“If you follow your talents then you’ll end up with work you love.”
Falling into procurement is a common theme for many practitioners. And while a career in procurement wasn’t an obvious choice for Mike Dubbs, he grew to love the profession after discovering he could leverage his natural talent for developing relationships within the space.
While a scientist by training, Dubbs has spent nearly all his career in procurement and previously led the IT procurement department for Monsanto Company, as well as several other areas across indirect and direct procurement. Now armed with more than 20 years of experience within the function, Dubbs currently serves as department head in R&D procurement at Bayer and is also a member of the North American procurement leadership team.
“Like lots of 17-year-olds, when I went to university, I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to be. I assumed I would work in science because that’s what I was studying my undergraduate degree for,” explains Dubbs. “But after entering the workforce, I got exposed as a business partner on a couple of sourcing events and RFPs. At the time it opened my eyes to procurement as a career opportunity, because over 20 years ago universities didn’t have supply chain management programmes and everybody my age who got into procurement sort of stumbled into it.”
Procurement transformation
Within Bayer’s procurement function, the company is building an environment of increased empowerment and accountability. Bayer is referring to this philosophy as Dynamic Shared Ownership (DSO), which is considered an innovative way of leading a company the size of Bayer. According to Dubbs, this shift in culture has seen a major impact on areas ranging from how leaders lead to the way in which procurement operates.
“DSO is something that has been rolled out across all of Bayer and it’s a big journey of change for our leaders because what we’re trying to do is shift away from the traditional command-and-control leadership style to where leaders act more as a coach,” says Dubbs. “As a leader at Bayer, the goal is to get to where leaders are establishing a vision, motivating or catalysing their employees, but then also empowering those individuals who are closest to the work to make their own decisions. These are the people who are most knowledgeable on the day-to-day business. Once you get into leadership, you get further removed from the day-to-day work.”
Evolutionary leadership approach
As Bayer decision-makers transition from a traditional leadership approach, it means leaders are to provide vision and activate their teams, but also empower teams to make choices while having the freedom to be creative and take risks. Dubbs explains that this represents not only a change for leaders but also procurement professionals actually doing the work. “An example is how I conducted goal setting with my team this year,” he says. “Most years goals are cascaded down and are largely predetermined. But this year I stepped back, provided some guardrails, and then allowed the team to design their own goals. These individuals on my team are closest to the work and the result was a better set of goals and tasks that will lead to successful outcomes.”
Dubbs explains that in his experience, part of being a good leader is also knowing when to get out of the way and let your people perform. “This is definitely a longer-term journey within the organisation because it is not just a major change for leaders,” explains Dubbs. “This empowerment and accountability concept is new to a lot of individual contributors because they’ve either worked in more traditional organisations where everything was top-down and this change is going to take time for them to acclimate. But again, that’s where the leader comes in and provides coaching and guidance to help people along that journey so that they are successful as well.”
The Procurement User Experience
As procurement evolves, organisations must change with it. Bayer has recently introduced a new Salesforce tool called ProConnect which pools relevant supplier information into a single dashboard.
“I think this is a really good example because it’s the first platform that we’ve deployed where stakeholder value was front and centre, i.e. not simply the value for procurement,” he says. “Historically I would have looked at what we do as a function and asked what does procurement want to get out of a platform like this. And in this instance though, what we said was, ‘What value can a stakeholder get out of this as well?’ “It’s strange how in procurement we’re sometimes guarded and privatise our platforms, our data, and our intelligence from the rest of the business. I think our mindset with this was we want to make this a tool that’s helpful for us, but also accessible to stakeholders in the organisation.”
“We’re even looking at ProConnect as being a kind of conduit to our suppliers. It’s not just a tool that is helpful internally for Bayer, but how can this tool be something beneficial for suppliers to have insight into our company? It is a different approach to how we think about leveraging our networks alongside a platform, and ultimately what value can be created.”
Sustainability drive
Sustainability is a key piece of the puzzle to Bayer. Indeed, the company’s Chief Procurement Officer is Thomas Udesen who is also one of the co-founders of The Sustainable Procurement Pledge (SPP). The SPP is an international society aimed at driving sustainable procurement practices and developing more environmentally responsible supply chains. As far as Dubbs is concerned, sustainability at Bayer starts with Udesen. “He’s not just a role model within Bayer but an industry role model. As an organisation, we try to embed sustainability into the majority of our decision-making. I think we recognise too that sustainability is still an emerging area, and we still have a lot to learn.”
A clear sign of the passion Bayer procurement has for sustainability was evidenced by the recent World Sustainability Day event hosted by SPP. Across the global offices for the procurement function were in-person watch parties where people from various teams came together to participate and learn.
To help accelerate Bayer’s sustainability objectives, the organisation has teamed up with external partners such as Ecovadis and CDP to help them on the journey. “With their expertise and tools, we are able to assess the as-is performance of suppliers while developing actionable plans that we can use to jointly work with our suppliers to advance sustainability,” adds Dubbs. “One success story in my area was with a large Contract Research Organisation (CRO), who following the Ecovadis engagement and receiving an unsatisfactory score, realised the need and benefits of creating a sustainability function. This is what sustainability is about, not a rating or survey score, but jointly working together to improve.”
Digitally future facing
Technology is gripping procurement now and for the foreseeable future. As such, the procurement space is at the fore of transformation and functions are continuously seeking to embrace the latest innovations in order to harness efficiency, save money and grow quickly.
In the case of Bayer, the company is currently piloting a solution from ORO to optimise guided buying for stakeholders while complementing the features of SAP Ariba. “It’s not about replacing our big platform providers, it’s about how you complement them,” discusses Dubbs. “What we found is that innovative startups are coming up with best-in-class solutions to leverage generative AI for the guided buying experience, which is part of improving the user experience. Working with startups, we found very quickly that not only do they have cutting-edge technology, but they’re extremely agile and adaptable. Every big company is going to have something unique about them and a one-size-fits-all solution, or rigid solution framework, might not be always the best fit.
“To drive digital transformation we need good collaboration partners that can bring expertise in new technologies, but also speed and agility to keep up with the pace of our business. With ORO they have Bayer come up with a vision for how we want the guided buying experience to look, and they use their technology and expertise to create something that fits that vision. I am very optimistic and excited because user experience is one of our key priorities this year.”
Future of procurement
Looking ahead to the future, Dubbs is full of optimism and insists the next few years for Bayer and the wider industry is incredibly bright. “It’s amazing to see how much change has happened just in the last five to 10 years within our organisation as well as the industry in general,” he explains. “At Bayer as well as other companies that I talk to within my network, our procurement organisations are playing a much bigger role in our companies and we’re enabling those businesses that we support in ways that we never did in the past.”
Dubbs adds that the rise to the top of the c-suite also comes with new challenges that previously weren’t a factor. However, on the other side of the coin, procurement’s evolution has made it a more attractive proposition for tomorrow’s workforce.
“What I see that is very positive is that procurement is being elevated as a career opportunity for people,” he continues. “You’re starting to see the attraction of talent become much easier and you’re getting new faces into procurement organisations and they’re seeing this space as a great career opportunity. I think that’s going to help drive a lot of the innovation and problem-solving for some of these new challenges that we have. Even with advances in technology, strategic procurement will still be a people business, and it is going to be these individuals coming into the industry now who are going to write the next chapter for procurement. We’ve all got a lot to be excited about.”
