Dana Drake-Cox is an innovative global executive with >15 years senior leadership in Procurement and Supply Chain Management for Multinational and Fortune 150+ companies.
Dana is Vice President of Procurement – Food Preservation at Electrolux Group, the world’s 2nd largest home appliance company, where she is accountable for the product line’s direct spend across business areas North America, Latin America, Europe and APAC MEA serving 8 manufacturing centers.
We met with Dana and captured her thoughts on procurement and its potential. Dana’s industry background spans Automotive and Consumer Goods where she has successfully accelerated line functions through growth curves and has guided transformation across the enterprise harnessing Industry 4.0 technology to reduce cost to serve the customer.
Dana, how did you get into Procurement?
After an initial role in materials management, I was recruited by procurement. The reasons why I was drawn to it then, and why I have spent nearly half of my career path in Procurement, is because:
- it is Strategic
- it has High Impact
- it is Ever-Evolving
- it faces both Externally and Internally
Procurement is evolving. The pace of change often calls for new skill sets and disciplines within a team. Reflecting upon your own career path, can you share what value procurement can source from adding non procurement skills to the team?
While building depth in my skillset as a procurement professional spanning from new product introduction to category ownership and then to operations, I realised that to have the greatest positive impact on total cost across the value chain, I needed greater breadth.
With this perspective, I designed a career portfolio that is multi-disciplined – Procurement, Quality & Six Sigma, and Supply Chain.
As I reflect on my career path, the value I bring with this broader Supply Chain Management knowledge base and mindset is strategic vision, ability to drive transformation collaboratively across the business model, and to deliver breakthrough performance
We often hear that procurement wants a proverbial “seat at the table”. What does it need to do to earn that seat? What can procurement achieve with this seat?
Depending upon the industry, corporations who manufacture purchase a range of between 50% – 80% of the direct material content. That’s significant. As a result, procurement has a seat at the table. The difference between organisations who step up and claim it and those who surrender it to other functions is four- fold:
- Demonstration of Value Creation
- Listening and adapting to the Voice of the Customer/Consumer
- Harnessing the insights and capabilities of the Supply Base
- Deep collaboration with cross-functional Business Partners
With this seat, procurement can be an agent for disruption, helping the corporation overtake and surpass the competition. And, that is always my goal – to deliver a competitive advantage to the corporation
So you view that procurement has the ability to become transformative. What does procurement need to do to ensure that the corporation leverages this capability?
Procurement must first execute its own game plan, demonstrating the value proposition it offers to the corporation. Credibility is key.
Second, procurement needs to create its own marketing strategy as a solutions provider. By partnering with customer-facing organisations to understand what it takes to win in the marketplace, procurement can craft innovative global strategies to speed benefit yields. As these and other functions realise not only the bottom-line results, but also the top-line market penetration they can gain with procurement as a collaborator, procurement can realise its ultimate potential and status as a “game changer”!