SCAAS

A NEW WORLD

Her next career move opened a new sourcing world for her, when she began working at Labbatt in 2006, Vora says. Other organizations she had worked at focused on services. But as a manufacturer, sourcing and supply chain were critical to Labbatt. The company also had a disciplined approach to its supply chain function. While focused on North America, Labbatt is owned by an organization called Ambev. The chief procurement officer of Labbatt reports to that company’s CEO in Europe. Like in her previous roles, Vora learned a lot.

“One of the things I learned at Labbatt is that anything is negotiable, absolutely anything,” she says. “We had a lot of autonomy, and the corporate culture was very much that we needed to save money, we needed to drive dollars.”

Achieving those savings was very much part of the company’s culture, and not just in sourcing, she says. Savings were included in compensation. There was zero-based budgeting, and those who owned budgets were separate from those who used those budgets.

“There was absolutely nothing that we couldn’t put on the table. It was a huge learning opportunity,” she says. “Again, I managed a bunch of different categories. I outsourced facilities services. I also outsourced HR recruitment services and myriad other things.”

After Labbatt, Vora moved to Rogers in 2008. She was again responsible for new and different categories, pivoting to collections and training services, along with professional and contingent labour. At Rogers, she honed her contract management and negotiation skills. She also built up the organization’s sourcing strategy as she learned the details of contract negotiations during her two years there.

“Even though we were able to save money, which is typically your focus in sourcing, we were actually able to improve their outcomes on collections,” she says. “We were able to drive business revenue through that process. We were also able to improve customer experience along the way.”

Vora’s next career move was also within telecom, this time to Telus. That company, where she worked for the next seven years, had a different culture from Rogers. Vora again had a fair amount of autonomy and owned several categories including contingent labour and professional services. At Telus, she was able to move the contingent labour category up in terms of maturity.

The company went from a mediocre strategy to one considered world class, Vora says. Both service and contract levels improved significantly. Vora found herself owning sourcing strategy, operations, and vendor management.

“When building this program, I had the autonomy to challenge the status quo,” she says of the contingent labour program. “While not limited to the following, we in-sourced it and built the practice from the ground up, where everyone else outsourced it. We kept the number of suppliers very low, where most organizations had trouble consolidating suppliers. We partnered with the suppliers and utilized them to support and market the program with the business and held them accountable to our internal goals through scorecards and data transparency. My team and the suppliers built trust with our stakeholders and improved our delivery time and quality, reduced costs and made it into a profit centre for sourcing. My team’s creative and data-driven approach is what led to the program being successful and recognized as one of best internally run programs in the world.”