Heinz VP of North American Procurement, Chris Stockwell, just wrapped up his keynote - The Indirect Opportunity: A Call to Arms. It was a follow up to his presentation at Ariba LIVE Virtual last month (replay here - registration required), which I would recommend for anyone looking to tackle more indirect spend. By constantly upping the ante, Chris and his team have not only yielded massive cost savings and increased spend under management, but also justified increasing procurement headcount at a time when most companies and departments are making painful cuts.

During the Q&A, several people in the audience probed Chris on specifics on how they were able to make the case to management during a dour employment market. Chris revealed that the recent “new hires” in procurement were actually people pulled from other functional areas in the company. And although some would see this reallocation of resources as a negative, since they obviously require training in order to get up to speed as buyers, Heinz has found that these new buyers are actually very valuable because of their prior roles.

According to Chris, you “don’t have to be a sourcing expert to take advantage of low hanging fruit in a lot of these categories that haven’t been touched before.” So armed with procurement staff from other departments, procurement has been able to tackle indirect categories that were long believed to be sacred cows in the organization.

Chris said these new buyers “helped us a lot in marketing and IT” because they:

• Had the necessary relationships in their previous departments to gain trust
• Possessed a better sense of what stakeholders wanted
• Were not seen as “buyers”, but as colleagues who understood the needs of the department

Justin Fogarty is Managing Editor of Supply Excellence. For any questions or feedback on the blog or its contributors, Justin can be reached at jfogarty[at]ariba.com.