Players: Leslie Campbell, VP of worldwide procurement, Dell

Staff -- Purchasing, 3/2/2006

In this exclusive interview, Dell’s Leslie Campbell tells Purchasing how she got into the field and came to lead Dell’s indirect procurement.

Living proof that the purchasing professional has evolved over the years, Leslie Campbell, vice president of worldwide general procurement for Dell, is an expert in both high-tech and finance, which in turn, makes her a perfect fit to lead Dell’s indirect procurement efforts.

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in accounting from University of Washington, Campbell worked for eight years at KPMG, reaching the role of senior manager of its international and high technology tax practice. Oracle, one of KPMG’s clients at the time, hired Campbell to put financial controls in place at the software giant, which eventually led to spending eight years in the purchasing organization running global purchasing.

"I understood the type of control and compliance that needed to exist in the supply chain. I didn’t know very much about purchasing when I took that job [at Oracle], but I knew a lot about financial controls," she says.

At Oracle, Campbell consulted with Dell on how to better sell to large global customers, which resulted in Dell hiring Campbell on the sales side. Campbell entered the European sales organization and ran a segment of sales in Europe for five years. Since she was the guru of global and had a procurement background at Oracle, Dell asked her to come back to U.S. operations and run the general procurement function, or indirect procurement.

What was your biggest challenge when coming to Dell?

The biggest challenge was getting the company to support centralization in general procurement. Also, we made a science out of production procurement, but didn’t spend a lot of time looking at general procurement. We realized that spend was large, so it was an area we wanted to look at. I inherited a team to rally behind it. It’s a team that has taken it upon themselves to embrace radical changes in the way it was doing its business.

There are so many spend areas and industries to develop expertise in. You need:

• Expertise across a number of commodities.
• Understanding of the services industry, which is complex.
• Cross-functional teams that deepen our expertise by working side-by-side.

Who do you report to?

Our two chief procurement officers Marty Garvin and Glenn Neland.

What have you done in the centralization effort?

We brought people into procurement from various areas. So, we transferred people in from services and marketing, for instance, to become part of the worldwide procurement team. We blended these teams to be part procurement professionals and part professionals from the other areas of business. That is really useful because our teams become more business savvy. The marketing folks that came over to our team over the past year have gained professional procurement skills.

Often people from procurement will sit on the procurement staff as well as a particular business unit, such as services, logistics, international operations and marketing. They report to both the vice president of procurement as well as the vice president of the business unit.

To use marketing as an example:

• The procurement team supports marketing, but does not make marketing decisions.

• Procurement provides the strategic sourcing and supplier management skills to the marketing organization.

I do. I think I’m living proof of it. Thirty years ago I wouldn’t have ever been considered for a purchasing profession because I didn’t have any procurement background. I think today, certainly at Dell, we’re seeing individuals from different backgrounds come into procurement. We’re seeing different professions such as engineering and finance come into procurement and it’s really good.

• We have a team that focuses on supplier diversity.
• We insist that diverse suppliers are included in every RFP because we want to make sure we give diverse suppliers the opportunity to bid on our business.
• We do diverse supplier outreach programs where we let them know in advance “how to do business with Dell.”
• We set their expectations about how to communicate with us, get their information to us, and how to best position their business case.
• We make sure they get registered with us so that we have them in our database and that their information is accurate. So, when we have an RFP that they can potentially participate in, we have all their information and we know how to contact them to help them participate.
• We are a sponsor of the Central and South Texas Minority Business Council (CSTMB), which is a mentor program to help pair diverse suppliers with large corporations.

What advice do you give to young professionals in the purchasing field?

The closer you can get to the organizations that you are supporting from a strategic sourcing standpoint, the better position you are in to continue to provide added value. And, it is more likely you’ll be invited into strategic planning sessions early on where you can add value rather than if you get brought in at the last minute just to do sourcing.

• Know the industry of the company you work for, not just the procurement industry.
• Be a business advisor, not just a sourcing professional.