Why & How to Run Your 1st Supplier Day: Pearson's Story

Ask any supplier what they want most and the majority will probably give you the same answer – namely, being involved earlier in the decision-making process and also, crucially, given a true understanding of what it is that a company is trying to achieve

How often that happens, in reality, is a moot point. Having a truly integrated supply base remains a pipe-dream on both sides of the fence for many but Pearson, the London-based global education giant, is putting its money where its mouth is and investing in its suppliers in every sense.

Key to this is Pearson’s desire to see its supply base as a source of ideas and innovation, rather than as a purely transactional partner. And it’s for this reason, that Pearson recently decided to organise an inaugural supplier day in an attempt to ensure that this rich source of potential was being harnessed rather than wasted.

Opening the door to innovation

Daniel Cameron (Chief Procurement Officer), and his team invited 24 of the company’s key strategic suppliers to join them for a day that would see not only the exchange of ideas but also enable the firm’s supply base to hear from key senior figures from the very top at Pearson. 

“I’ve been at Pearson for two and a half years now and the backstory is that we really had a fragmented procurement team,” he tells me. “There was no real common view of things going on with suppliers, whether that was spent or projects. We wanted to pull all that together and really get a grip on what we were doing.”

After taking the time to get the visibility they required and the data they needed to make more informed decisions, Cameron and his team could then build on that and move into the second phase – which was really aimed at elevating the conversation and identifying the key suppliers that could take Pearson’s procurement offering to the next level.

“We wanted to know who the most influential suppliers in our supply chain were,” he says. “We then picked 20 to 25 across the spectrum of category of spend – from technology to marketing to print to real estate. We really wanted to engage with those suppliers who had a bearing either from a risk, quality or cost perspective.”

This process didn’t only involve identifying those suppliers who Pearson spent a lot of money with but also those suppliers who have a direct influence on managing risk on the company’s behalf and those who bring real and genuine value now and potentially in the future.

"We took as broad a look as possible around cost, risk and opportunity," he says.

“We wanted to bring them together to have a common conversation around what it is we’re trying to do here. That group of suppliers was put on a bit of a pedestal so we could have the biggest and best conversation possible.”

Hearing it from the very top

That was very much a two-way street, with this open channel of communication not simply aiming to provide suppliers with an idea of Pearson’s future strategy but to also provide the company itself with a better grasp of potential changes in the supplier space that could impact or benefit it in the future.

Key to the success of the day, however, was the need to get the right people involved from the outset and also win buy-in from those at the top of the business.

“We managed to get five of our senior executives up speaking, which was fantastic,” says Cameron. “We had John Fallon, our CEO, our CFO, CPO, CMO and chief strategy officer to come and talk about their perspectives on where we were going.

"We had never seen that group as joined up with us in terms of cohesive messaging and where we were going. When I spoke to the execs before the event they turned and around and said ‘this is what we’re here to do – it’s our job to be the storytellers for the organisation’.” 

Getting such senior figures to play a prominent role in the day was clearly something of a coup for Cameron, with the presence of so many senior leaders serving to illustrate the importance of the day.

Again, as Cameron suggests, hearing the message from other key personnel alongside procurement also provided a completely joined-up narrative for suppliers to buy into.

Providing a two-way flow of information

“I’ve been in procurement for 16 years and the common feedback I get from suppliers and partners is that they really just want an insight into why we’re trying to do something,” he says. “If they have some additional context and knowledge then that empowers them to potentially bring a better solution to the table.”

Clearly, that takes a level of trust which may take some time to build but once both sides can establish this common ground then the benefits to procurement and also the supplier can be enormous.

One of the off-shoots – perhaps unforeseen – of the supplier day in this instance was also the chance to build partnerships between those suppliers in the room.

Some are clearly competitors but that’s not to say that suppliers can’t work together, profitably, to find a solution that not only benefits what Pearson is trying to achieve but also provides an opportunity to bring innovation and a long-term view to the table.

Cameron talks of asking those involved to leave their egos at the door and think of Pearson as an organisation. It seems to work, with the afternoon session, which I myself played a part in, showing just what could be achieved when suppliers take a more holistic view of what it is both they and the company they’re working with are trying to achieve. 

“We probably shared more than we would ordinarily with a supplier group," he says. "But one of the major pieces of feedback we had was that, next time, it would be interesting to have an influencers and innovators group in the room together – the feeling was that there could be some really interesting eco-systems and partnerships as a result.

 “One of the keywords of our strategy going forward is eco-system. We recognise that we’re not going to be building everything ourselves. We want to be a digital platform provider and then we plug other people into it. We’ve talked about being the orchestrator of the education sector and to do that we really need to bring some of these guys along with us. You don’t realise some of these organisations have smaller subsidiaries that have some very niche and interesting skill-sets that we can bring to bear.

“By telling them what we’re really looking to achieve you can have a really different conversation.” 

A jump into the unknown

Cameron admits that the whole day required partial leaps of faith from both sides as well as a need to put implicit trust that procurement knew what it was doing by conceiving such a day in the first place.

The desire to make the supplier day exclusive as well as aspirational meant that the impact of it could be felt well beyond the 24 companies that were eventually invited to take part.

Pearson is now planning a 2019 event focusing on the influencers and innovators that Cameron referred to earlier. That is likely to take place on the West Coast of the US, which again illustrates the global reach and ambition of Pearson’s plans moving forward. 

“That could potentially bring in companies that we currently don’t even have any business with,” he says. “But they could be a really interesting start-up, scale-up companies that we want to get into our ecosystem in the future.”

It’s a process based not on total spend but one that has a constant eye on what's coming – the next big challenge, the next big idea. What could be more aspirational for a supplier than that?

“We don’t want to make it so broad or vanilla that it becomes a mediocre conversation with everybody,” says Cameron. 

“We want to almost have a generic outreach from us detailing where we’re going, the hot topics for us and the state of our financial health. Then we want to tailor the questions, the conversations and the themes that we engage with each of the suppliers on because they’ll each have different things to bring to the party.”

It’s another example of how Pearson are intending to shape the narrative around the supplier, rather than the narrative being forced down their supplier's throats. It’s banishing the blinkered thinking that some procurement organisations can find themselves rail-roaded into without careful thought and consideration of exactly what it is they want their suppliers to bring to the table.

If both sides enjoy a thorough understanding of the needs of the business, the marketplace and the business landscape, then an open conversation can push them in previously un-thought of directions.

And that can only be a good thing.

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