At any scale, under any circumstances, procurement is ultimately about relationships — the ones forged with suppliers, with partners, with stakeholders, and with colleagues.
Procurement: It’s all about the relationships
An organisation like facilities solutions provider ABM, where over 120,000 team members service more than 6 billion square feet of real estate every day — tackling everything from janitorial and sanitation tasks to HVAC maintenance, mechanical services, landscaping, transportation, and electrical infrastructure — is made up of hundreds of thousands of relationships. Ask Jamie Bilbrey, Director of Procurement at ABM, and he’s quick to assert the fact that relationships are at the heart of the procurement process at ABM. “If you ask me what I think you need the most to be a successful procurement person, the number one thing is the ability to build relationships,” he says. Whether dealing with compliance and risk management, any of ABM’s team members (from the C-Suite to front line operators), or its network of valued suppliers, Bilbrey stresses the fact that “you have to build the relationship.”
One relationship that Bilbrey has built over more than 17 years is his working partnership with ABM Chief Procurement Officer, Joe DeMarco. Long standing colleagues, from the start of their respective careers through to their current roles managing over a billion dollars in spend for a Fortune 500 company, it’s not hard to see the trust and shared language that exists between the pair. “We were both taught to do things the same way when we were starting out,” explains DeMarco. “It’s a heck of a lot easier to work with someone that went through bootcamp with you, for lack of a better word. You value the same things, you tackle problems the same way.”
“The number one thing is the ability to build relationships” — Jamie Bilbrey, Director of Procurement, ABM
DeMarco joined ABM in April of 2023 (Bilbrey came aboard two months later) and has spent the past two years managing more than $1 billion in spend on equipment, materials, supplies, fleet, corporate services, subcontractors, and temporary labour.
From a relatively siloed situation where discrete divisions handled much of their own procurement, where shadow spending was a major source of inefficiency, and the system was underpinned by legacy technology, DeMarco and his procurement team are taking ABM on a procurement transformation journey. The transformation is organisational, technological and, above all else, focused on developing and building relationships between the organisation’s now-centre-led procurement function and its stakeholders, suppliers, and team members on the ground.
I sat down with DeMarco and Bilbrey to learn more about both the process of strategic procurement in a business like ABM, and their plans for a sweeping transformation of the function — the goal of which, DeMarco explains, is to bring 100% of ABM’s third-party spending under management. “That’s the utopian dream we’re shooting for,” he says, adding that new systems will play a huge role, underpinned by technology, and enabled by the relationships he and the team are building between procurement and the business.
Procurement at ABM: Relationship management at scale
One of the more remarkable things about ABM is just how many different places the business touches. “Picture your typical office space, your skyscrapers in a big city—we’re in there. We’re also in manufacturing plants, distribution centers, schools, airports, you name it,” says DeMarco. This broad footprint, he explains, was one of the things that he found most exciting about the prospect of coming to ABM. “We’re in a wide variety of different customer segments and offer so many different services, not to mention the company has been around for over 115 years,” he says. He adds that, thanks to a recent acquisition, ABM recently added critical power service and uninterruptible power supply (UPS) maintenance to its array of products. The variety of products and scale of the organisation makes procurement an endlessly varied challenge.
Click here to read the full story in the latest issue of CPO Strategy.
