Procurement
transformation
01
Context
Years of uncoordinated attempts optimizing for the local maxima
For 20 years when different business teams at Google identified a procurement use case, they would stand up their own operations and build disconnected tools.
This unmanaged growth led to proliferation of tools, mismatched policies, and redundant operations. Purchasers were extremely dissatisfied with their existing solutions, finance stakeholders were identifying billions of dollars lost due to inefficiencies, and legal stakeholders were raising the alarm on unmitigated legal risks associated with purchases.
I was hired in 2020 to partner with a newly formed centralized procurement organization and a cross-org engineering group to untangle this structure and transform the procurement process.
02
Vision
Starting with a shared vision
We led the charge by running a design sprint with participants from all stakeholder group to define our collective north star vision, then brought in an agency to develop visual concepts for our vision.
These concepts helped align our executive sponsors and secure funding for a 4 your program. At this point I started hiring the procurement UX team.
03
Strategy
A coordinated approach to transform the ecosystem at large
The newly-formed cross org leadership group started to explore solutions to strcuture the vision platform and determine a release strategy. We had great ideas for a set of servies and APIs, a new purchaser-facing prodcuct, and new business processes to develop but these domain-specific solutions were not coming together in a cohesive strategy. I recommended a layered architecture borrowing from service design terminology and thinking to align the different efforts and have create an ecosystem map of upcoming efforts. With this new mental model, we defined our strategy, hypothesized a four year plan, and started building our new capabilites.
04
Execution
Building toward ther vision
Our four year roadmap in 2020 planned enable $1B savings annually, increase risk compliance, and meaningfully improve user satisfaction. Over the years we updated our GTM and release multiple times as we uncovered new insights but we managed to deliver our program goals within four years.
2021
In the first year, we built a Purchase order management solution in a product called “Buying Hub” and integrated it with our ERP system.
2022
Then we built a catalog of strategic partners with pre-negotiated rates to influence supplier sourcing.
2023
in 2023, we built our first E2E solution for the Cloud PA and enabled contracting and risk management through scaled operations support
2024
Then we brought the Marketing PA’s into our E2E experience which integrated with their campaign planning tools, and automatic manual operational tasks.
An end to end purchase journey
After collecting an initial set of information about the purchase, Buying Hub proprietary logic prescribes the required activities for each purchase, then guides purchasers and their collaborators through each activity.
It also shares updates as purchases move forward, and notifies all parties when their action or attention is required.
Guiding users the entire way
The new E2E experience helps purchasers complete all required steps, influences their decision making, and keep purchases compliant with Google policies. Contextual help is always available through a wealth of guiding content.
Supported by scaled operations
For activities that require expertise beyond requesters’ capacity, multiple support teams are available throughout the journey to offer services like professional sourcing or contract drafting and redlining.
05
Research
Maturing user-centricity
we segmented the users, actors, and stakeholders in the procurement ecosystem into 7 user archetypes and identified their foundational needs. Then documented their user journeys and measured the effectiveness of our solutions for each archetype against their journeys. Our measurements are now used as the primary insights for planning and prioritization exercises.
06
Service design
Organizing processes, policies, and products
In order to orchestrate the operational support offered by all different parties into a coherent offering, I started a service design practice. We initially ran a series of service blueprint workshops between 5 teams to harmonize the Marketing org's practices with our centralized solution. With the success of this exercise, our service blueprint became the source of truth for our service architecture, adopted and maintained by business partners.
07
Results
Surpassing every target metric
So far, we've surpassed our $1B annual savings target, increased the CSAT of journeys we fully control from ~30% to ~80%, and increased the risk assessment rate of purchases in our funnel from ~40% to 100%.
We've extended our program for another three years to save an additional $12B (cumulative) by bringing BH to a general audience, and build two new products for our operational teams and category stakeholders.