Last month, we welcomed Joe Frederick, Senior Director of Procurement at Strategic Sourcing at Snowflake, and Colin Glazier, Vice President of Solutions at Zip Intake-to-Procure, for an AOP Live session.
I knew we were in for a unique discussion from the outset. If you are an Art of Procurement podcast listener, you know that Philip Ideson’s trademark intro question is ‘Did you find procurement or did procurement find you?’ I’m sure you can guess how most people answer. But in Joe and Colin, we found not one but TWO people who found procurement.
Over the course of the hour, we discussed the procurement experience from a number of perspectives. One of the most interesting ideas to me was that we need to keep rules in place, but that all of our systems and processes should make it easy to follow those rules. Colin talked about the concept of a ‘walled garden,’ a place that has boundaries but is still pleasant:
“We’re trying to create a situation where people can follow the rules easily because they want to. They want to go through the right process. They want to be in compliance, but they need that little bit of help or that extra functionality from our system to make that process easy and create a ‘walled garden’ where you can’t really break the rules because all the rules are built into the logic of the intake and the approval flows.”
Joe added to that idea by sharing his perspective on building alliances between procurement and the business from the very beginning. “I think it’s super important to make the business part of your team and build partnerships through the buy-side process. If you have allies on your side before you go, you can meet with business stakeholders that are brand new and don’t necessarily want to work with procurement. They will see that we are all stakeholders and that together we will achieve what they need out of the process.”
You can now watch or listen to this AOP Live session on demand here: Placing Procurement at the Intersection of Corporate Culture and Employee Experience
