over backwards to give us good pricing. How do you manage the mutual aspect of the relationship here, truly making it a two-way street?
Amanda Prochaska:
I think it’s been an interesting transition, and I think that some of the work that we’re doing in the ESG space, supplier diversity space, has been shifting the thought process a little bit. I just was recently told that there’s a large retailer that most people probably have been to in their lifetime who used to be that really strong like, “Hey, we’re X and you’re going to do Y because we’re X,” Kind of a relationship. What I’m hearing is that that’s changing. They’re all of a sudden realizing that that’s not the best way forward. The best way forward is actually to do that collaboration and find the suppliers that you can really, truly grow with, because those are the suppliers that are driving innovation.
I’m seeing a little bit of a change in the marketplace. I don’t know if Intel’s feeling that way or any of the other businesses, but I am seeing a little bit of a shift. Now, if you are a smaller player and you have a lot of big suppliers out there, my recommendation to you is to really focus on building very strong relationships with several contacts at those large companies so that you can showcase your value and the supplier relationship that is being brought. If that’s a supplier of yours, and let’s just say it’s Microsoft, do you know not only your key salesperson, but do you know their management? Do you know what their strategies are?
Can you understand where their business is going and speak in that way? There’s a lot that we can do to really create those robust people relationships, because you’re not going to have an overall relationship with Microsoft, but you can come down and think about who are those people that I really need to have strong relationships with and build those.
Conrad Smith:
When it all hits the fan, like we’ve seen happen a lot this last week and over COVID… Now think back to the segmentation. We segmented off all of our critical suppliers. If they’re critical to the business and something goes wrong and they won’t pick up the phone when you call, it’s not good. Even if they’re big, I mean, you need to know who am I going to call and how’s it going to work. That aspect is maybe the most important part of being small and having big suppliers.
If it fails, what is the plan? What does contingency look like? They may not have a dedicated account management. Maybe they just have resources. Maybe there’s an escalation process. Learning that stuff along with your other thousand peer customers in a moment of crisis is not an ideal scenario, right? But anyway.
Amanda Prochaska:
A great way is to build a relationship, Conrad, and we have it here at the second bullet point. But so often we forget to ask for help. How are we approaching our suppliers saying, “We have this business problem that we need to solve. Can you help us solve it?” That in itself, if you can work on collaboratively solving a problem together, will build a very, very tight supplier relationship at the end of the day. That’s just one key lever that you can use to drive that relationship forward.
Conrad Smith:
When you were giving the example of the giant retailer that shall not be named, what came to my mind was ego. How much of an ego build it was for me to be sitting in that Intel chair or whatever chair that you might be in, where you feel like, hey, it’s all about me and it’s about my company. When you come off of that ego position, we need to… In so many aspects of our life, I mean, this is just all these other relationships, if you get off the ego and you stop focusing so much about me and us and our organization, and you really do open up and now you’re talking and you’re sharing and you’re learning and you’re helping, there’s real breakthroughs there.
It really is.I know we’re about to the end of our time here, Amanda. I’d love to hear, looking back over what we talked about, what would you say the top… Because again, this is a bit overwhelming. I’m spending all my time trying to survive and deal with what hits me today. What can I do today is Thursday, tomorrow and next week to start building out a supplier relationship program that’s the foundation of a meaningful future?
Amanda Prochaska:
The first thing that I would suggest to anyone looking at this and trying to get something off the ground is you don’t have to boil the ocean. You can start small. You can start with a handful of suppliers that you’ve segmented to the top and almost pilot it, because it’s a great way to learn and understand what’s needed. I’d say don’t feel like you have to do everything at once, because a little bit of progress each and every day is going to make such a difference. That’s the first thing. The second thing is, like we said earlier, learn from what you’re doing with your employees. Those employee performance management processes are pretty well understood.
They’re pretty mature at this moment in time. There’s always an opportunity for improvement, but it’s a great way to start and apply what you’ve learned from how you manage your employees to your SRM program. And then the last thing that I would suggest is you likely already have some really great relationships that you have today with or without an SRM program. How can you build upon that? And maybe that’s your starting point to move forward. Those are maybe some things to think about as you are looking at all of the great suggestions that we had today to at least get your process started within your organization or maybe improved upon if you already have an existing one.
Conrad Smith:
I love it. 1% improvement every month, in two years, you’ll have gone through a massive transformation. Little small steps, just get started, move in the right direction. I absolutely love it.
Amanda Prochaska:
Conrad, I think we have a couple of minutes. If there are questions out there in the audience, we can take them. There is a Q&A box. If not, we’ll pause here for maybe 30 seconds or so to see if we have any questions as we wrap up today. But Conrad, I do want to say just another thank you to yourself and your team for being such great partners with Wonder Services and putting in the time and effort into conversations like this. It’s really appreciated. I have a question coming in actually, and it says, any recommendations for a supplier database management system? Conrad, I’ll let you take that one.
Conrad Smith:
That’s hardly fair. I’m afraid per my marketing people probably ask that question. I don’t want to spend too much time selling Graphite in here. That’s not the point. We’re doing some pretty awesome stuff at Graphite as it relates to supplier information management. Information, I think, is the foundation for knowing who your suppliers are. Come talk to us separately. We’re at the next purchasing conference near you, ready to have fun and talk about what we’re doing and do what we can to help lift your procurement success and value to the next level.
Amanda Prochaska:
Perfect. Thanks for that, Conrad. We do not have another question coming in. Thanks, again, for your time today, everyone that has joined us, and you will receive a recording of this presentation so you can refer back to it. Conrad, have a wonderful day and I hope to see you at a conference soon.
Conrad Smith:
Yeah, will do. Thank you, Amanda. Take care.
Amanda Prochaska:
All righty.