Today I’m joined by ProcureAbility, a company that wants to help you reimagine your procurement capabilities.
ProcureAbility, a Jabil company, is the leading provider of procurement services, offering advisory, managed services, digital, staffing, and recruiting solutions. For nearly 30 years, ProcureAbility have focused exclusively on helping clients elevate their procurement function.
Today Carlos Perico, Senior Director at ProcureAbility, joins me to talk all about sourcing best practices in a tariff-driven world. We’ll be sharing the three key best practices you need to focus on now; how to protect your margins whilst maintaining supplier trust; leveraging AI to mitigate tariff impact; and how to turn your procurement function from cost center to competitive advantage.
Guest bio:
Carlos has nearly 25 years of international experience in consulting, business process management, procurement, and supply chain. He has expertise in procurement organization transformation, category management, strategic sourcing, procurement operations, and delivery teams’ development. Carlos has worked in high-tech manufacturing, CPG, hospitality, retail, telecommunications, automotive, utilities, and social-media industries. He started his career at UM Motorcycles building their Global Procurement and Supply Chain Finance capabilities. Later he founded CPG, a boutique consulting firm based in Shanghai, specializing in strategic sourcing out of Asia. After returning to the US, Carlos joined Denali Sourcing Services where he spent eight years delivering global procurement services to Fortune 1000 organizations and was a member of the integration team after the WNS acquisition. Before joining ProcureAbility he led Unify Consulting’s Delivery Centers’ expansion. Carlos has lived on five continents allowing him to adapt and learn from diverse cultures and ways of doing things. He is bilingual in Spanish and English and continues to hone his Mandarin skills. Carlos holds a B.A. in International Economics and an M.S. in Finance from Florida International University.
IN THIS EPISODE WE DISCUSS:
[04.29] An introduction to Carlos and ProcureAbility.
“All we do is procurement! It’s our speciality, it’s what we’re passionate about. And that’s key.”
[05.59] Tariffs: what they are, and why supply chain professionals need to pay attention.
[07.07] Diversification: Some of the strategies companies can employ to build agile supply chains for long-term resilience, the big challenge with long-term strategies, and why your supply chain is like Tetris.
“Diversification is the name of the game. You don’t want to have all your eggs in one basket – but the challenge now is that the baskets are getting very complex!!”
“For those long-term strategies to pay off, you have to start now.”
[14.08] How companies can utilize scenario planning or future-proofing to prepare for further tariff fluctuations.
“You need to know your risk. It sounds simple… but you need to go deeper. You need to dive deeper into understanding your supply chain at different levels, your supplier network – and data becomes even more important.”
[19.17] Dual-sourcing: what it is, and the impact that implementing dual-sourcing strategies can have on risk mitigation.
“Communicate to your stakeholders, because we human beings have a tendency to forget the risk when it’s not present… Communicate the risk you’re trying to mitigate in advance, build that relationship with the business.”
[24.57] How to effectively work with suppliers: How fluctuating tariffs are impacting supplier pricing and contract stability, and how businesses can think about strengthening long-term partnerships whilst retaining the need for short-term agility.
[31.19] Working with technology: How businesses can leverage AI and data analytics to predict and mitigate tariff impacts.
“Live data visibility is critical right now… Technology is allowing us to be immediately alert… So you can prepare and be more educated.”
[37.09] How AI helps businesses to shift the focus from damage control to proactivity, and turn procurement into a competitive advantage rather than a cost center.
“Everybody wants to mitigate cost… But you need to continuously evolve your procurement organization to become more of a business support and value driver, as opposed to just one cost center.”
[39.49] The key lessons to learn from this discussion.
[42.01] How Let’s Talk Supply Chain listeners can benefit from a limited-time discount with ProcureAbility.
RESOURCES AND LINKS MENTIONED:
Head over to ProcureAbility’s website now to find out more and discover how they could help you too. You can also connect with ProcureAbility and keep up to date with the latest over on LinkedIn or YouTube, or you can connect with Carlos on LinkedIn.
If you enjoyed this episode and want to hear more about procurement, read The Three Biggest Challenges For Procurement – And What To Do About Them or listen to 243: Reinventing Freight Procurement with Emerge or 211: Transform Your Procurement Process, with Zip.
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