Dario Kulic has spent close to two decades across numerous procurement and purchasing roles. His experiences gained from a multitude of sectors combined with a thirst for learning and an ability to take on board, adapt, and apply, has resulted in the development of a procurement leader and mentor who insists on the human touch.
We sat down with Dario and got his take on opportunity that exists for procurement if it upholds the fundamentals.
Dario how did you get into Procurement?
I never planned to go into procurement, but I was offered the opportunity (the first person in the world at the time) to write my practical diploma thesis within the procurement department of Ford Motor Company, so I took the chance and said to myself: challenge accepted and let us see where it leads to. At that time, I had no perception of procurement, but learning procurement from scratch within Ford, gave me the perception that procurement is about working together with other professional people on complex issues, challenges and failures and successes. This shaped my understanding of procurement for the next 10 years or so, while I have 17 years of experience in procurement, it took 10 years before the picture of procurement started to crumble. Having worked in many different companies and industries I have been lucky to see various procurement departments and management styles.
At 41, I now have 17 years’ experience in Strategic Sourcing, Purchasing, P2P, S2P, AP as well as Management of Categories, Commodities, Suppliers and various (capital) projects in (Corporate) procurement. I am motivated continuously by my intrinsic drive to push cost and process efficiency. By being aligned with company goals, I am offering support to stakeholders throughout the procurement and implementation process on an end-to-end scale. My experiences in various other industries enlarged my portfolio of knowledge, tools and deep process insights. I am creating and maintaining trust with stakeholders through my focus on value added contributions and synergies, professional leading and advisory skillset, an entrepreneurial mindset.
My expertise’s span over 4 years in Sales, Marketing, Product Management and Strategic Business Development, 9 years Supervision and leading teams of Commodities, Categories, Invoice experts, Sox control owners, VMD Governance agents, power users, ERP Technical and Business Experts, 7 years Project Procurement and Project Management, 9 years Strategic Sourcing Managemen and 7+ years Consulting and Advisory, direct assignments at clients and Pitching new Business & strategic development & management. During these 17 years I have realized approx.180 million USD on Cost reductions to date and realised approx. €20 million on Sales turnover on mobile phone accessories by pitching my own product development to key account customers by driving competition to negotiate the best deal. Awarded in 2015 by Glaxo Smith Kline for the best professional procurement consultancy. Top Performance Award 2020 and 2021 at Elanco as being Global Procurement Advisor. For the last 3 years my focus has been on building and leading the global Shared Service Center Team for P2P & AP for Bayer Animal Health business since the time of the carve out in 2020 until integration in 2023 and stabilized the whole P2P end to end process.
I have trained, coached and guided many executive procurement leaders throughout my time in advisory but also in my current position as Global Procurement Advisor at Elanco Animal Health.
I introduced to my clients a new win-win stakeholder management, less complex way of working, the Introduction and standardisation of a problem-solving methodology in A3 Storytelling Format are just few of my customers success stories. Apart from this, customers like my maturity and professionalism, my ethics and morals and my high determination to bring success to the team and negotiate the targets or even better.
How do you feel procurement is perceived in general?
Fine line between funky and arrogant, helpful and not helpful. Attitude, motivation, ability to support stakeholders and capability to deliver are the key drivers for anybody in procurement. For me procurement is losing its grip right now, between being an incumbent function of corporate business and being outsourced completely as some procurement functions fail to deliver the required value in the longer term.
I still often hear business users being puzzled about procurement policies, guidelines for engagement and overall services offered by procurement. One part of this is when procurement is not able to promote themselves at its best, e.g. what are the services we offer and what is the practical value in the end. This starts with poor intranet sites which have no meaning and value or showing even SPOC for any user. Suppliers sometimes do not know how to contact procurement employees; hence opportunities can be missed.
In a nutshell, to instil excellence in procurement, the quality of output must increase and stakeholder management must improve otherwise no trusted bonds can be created which are fundamental for procurement to remain with an official mandate in their hands.
Without official mandate, any procurement department will have challenges to succeed and be as efficient and valuable as they really can be. What I do not recommend is putting CPO’s in place who do lack in the minimum knowledge you must have to be a procurement leader. Also, if CPO’s offer dialogue they should ensure this does not evolve into a monologue.
What can procurement do better?
Create and maintain trust with his stakeholders through a focus on value added contributions and synergies, professional leading, entrepreneurial mindset and leadership empathy. Becoming role models again for the company.
Keep procurement away from politics, internal and external, as it will create trust faster and stronger.
Practice what you preach and preach what you practice. That’s it.
The pandemic appears to have raised people’s awareness of procurement. There is a significant opportunity for procurement to move away from the back-office support function label and move towards the role of commercial facilitator. Does procurement need to rebrand or reinvigorate its processes and culture to make the most of this opportunity?
Yes, it is the best way to reinvent and become more professional and impacting again, regaining trust of the stakeholders and taking second chances to show their real value for the organisation.
Leadership empathy simply brings just more leadership empathy into the world and this, in my point of view, has massive potential to become our all-life’s greatest success story. Again, role modelling is the key.
Sourcing brings the real value but only if conducted properly with commodity and category strategies.
Procurement is evolving at pace. The pace of change often calls for new skill sets and disciplines within a team. What value can Procurement source from adding non procurement skilled staff to their teams? Do you need to be a qualified procurement practitioner to be a successful member of a procurement team?
In 2021 I interviewed and selected my P2P team (17 in total). I decided to train all from scratch without any prior knowledge of procurement basics, processes and systems. Today, 18 months later, I have a team of highly self-sufficient and motivated subject matter experts. They deliver operational excellence with all stakeholders, by showing understanding, listening, taking time and extra care, and remaining humble.
All of them are now leaders, not only in their own core areas of expertise, but being spread all globally across more than 7 countries they can cover all countries and time zones, being able to provide an “around the clock service”.
So, in the end I have proven that statement as correct and everybody can be trained to become a successful member of a procurement team, I do not see the need to have a CIPS certificate but I encourage every enthusiast in procurement and all who want to go into process improvement and excellence to go for a Six Sigma Green Belt.
How procurement evolves is dependent on procurement leadership and the ability to be good captains to their professional teams. Role modelling is the key and practice what you preach. Also losing track on technology and tools is a bad sign for good leaders.
The ecosystem of service, solution, and tool providers is rapidly growing. The need to automate processes, ascertain risk, drive sustainability, and work collaboratively with both internal stakeholder and suppliers are just a few of the areas that the ecosystem can assist. For procurement too truly take the next step and move beyond the seat at the table it needs to embrace this community of providers. What are the benefits of this growing ecosystem? What are the shortcomings? How do you compare and select in an efficient time frame? What do you feel vendors could do better?
In my opinion we are in a promising and fantastic era of new tech, tools, opportunities, and capability enhancements, to run businesses much more efficiently. How we approach and embrace this is the key. Embracing it in silos and leaving it to IT functions only to lead this will reside in failures because IT is not the function have the business eyes on. This is more procurement. Also, procurement should lead these conversations with those suppliers or be part of it from the beginning. When it comes to process improvements, only experts should judge and make the decisions otherwise the loss of entrepreneurial mindset is inevitable.
The coordination between providers and platforms resides for me either in Procurement or in GBS.
The topic of ESG and carbon emission reductions is shaking up the market now for every company but it is not a new concept. It has been a requirement in automotive for many years years to analyse your supply chain up to Tier 3 and 4 making sure that no embargo countries are used as sources or where child work is promoted etc.
But it will create new turnovers and additional business for providers to help and maintain datasets for suppliers to provide proper reports etc. On the other hand, it creates new work within each company and where resources previously were unused these can be used now efficiently again. I do not see any rocket science here but merely pure management of data which requires human efforts if not automated properly. My recommendation: implement and action chatbot internally and one externally for suppliers to make data flow and action prompting possible.
In my view, to navigate and lead in this new world properly, it will not require only knowledge about systems, tools, and processes, but it will inevitably pull us deeper into the world of empathy and emotional intelligence because people with a free will, will always buy in and follow only trusted leaders. This combination will require a repositioning in leadership to be prepared for what is still to come.
Will there be a need for a Procurement Technology Officer in the future to handle the dynamic and complexities new solutions can offer?
I think if the CPO and Senior Leadership is not able to deliver the tech piece, I recommend not to leave it in hands of IT but rather having your own Procurement GPO or PTO who is expertise in this area. Often Operational Excellence Managers do not cover the full end to end process of tools and systems and processes. Often the incorrect people are thrust the responsibility which I find remarkable considering the high value this position can deliver and how many non-value added activities for all employees can be eliminated which would kill a lot of hidden operational costs. My personal mission is to help enterprises to eliminate as much as possible non-value-added activities but without laying off people through this approach. For this I am speaking currently on OPEX and SSOW and other conferences e.g. Hackett Group about this topic and how it can help the whole industry no matter the size of company.