The purchasing function entails much more than just negotiating price and delivery. These "fab four" are among the stars who are taking the profession into new directions and transforming their companies' relationships with suppliers.

Ask Garry Berryman who his mentors were throughout his 20-plus years in the purchasing profession and he doesn't hesitate a second with his answer.

"The truth is that virtually every business leader in every company I've worked at has been a mentor for me, generously sharing their knowledge to help me grow," he says.

If that statement sounds a tad sentimental, consider this: It comes from a person who believes that the road to success often will wind out of your immediate neighborhood. "Everyone you meet can bring another data point of information," Berryman asserts. "If you tuck yourself only into procurement, your success will be limited."

The road Berryman traveled included stops at off-road-equipment manufacturer John Deere, vehicle giant Honda of America Manufacturing, motorcycle mega-player Harley-Davidson, and semiconductor-industry supplier Applied Materials. At each stop, he took on increasingly more responsible procurement duties. Recently, he moved to Sara Lee Corp., where he assumed the newly created position of chief procurement officer.

What brought him to the food, beverage, and household-products company, he says, was a major business-transformation plan Sara Lee announced in February 2005. Under the plan, which aims to improve financial performance and better position the company for long-term growth, Sara Lee will concentrate on a smaller number of business segments, spinning off much of its apparel business and selling its European packaged-meats, direct selling, and U.S. retail coffee businesses. The company is also considering selling its European apparel business.

Among the steps Sara Lee will take to reduce its cost structure is to centralize purchasing. Corporate officers hope that step, in conjunction with centralization of information technology and services, will save between $175-250 million.

"I'm excited about the role purchasing will play," Berryman says. "It's another learning experience, and we'll be creating an important role for purchasing."

Of course, creating that role will not exactly be new for Berryman. At Harley-Davidson, he was part of the team that positioned the supply community in a key business role and then leveraged that role to improve total enterprise performance. Berryman and team worked with suppliers to remove waste and integrate them into the company's new-product-development process. Largely due to Berryman's efforts and coordination, Harley won PURCHASING magazine's Medal of Professional Excellence in 2000.

Berryman said at the time that among the keys to success was a grounding in technical competency and a technical understanding of the supplier community.

Says one engineer at Harley who worked with Berryman on a major product-development project, "he was very helpful and very intelligent." And true to his belief in the necessity of technical competency, he worked hard to learn the product and its components.

"He would always lead off by saying, 'this is a dumb question from a non-technical person, but....' Of course, the questions were not dumb at all, so I knew he had a good lock on the physical," the engineer recalls.

Berryman isn't giving any hints about the specifics of how he will approach his responsibilities at Sara Lee. But, he does say that he believes procurement staffs must understand the overall strategies of their companies. That belief is shared by top executives at Sara Lee. Berryman's strong expertise in procurement will play a critical role in leveraging Sara Lee's scale and establishing best practices throughout the company's global operations, says L. M. de Kool, executive vice president and chief financial and administrative officer for the company.

A numbers guy by education (he has a bachelor's degree in accounting from the University of Northern Iowa and is a certified public accountant), Berryman insists that procurement staffs must demonstrate how their plans impact a company's income statement. And, he believes that such tools as e-procurement can help bring discipline to a company, create opportunities for speed and enable multinationals to bridge substantial distances. Overall, he says, "procurement strategy that's not connected to corporate strategy won't work. "Making the connection is how you earn a place at the table."

Most of all, Berryman believes in the value of being adaptable in the corporate arena. "The world is dynamic," he says. "There are different influences on different days, and you have to stay flexible."

• Years in supply chain: 20
• First job: John Deere
• Biggest accomplishment: "Learning from a wide variety of people inside and outside procurement."
• Why he's at Sara Lee: Another chance to create an important role for procurement.
• Mentors: "Virtually every business leader I've met."
• Advice for others: Be flexible, gain technical competency, align your plan with the corporation's overall strategy, and learn from everyone, including those outside purchasing.

For more information on Garry Berryman and his approach to procurement, go to the archives on www.purchasing.com, type his name in the search box, and see a profile of Harley Davidson from September 4, 2003. —Paul E. Teague

GlaxoSmithKline's Gregg Brandyberry is a study in what makes an effective procurement professional—a diverse background, a keen interest in improving upon existing processes and systems and a passion for the industry he's working in. For these and a host of other reasons, he is perhaps the most qualified person to be doing the job he is currently doing—vice president of global procurement systems and processes at GSK.

Brandyberry drove GSK to become an early adopter of what were at the time the most cutting-edge technologies available, including e-sourcing and e-procurement tools. His extensive background in quality work prior to his arrival in the procurement world emphasized the value of supplier performance and measurement over purely cost-based procurement strategies. And his continuing work in expanding areas of procurement such as compliance and supplier diversity, make Brandyberry one of the most insightful minds in procurement today.

Brandyberry started his professional career with Gates Rubber—working in its laboratory—and progressed through several positions over the next decade, including laboratory manager and quality supervisor. He also did some preliminary work as a materials manager for several Gates sites. It was during this time that Brandyberry encountered one of his earliest mentors, Paul Hinkson, a plant manager at Gates who encouraged him to learn more about statistical process control.

"You hear people today talk about lean manufacturing and Six Sigma processes and I now realize [Hinkson] gave me some very good advice," Brandyberry says.

By 1990, Brandyberry had overall responsibility for manufacturing and quality at Gates Energy Products and achieved what he still considers one of his career highlights—his organization was named a semi-finalist in the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality award competition. "[The Baldridge award] is basically the pinnacle for someone in the quality field," Brandyberry says.

The next big break for Brandyberry came in 1993 when he was hired at SmithKline Beecham's clinical laboratories business by someone who would become his mentor in the world of procurement—Willie Deese (now senior vice president of global procurement at Merck & Co.).

"When Willie hired me, it showed he was already taking procurement in a different direction because he understood the benefit of having a person with a quality background focusing on procurement. It would have been hard not to learn from a person like that."

Brandyberry eventually became manger of SmithKline Beecham's team of commodity managers ("that's what we called them back then" he says) for its clinical laboratories division. In 1997, he took on a role at the pharmaceutical division of SmithKline Beecham as the manager of its direct material procurement excellence program, where his combination of quality and procurement skills paid big dividends. From there, he migrated to the work he's doing now—procurement systems and process improvement, leveraging technology and data to improve the processes around procurement.

Brandyberry's current organization in GSK is called global systems and operations and includes oversight of procurement systems, development and implementation for all procurement applications and purchasing systems. He reports directly to Joe Meier, GSK's senior vice president of procurement, who reports up through GSK's manufacturing organization.

Brandyberry also oversees procurement operations at GSK's three transactional processing sites—two in North America and one in the U.K.—that do the majority of the electronic sourcing and bidding events. GSK also has a group that focuses on procurement policy, compliance, and internal audit, which is a growing focal point for procurement in light of Sarbanes-Oxley, he says. And lastly, Brandyberry is responsible for developing GSK's supplier diversity program, overseeing a staff of four in this area. He says changes in ethnic demographics will shift the buying and selling power in the next two decades in this country. "We truly believe that our supply base needs to mirror the increasingly diverse markets we serve," he says.

Perhaps no one has leveraged the onslaught of Internet-based technologies for sourcing and procurement better than Brandyberry. From the earliest incarnations, he was investigating reverse auction, e-sourcing, and e-procurement tools. When Glaxo Wellcome merged with SmithKline Beecham in 2001, it was Deese and Brandyberry who led the procurement systems integration effort to get more than 6,000 users up on its online buying system.

"I honestly think e-sourcing has been the biggest change in the history of purchasing," he says. And I truly believe we're still at the tip of the iceberg."

Today, Brandyberry oversees GSK's technology work cell for procurement systems, a centralized organization that does the majority of the company's electronic bidding work. The group leverages tools from Ariba, Emptoris and SciQuest to bring the majority of its direct and indirect spend online. The group has full responsibility for $500 million spend and supports another $2.5-3 billion of spend annually.

But despite his enthusiasm and confidence in technology, Brandyberry has not placed blind faith in such tools. "So much of the process is still dependent on good execution," he says. "There are too many procurement organizations trying to fit traditional procurement strategies in with their chosen technology. GSK has 12,000 suppliers on its electronic bidding tool today, managed by a handful of internal people."

Brandyberry gives plenty of praise to his mentors for helping him achieve the success he has to date. Of Meier he says, "He might be the best pure procurement person I've ever known." And when asked about Deese's influence, Brandyberry has trouble focusing the praise into one of the many areas Deese works well in.

But Brandyberry has reached a point in his career where he is now a mentor to younger employees at GSK. Of the younger people in his group, Brandyberry says it's clear they think differently about careers than he did at their age. "If we don't keep them very excited about their work, we are going to lose them. I strive to create an environment where a person can have as much responsibility as they want."

Brandyberry says the skills required to be a procurement leader today are much broader than skills top buyers aspired to when he entered the field. For starters, a background in finance can be a major advantage as well as some technology and software expertise.

"Also strong people skills and presentation skills will help a purchasing professional progress farther in the industry today," he says. "Procurement people are selling their business cases and they need to have the presentation abilities to make sure they can compete for the resources."

• Years in purchasing: 15
• First job: Materials manager at Gates Rubber Co.
• Why he's at GSK: His combination of quality and materials planning skills made him the right person to build a new procurement organization in the pharmaceutical industry.
• Mentors: Paul Hinkson, plant manager at Gates Rubber; Willie Deese, former supervisor at GSK, now senior vice president of global procurement at Merck; Joe Meier, current senior vice president of procurement at GSK.
• Advice for others: "Top executives are looking to procurement organizations to participate in strategy and stick to financial targets and I think that's pretty exciting. I think if young people are working outside of procurement in other functions, it would help fulfill their role in procurement down the line."

If you want to read more about Gregg Brandyberry's work in e-sourcing at GSK, read the story "GSK closes the loop using e-sourcing tools" in the June 3, 2004 issue of PURCHASING magazine. http://www.purchasing.com/article/CA422096.html —David Hannon

Training other purchasing professionals in the skills of his trade has always been near and dear to the heart of Timothy N. Kelly. Once he even tried to lend a hand to former president Bill Clinton, who declined his offer to share his quality and purchasing expertise with the U.S. government.

While he considers it "sad" the President didn't think government spending could use a little discipline as practiced by the private sector, Kelly, in his current role, now has opportunity to share much of the knowledge of supply chain management he's gathered during his 35-year career.

As executive vice president of procurement and quality at Arsenal Capital Partners, Kelly consults with Barry Siadet, Terry Mullin, Jeff Kovach, and Jim Marden, partners of the private equity firm, as they buy and sell companies. He also works with the purchasing teams of the companies they acquire, ensuring they have the training and tools needed to strategically source goods and services over the long term. New York-based, Arsenal Capital Partners invests in manufacturing, healthcare and business service companies generating revenues up to $500 million.

To help the partners better understand purchasing, Kelly created a flow chart to illustrate the process for acquiring raw materials. In their case, the raw materials are companies. He also developed a multipage form to assess capabilities of the purchasing function of the companies they acquire. It includes detailed questions on quality management, engineering and production and supply chain. Siadet values Kelly's analysis of a company's purchasing capabilities so much so that it can be "a game changer" as the partners put together a deal.

Kelly leads a council of purchasing leaders of the firm's portfolio companies. The council works to leverage sourcing of goods and services among the companies and provides opportunity for the purchasing leaders to share best practices.

Kelly started his career in purchasing at General Motors in the 1970s. Early on, he complained about shoddy parts provided by some suppliers, which led to his helping draft general procedures for quality for the automaker.

By the late 1980s, Kelly went to work at ABB where he served as vice president of supply management for the automation technology specialist. During the interview for that job, the company president queried him about problems with a purchasing process at a facility in Maine. When Kelly explained how he would resolve the issue, the interviewer decided to hire him. His solution whittled a four-week process to two hours.

At ABB, his talent for bringing together diverse personalities came to the forefront as he convinced bickering internal groups to sign a contract stating that they would treat each other as customers. He still has a framed copy of the contract hanging on a wall in his home outside Atlanta.

This led to Kelly helping put together a purchasing council of supply chain leaders from each ABB division worldwide to leverage the company's immense buying power. For one larger division, he set up a global purchasing operation. He helped design a purchasing office that provided a strategic edge in negotiations with suppliers.

If Kelly says that his years of learning about purchasing and quality at GM, and later at Saturn, provided the foundation for his current post at Arsenal Capital Partners, then his time at ABB and later with Siebe, which eventually merged with BTR to become Invensys, honed his skill and expertise in supply chain management.

Kelly next moved to Siebe where he worked with Jim Mueller, who was chief operating officer of the controls group. Kelly says Mueller had—and still has—a huge impact on his career. "Jim allowed me to teach him about purchasing," he says. "He took advantage of that and I don't mean that in a negative sense. He allowed me to grow the operation and he supported the hell out it. He still tells me that he wishes he could have supported me more."

Once the merger of Siebe and BTR was complete, Mueller named Kelly chief purchasing officer and asked him to integrate the supply operations of Siebe and BTR, which combined had an annual spend of $7 billion. Kelly considers his work in this effort his crowning achievement.

At Invensys, Kelly was a pioneer in spend analysis. He helped create a database of more than 600,000 records that held such spend data as part number, supplier, manufacturer number, volume purchased and last price paid. From the data, the purchasing team was able to determine the largest users of, as well as, dollars spent on, specific commodities.

As he sees it, the only cost savings that count are those that directly impact the bottom line. He helped develop a Cost Savings Tracker for Invensys that measures direct material savings from PO (prior to a new purchasing agreement based on new leverage) to PO (after a new agreement is in place).

Kelly was responsible for a supplier-development team of individuals who earned Black Belts in quality. He is a Master Black Belt, and helped train 1,600 Black Belts for Invensys. Also, he introduced a sourcing process that included creating a Kepner Tregoe musts/wants list. Commodity teams use KT to rate suppliers against the list.

In 2003, Arsenal Capital Partners hired Kelly for his purchasing and quality expertise as well as his experience instructing colleagues in supply chain management. Kelly calls the post "a new twist to his career."

At the firm, Kelly helps "to identify companies that are diamonds in the rough. Once we acquire a company, I develop a plan that builds a bridge from where the company is today to where it needs to be tomorrow."

Working through this transition with the purchasing operations of the companies acquired by Arsenal, Kelly knows his team has to tread carefully. The plan usually includes lengthening payment terms and negotiating new agreements with suppliers. Working with the purchasing operations and educating others about supply chain continue to be a priority for Kelly as it has been throughout his career. He regularly gathers together leaders of these purchasing operations at council meetings where they share best practices on such tools as pay-on-use, leverage spending when possible, and sharpen quality skills. To help manage the companies' indirect spending, Kelly hired Rob Rose as director of indirect materials. He has helped to significantly reduce costs in such areas as lab supplies and hazardous waste management.

Asked for advice to share gleaned from his career, Kelly suggests that purchasing professionals not hesitate to listen to others with supply chain knowledge. For their bosses, he asks that CEOs be open to the idea of purchasing as a profit center. "There are tangible and intangible costs that can be extracted from the organization, and, if done right, it still can maintain good relationships with suppliers. In fact, if the purchasing operation has a few Black Belts on the team, suppliers will want to maintain their relationships because you're helping to improve not only the products you're buying but also those they sell to others."

• Years in purchasing: 35
• First job in purchasing: Materials manager, General Motors
• Why he's at Arsenal: "It's a learning experience and a whole different twist to purchasing."
• Mentors: Jim Mueller, former COO, Invensys
• Advice to others: "Be open to the idea of purchasing as a profit center. Costs can be extracted from the organization and, if done right, it can still maintain good relationships with suppliers.

Read more about Tim Kelly in PURCHASING magazine's July 2003 http://www.purchasing.com/article/CA310895.html and April 2001 http://www.purchasing.com/article/CA138189.html issues.—Susan Avery

Jose Mejia has two attributes that have served him well during his career in purchasing and supply chain management: Vision and the ability to communicate that vision to others.

Mejia, president of supply chain networks for Lucent Technologies, can see what's wrong in a company's supply chain and what needs to be done to correct those shortcomings. Equally important is his ability to enlist the support of higher level executives and to motivate his supply chain team to make the necessary changes.

Mejia, 44, and his team have turned the supply chain organization around at Lucent. His initiatives and management have helped the company go from the brink of financial collapse to profitability.

When he began working for Lucent in 1999, the company's procurement organization was decentralized. It had a Global Procurement organization that leveraged some company-wide purchases, but most purchasing was left up to Lucent's 11 individual business units.

"Every one of the units was independent," says Mejia. "For the most part they did their own manufacturing, purchasing, logistics, transportation, and new product introduction. The perception was that we wanted the units to act almost as startups," he says.

Mejia saw that Lucent was missing out on an opportunity to leverage its company-wide purchases and reduce materials cost. Under his leadership, Lucent centralized purchasing, with commodity teams managing suppliers. In 1999 only about 30% of Lucent's purchases were leveraged. By 2002 that increased to 90% and today it is about 94%. Lucent saved millions of dollars just by consolidating its purchases and using its volume clout.

Next, he was instrumental in development of company-wide strategies for 70 different commodities, and reducing the number of suppliers for those commodities.

Lucent cut its supplier roster from more than 3,000 in the year 2000, to fewer than 1,500 in 2002. About 60 suppliers now account for over 80% of Lucent's spend. In 1999 more than 1,000 suppliers accounted for less than 40% of the spend.

To further reduce material cost and to make sure Lucent got access to the latest technology, Mejia involved suppliers in new product development and initiated supplier partnership workshops, where engineering, manufacturing and suppliers brainstorm ways to cut costs, including simplifying design or substituting parts.

Over a three-year period, workshops resulted in $200 million in cost savings.

As Mejia's organization reduced cost, profit margins on Lucent's products increased. Mejia's organization developed a forecasting model that could accurately project profit margins for new products up to four quarters out.

The supply chain initiatives resulted in Lucent cutting materials costs by 55%, reducing inventory levels from $7 billion to less than $3 billion and improving profit margins on new products from the teens in 1999 to 24% by 2002. More recently, profit margins for new products have averaged 42% for the past seven quarters.

His climb to become one of the industry's more accomplished supply chain managers may seem improbable to some. Mejia was born in Valera, Venezuela and he did not speak English until he was nearly 17 years old.

"I was oldest of three children. My father went to third grade. My mother never went to school," he says. His father, a caddy on a golf course where Americans played, dreamt of the opportunities in the U.S. He and his family saved money so they could send Mejia to the U.S. to learn English.

"I tutored rich kids in math and physics in high school," he says. When he graduated high school he and his family had saved up enough money for Mejia to go to America for six months to learn English.

He learned English at Beaver College in Pennsylvania. Instead of leaving after six months, he enrolled at the University of Michigan, earning a degree in engineering while working his way through college. After graduation he got a job as head of engineering and procurement for an Owens-Illinois manufacturing facility in Venezuela.

Next stop was IBM at Research Triangle Park in North Carolina. Simultaneously, he went back to school to earn an MBA from Duke University. Mejia worked at IBM for four years, but then left for a job at the newly formed Ford Electronics Division.

"We started growing the division, opening factories in Mexico, facilities in Asia Pacific and a research center in Japan," says Mejia. At Ford, reducing inventory levels was a priority. "I hated warehouses. I started cutting them," says Mejia.

To motivate his management team to cut inventory, he took the team on a tour of a warehouse. "There were boxes of stuff in the warehouse and no one knew how long the stuff had been there," he says. "I took out a $100 bill and I put the bill on the shelf and said to the team, 'I want you to think of these boxes as this $100 bill. I want to know how long you would let a $100 dollar bill sit on the shelf. I trust you are going to know what to do.'"

What the team did was institute just-in-time and vendor-managed inventory programs to reduce warehouse space. "We ended up with the best inventory turns at Ford. It went from about 10 to 40," Mejia says.

In 1994, Mejia was named to the Ford 2000 team, a re-engineering effort to make Ford more competitive globally. He was in charge of re-engineering a new product development system and a total-cost-management organization.

"My job was to transform the way the purchasing organization thought about suppliers and connected with the supply base," he says. Ford started value analysis and value engineering workshops, working with suppliers to take cost out of existing products or to make sure excessive costs don't get designed into new products.

"We identified $1 billion in cost savings and cut our inventory in half," says Mejia.

In 1996 he left Ford to become vice president of commodity and supplier management at Bay Networks in San Jose, Calif., where a key responsibility was managing Bay's electronics manufacturing services providers. Later, Nortel bought Bay Networks and Mejia took over external manufacturing at Nortel. Then, Lucent recruited him.

He says his greatest accomplishment during his career was guiding procurement and the supply chain organization during the dark times at Lucent.

"It was rewarding to take an amazing group of talented people who were proud of Lucent's tremendous heritage and show them the tunnel wasn't so dark. I think I helped a lot of people see that there is light and we just had to focus and do what we needed to do."

• Years in supply chain: 20
• First job: Head of engineering and purchasing at an Owens-Illinois plant in Venezuela.
• Mentors: Chuchi Muchacho, a former governor in Venezuela and Charlie Szuluk, head of IBM's monitor division.
• Single Greatest Accomplishment: Guiding Lucent supply chain networks group through the telecommunications industry's downturn in 2001-2003.
• Advice for others: "Believe in the power you have and speak and act as if you were a business leader."

Read more about Jose Mejia in PURCHASING's March 18, 2004 http://www.purchasing.com/article/CA403250.html and Feb 19, 2004 http://www.purchasing.com/article/CA381826.html issues.—James Carbone