Being at the forefront of change requires a specific type of person – it’s not for everyone.
But for those that are equipped to deal with the volatile and at times, disruptive, nature of change, that’s where the rewards can be uncovered.
Knowing this all too well is Linda Chuan. She is a seasoned sourcing and procurement operational excellence executive with a public accounting background and a strong ability to execute from vision and strategy. Her innovative experiences with organisations large and small have culminated in a unique, but practical end-to-end view and understanding of business processes. Chuan’s approach to problem-solving is holistic, mixed with a blend of discipline, creativity, agility and resilience. She has demonstrated successes in her execution and delivery with real results time and again, while also leading successful transformational digitisation strategies.
Procurement’s transformation
The industry she serves has undergone quite an evolution in recent times. Having transformed from a back-office function into a dynamic, exciting, enterprise division at the forefront of change. Procurement and its professionals have been on quite the journey in recent times. As such, Chuan explains that the space is, in fact, so unrecognisable that even its definition has changed. “Procurement started out as purchasing for primarily manufacturing companies decades ago,” she discusses. “Then it evolved from purchasing to procurement where the practice and the profession required more skills around understanding contract verbiage and how the commercial terms would impact the business. There was a little bit more skillset required, legal terms, understanding contracts, all the way to what we know today as strategic sourcing.”
Fast forward to 2020’s Covid pandemic and procurement was forced to shift again amid significant disturbance to supply chains. As a result, procurement was swiftly elevated to the c-suite and became front of mind for most CEOs globally as businesses looked to tighten their belts while urgently finding alternative methods of supply.
“Following Covid, I think we, as procurement professionals, are now mandated to be even more than strategic sourcing and add value to the company,” affirms Chuan. “We’re asked to look ahead and think about the macroeconomics as well as the microeconomics and how it could impact the company and get that translation to direct company impact earlier. This is all while being able to help either prevent large risks or promote opportunities within the company so they can then maximise what’s happening out there in the marketplace versus where everyone was reacting to what has already happened and trying to be prepared for what was coming.”
Tech disruption
Disruption has meant procurement was propelled to become even more strategic and forward-facing following a recent surge of black swan events as technology takes a firmer grip on the space. “The whole profession has evolved, especially over the last 10 or 15 years, where we’re becoming increasingly more strategic and important to a company.”
The company Chuan serves is a cloud content management company that empowers enterprises to revolutionise how they work by securely connecting their people, information and applications. Founded in 2005, Box powers more than 115,000 businesses globally, including AstraZeneca, JLL, Morgan Stanley, and Nationwide. Headquartered in Redwood City, CA, Box has offices across the United States, Europe and Asia. Chuan joined Box over four and half years ago and was recruited to help with establishing the firm’s procurement function and building it from the ground up.
“Any engagement or relationship with a third-party provider, whether it’s buying widgets, purchasing services or even SaaS across the entire company is under my scope,” she explains. “Box has grown globally to reach new regions such as Japan and Poland to UK and Australia. We’ve continued to grow even throughout the pandemic. It’s my third role to establish and build out a sourcing and procurement organisation from the ground up. I find that to be so rewarding and every company’s a little different. What might’ve worked in my previous roles may not work at Box. I love having to tailor and think about which processes and what systems could work that would fit each company’s specific and unique culture, executive level preferences as well as the employees. It’s very exciting.”
Blank canvas
For Chuan, her passion is to make things as easy as possible for the end user. She likes to think about a procurement organisation as a service firm. “We’re like a small entrepreneur company within an enterprise,” she tells us. “Our customers are our internal employees. As the company and the employee base grows, the customer base increases too. To me, it’s really imperative that we think about the user experience because every company has policies to check off, but who really ensures that we are compliant to those policies? A lot of other larger companies find it’s easier to make the policy a mandate where employees must follow, but I find that with high-tech companies, it’s more of a case of “influencing” rather than “mandating” in that kind of environment.
“In order to establish more of a centralised process where all of the employees would have to come through this one system and one intake, it has to be so user-friendly or else people are not going to want to come to you. If you make it easy for them and design the process in such a way that the policy is already incorporated, then employees will want to utilise the process. It should feel like they’re just going through the process, but they’re walking through the actual compliance policy and ensuring that we’re doing all the right things to protect the company, but they shouldn’t have to feel the burden of it.”
The Box Advantage
According to Chuan, unless she can show her people a new process or system that’s guaranteed to be more efficient, she understands there will be a degree of reluctance to accept change initially. “I’m already thinking about the whole change management programme at the beginning of when I need to select a solution, especially if there was an RFP involved, rather than waiting until we’ve selected a solution and are in the implementation phase. To me, that’s too late,” she explains. “Change management happens when a project has been approved for you to go find a solution or when the project has been initiated by your senior executives through an investment committee meeting or via a software review committee. That’s where change management actually starts.”
Chuan is passionate about harnessing a positive company culture. She stresses within Box operating with a mentality of collaboration, transparency and inclusiveness holds the key to success. Chuan explains that one of her best strategies is to imagine herself as an owner of a company as it leads to better decision-making. “It’s about always trying to think about doing the right things by the right people,” she discusses.
Secret sauce
“The culture is so special and it’s truly about walking the talk versus just talking the talk. It’s about making that culture real and living every single day like our two founders, Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith. The culture itself makes it easy to collaborate and build that relationship and that trust with my fellow employees, knowing that the procurement sourcing organisation is there to help protect them and make the company better. Doing it together is so much easier than trying to push through by yourself, and I call it with every deal that ‘it takes a small village’. We have a really, really good relationship with our legal department and with our vendor trust department. I am enjoying a level of engagement and utilisation of my function more than any other company I’ve been blessed to be a part of. The culture at Box is our secret sauce.”
Given the speed at which the procurement function is shifting, being proactive to the latest trends in transformation could be the key between success and failure. Indeed, one of the most highly anticipated innovations of the past few years ChatGPT has captured the imagination of procurement professionals globally. The race to explore the technology and examine how the natural language processing tool could be introduced into processes is already underway. However, its arrival brings with it fresh fears that AI is here to replace humans.
Future-facing
According to Chuan, that couldn’t be further from the truth. “I don’t see it as taking jobs away, I see it as improving our job and work life,” she explains. “Most people don’t want to do those mundane, low-level data entry, tactical tasks anyway. But if you don’t have people or the right system checking that the data going in is of good quality, then you can’t count on the reporting and the analytics on the backend. But the problem is that people don’t want to do it. Wouldn’t it be perfect to have a replacement with AI, robotics and machine learning that could do all of the things that people don’t really want to do anyway?”
Looking ahead
Having said that, Chuan is clear that there must always be some form of human influence and oversight over AI. One of procurement’s biggest challenges in 2024 and beyond is making new tech work for each respective organisation. Chuan believes procurement, and indeed the world, isn’t to be ruled by technology, but instead used as a tool. “There has to be some kind of monitoring and human judgment to QC/QA the results,” she says.
“I don’t think we’re at the point where machines can replace judgemental thinking. I think we need to have an eye on ensuring we’re doing the right thing ethically by people and making sure that we’re using technology responsibly. Let’s say we do all of that, the increase in the level of job productivity that AI could bring to many people should outweigh people’s fears. I don’t think we should be fearing it. I think we should be looking at it from an analytical and strategic view and get excited about the prospect of having all the time to be more innovative and forward-thinking. To me, that’s where the fun and rewarding work is.”
Hear more about Linda Chuan’s passion for delivering change management in procurement in our CPOstrategy Podcast.
