The Rise of Agile Procurement with Michelle Vita

In this episode of Procurement Reimagined, host Daniel is joined by Michelle Vita, Senior Director of Procurement and Strategic Sourcing at Datadog, a monitoring and security platform for cloud applications.

Michelle talks about pivoting procurement from a static to an agile process, lays out the framework for an agile procurement architecture, and explains why more companies need to adopt it. She also offers helpful tips for leaders of procurement teams. 

Michelle is a thought leader who specialises in transformational procurement processes. A professional who is passionate about identifying and solving problems, she has over eleven years of experience leading procurement teams. She is also on the advisory board of several companies and is a frequent speaker at industry events. 

Key highlights:

• • 07:13 - 11:00 - Agile Procurement, a New Concept - Traditional procurement is static and repetitive. You need to follow a predefined process regardless of what you're purchasing. Agile procurement turns that concept on its head and says that processes are defined by their use case. As a result, you’re handling more daily, but procurement becomes more straightforward and efficient overall. Agile procurement pivots around the belief that the procurement team is a part of all internal touchpoints for all capex spending. 
  • 11:36 - 13:35 - Linear Processes vs Parallel Processes - Michelle explains how most procurement processes are linear by design. Still, if you map out all the processes, it’s easy to split them into those that need to be run sequentially and those that can run in parallel.  The idea is to make the procurement process more efficient and allow procurement to evolve as the company grows and use cases evolve.
  • 18:57 - 21:40 - Focus Areas for Procurement Leaders - Michelle highlights that analytical skills, a proactive persona, and collaborative skills should be anchors in a procurement professionals toolkit. Analytical skills help identify opportunities hidden in the big data while being proactive aids in preempting problems rather than reacting to them. At the end of the day, procurement is a collaborative function, and the ability to work in teams and share information helps drive efficiency.
  • 21:49 - 24:00 - Best Practices to Follow in the Procurement Space - Start by listening to your stakeholders, seeking feedback, and being a good partner. Build trust with the leadership by providing air-tight propositions for approval and understanding that decisions are sometimes driven by non-operational considerations like the macro-environment and regulatory compulsions.

Quotes:

•  “At its core, agile procurement requires the philosophy that everything that needs to be done along the way to procure something falls in our ambit”.
• "Make the process around the rule and not the exception”.
• “Agile means you can change things as you go along. It doesn't always have to go the same way each time because the needs are not the same”.