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Archive for the ‘Grin’ Category

Up In The Air … As Trainer (Part One)

Posted in Grin, tagged , , on November 14, 2010| Leave a Comment »

The American dollar is so weak right now that it makes me think twice about traveling abroad.  Hong Kong dollar is pegged to the USD meaning that as long as I stay in between these 2 places, I shouldn’t be too less well off.  Wrong.  The recent quantitative easing round 2 by the Fed is pumping $600 billion artificial money into the US economy to stimulate business and creating jobs.  It however has a gigantic ripple effect to the global economies and I can already see huge inflation in this region ranging from grocery to property prices.  With all these uncertainties in personal purchasing power and a could-be volatile stock market, I better be more cautious about my vacation traveling plans.

Like most people I love to travel.  I particular have a thing for traveling on company trainings.  No I am not attending training seminars, but delivering them.  I never knew I had this passion of being a trainer until I was in consulting and a big part of my job then was to teach corporate clients how our reverse auction applications work.  Usually these are one to two-day workshops with not only technical transfer but also strategic procurement contents.  Then soon after I was asked to deliver purely knowledge courses specifically on the topics of strategic procurement, commodity and supply market positioning, project management and communication planning, negotiation skills, opportunity assessments, and the list goes on.  These trainings are by far the most fun and rewarding because they are highly interactive and engaging.

Conducting trainings is not all about getting messages across.  I see incredibly talented professionals who cannot present themselves or their ideas across precisely, not alone chairing workshops.  Making use of a room full of industry experts with varying levels of expertise and experience is exciting and challenging.  I love the challenge and I love to turn the floor over to get more participation.  It’s the sure-fire way to get everyone in the mood from just another boring seminar to one candid sharing and learning sessions which is about them and not about me.

I travel to many cities of Mainland China, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, India, Vietnam, Philippines and Korea to deliver trainings and I get excited every single time.  The people are different every time and if you add-on the different industries and cultures to the equation, I have to constantly adjust myself to make sure the scale is even.  It’s about playing the part well and playing the part based on people and circumstances that you can hardly prepare for until you are at the training hall at 8am.  It’s like waiting for the curtains to open and you have no idea whether the audience is a bunch of 80 year olds or die-hard heavy metal rockers.

Put yourself in my shoes for a moment.  What would you do if you find your training audience:

1. Dozing off

2. Seemingly bored and kicking himself thinking why he was forced to come in the first place

3. Extremely argumentative and outspoken which is interrupting  the progress of the class

4. Stone faced and authoritarian, maybe even feeling insulted from listening to a younger trainer

5. Fiddling with his blackberry or laptop the whole way through

6. Receiving and making calls as he pleases

Sounds fun huh?  Remember these are not school kids.  They are on average in their 30s to 50s and rank high in their organizations.  They usually come together as a team so the leaders may want to exert their authorities throughout the training.  Similarly the subordinates are shy to speak up with their bosses in the room. 

I’ll let you ponder over the above scenarios for a while and please share your comments with me.  I shall continue with my stories of each of these scenarios in my later posts.  So stay tuned…

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The Other Halloween

Posted in Grin, tagged , , on November 10, 2010| 1 Comment »

Corporate buying is not that different from us shopping for ourselves or our families.  When we shop for the latest fashion must-haves from I.T., H&M or Lane Crawford, we know we are getting our needs fulfilled, whether they make us look ravishing, keep us warm for the ski trip coming up, or just means of getting ourselves out of depression.  There are also purchases which we count them as investment in our everyday lives and work, like a flashy suit, a laptop or educational games for our kids.  In the corporate world, we buy just about the same things, only for very different reasons.

In the world of procurement, there is a rough distinction of two broad camps.  Intuitively enough, one is called Direct Materials while the other one Indirect.  Direct Materials refer to those that go into the product we sell.  Indirect Materials, on the other hand, refer only to those purchases made for the support of the corporate’s operation.  Take Hewlett-Packard (HP) as an example.  Its direct materials sourcing team will buy from plastics to printed circuit boards to batteries to packaging, while its indirect materials sourcing team will buy labor (staff), office rental, airplane tickets, and TV time spots to support its business operations.

Every corporate has both direct and indirect material sourcing.  Though we do not always see two distinct teams in service companies today (like financial institutions for example), I can still categorize whatever I buy that goes into the services we sell as Direct Materials.  It’s just a definition and no outsiders care about it, except us.

Like fashion buyers or fabric merchandisers you see in “The Devil Wears Prada”, it takes 10 or 20 years of experience for a buyer to be specialized in the direct material categories.  A food buyer, a plastics buyer, or an electrical buyer can be in hot demand depending on where you are located and what experience and supply base intelligence you can bring to the company.  The buyer needs to work closely together with the product development and production teams so as to source the right ingredients for the company’s products, and at the right price.  There are schools, networks, organizations and even unions for this community.  It may not sound too intriguing to the general public, but one can still quite easily appreciate the professionalism they bring to the table.

Unfortunately, I am not in this category.

I am an indirect materials buyer.

All of a sudden, the word “professionalism” shatters into pieces, and a loud piercing scream usually comes right afterwards.  Seldom out of revelation, mostly out of disgust.

“So you mean like… you are buying pencils?”

“Oh so you must be responsible for all those crappy knockoff Post-It notes they make us use now!”

“Get your hands off MY printer!”

“You just do NOT understand how bad the company will look if I am seen coming out from a HolidayInn by my clients!”

“What? You make us fly Korean Air?????”

Well, if answering what I do hasn’t bored people to death in the first place, these questions will definitely kill any cocktail party conversation.

Hmm… Can I yell “Trick or Treat!”?

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Looking it up in the dictionary

Posted in Grin, tagged , , , , on November 10, 2010| Leave a Comment »

It’s not an easy word, or at least it’s not a word that you will use in your daily life.  I do not hear friends saying “I’m going to procure for furniture tomorrow for my new apartment.”  So it’s not surprising when it was like 17 years ago when I just started working as a distribution officer for the China lubricants team in Shell, my colleague had to look the word “procurement” up in his Oxford dictionary.  Yes folks, there wasn’t Google then.

Turned out there was this young (but still older than myself at the time) executive whose title is procurement manager.  My colleague was embarrassed to go to this manager for a description of his title so he started to make fun of his search results.

“Hey it is something about prostitution!” 

Well we shrugged about it because we both knew Shell wasn’t into the China prostitution business, but it shows how alien we were to the word particularly as a second language.

I still remember my boss at FreeMarkets (now Ariba, a spend management consultancy) talked about increasing the awareness of our profession by putting more spotlight on the buyers.  Why? 

“Who wants to grow up to become a Buyer?”  The teacher asks.

I cannot imagine anyone would have raised their hands.  We are no policemen, firemen or doctors.  No one studied or aspired to be one of us, at least in my time.

I had been working in the oil and chemical industry for about 6 years after school and my last job was a regional business planner for the adhesion industry business unit of ExxonMobil.  I was working 16-hour days crunching reports, tabulating stock inventory while heading the Hong Kong office safety committee which was a very worthy cause but extremely time-consuming.  I was too stretched and wanted to try something new.  I naturally looked at similar business analyst jobs and applied to a few from the weekly Classified Posts. 

The interview was smooth but I didn’t expect to get a call from HR a few days later saying that the lady whom I interviewed with had me in mind of another post in her department.  HR told me it was actually a more senior post.  Sensing my hesitation and disbelief over the phone, I was invited to go for a second meeting with the lady boss.  Turned out she was the Asia head of operations procurement, and she wanted to mentor me as the next strategic procurement manager in her team.  The business analyst role that I applied for was already out of the picture.

“Why me?”  I obviously had no prior experience of the subject and the words strategic procurement meant nothing to me at the time.  I only remember one of the reasons she provided was that she thought I was very “articulate” and would be a perfect candidate for the role.  It was like riding a bicycle, or learning how to swim.

I have to say, now that I am 10 years into this,  it’s not exactly rocket science either .

And that was the beginning of my days with Agilent Technologies (a spun-off from Hewlett-Packard), the birth place of my procurement career.  This Director still remains to be one of my most respected mentors to date.

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