Procurement Leaders is supporting Marty Schoch, Senior Director of Procurement at B&G Foods and his team’s rapid growth through networking experiences, key takeaways at Procurement Leaders events and research that helps drive the improvement of their function.
Marty Schoch was determined to gain membership for his team, after receiving a piece of featured content from Procurement Leaders via email. Marty Schoch told us that after reading through the article he “thought Procurement Leaders was the best place to help us evolve our procurement function” and found the manner in which content helped “guide [us] with the best practices in place within procurement” as one of the main attractions of membership could offer their function.
An eye opener to the benefits of membership for Marty was attending his first Procurement Leaders event, the Americas Congress in Miami of March 2015. “After going to my first event I understood that we could do a lot more than we currently were. We needed patience to transform our function.” Since gaining this awareness at the event, putting this into practice has since been his mission, a successful one at that. Marty has placed B&G Foods forward for the ‘Transformation’ and ‘Procurement Leader’ section of Procurement Leaders annual World Procurement Awards where their transformation journey will be benchmarked against other outstanding procurement functions. Events and networking is a part of the membership that Marty saw value in immediately upon becoming a member; “One thing that stood out to me is the consistent level of talent Procurement Leaders has at events. These are multi-billion dollar companies with the highest level of Procurement Leaders who have had the same problems that I have now.”
Marty highlights that learning patience has been key to driving success in his function. “Overall, I’m pretty impatient but listening to great people speak at Procurement Leaders events about having patience and the need to keep striving and plugging away has been inspirational. When I was at a Procurement Leaders event in New York in May with Paul Teague (US Editor of Procurement Leaders) we discussed what future skills procurement needs to develop and he detailed how important patience is. You need to get everyone involved and work collaboratively in the process. Get them to lock in to what you want them to do. This approach is working well for me and help improve a skillset that I needed improvement which lead to my promotion in 2015 to Senior Director.”
Events isn’t the only value B&G Foods is seeing from membership – they have also benefited tremendously from the research on offer. “The Category Intelligence research is something we use monthly, if not weekly. Some of the other reports such as the CPO Planning Guide are really useful to me. These tools are helpful, to see what other companies and industries are doing. I took over indirect spend recently and I was not as familiar with that category and these reports helped me identify where we can make savings and what we might have missed. I.T for example. We just negotiated a deal with Cisco Systems, a big undertaking, and I was a part of the processes which wouldn’t have normally have happened if not for our track record of success.”
The success B&G have been enjoying has led to expansion within the procurement team as well as with their affiliation with Procurement Leaders. “We are transforming into a strategic function and with the additional team members with access to the membership will allow us to be able to get a broader sense of thinking rather than just a heat of the moment decisions to get things out of the door. We are sending two or three people to Procurement Leaders Forums to get the training and advice they don’t get here. I just hired a Director of Packaging and she will be looking at paper and packaging resources from your website to learn their key information. The team was broad and spread thin before but now they are category experts and there is value to be gained from having specific industry knowledge. The ‘Team’ award at Procurement Leaders ‘World Procurement Awards’ is one I am looking at as the team has grown and we now deal with indirect spend which we didn’t have before.”
With fantastic success driving him forward Marty has big plans for the future of B&G Foods; “We are looking to become a leader at the executive table. Procurement Leaders has made me see we can’t do it all our self.” With a continued partnership with Procurement Leaders Marty is looking forward to the coming year. “Our membership involvement has increased so we hope that by experiencing the same benefits I have the team will grow and enhance their capabilities. Risk and how to deal with this is something that challenged me last year. Supplier risk, policy risk, reputational risk, I.T risk etc. are things we will look to spearhead using Procurement Leaders information.” When discussing future engagement with other procurement professionals Marty detailed that the networking benefits that come from Procurement Leaders aren’t just for the benefit of the procurement function, “It’s also a good thing for B&G Foods, to get our name out there. We are a work in process, as many other people are and we can talk to these people to brainstorm the issues with people in the industry that share similar issues.”
With Marty planning great things for his function, Procurement Leaders looks forward to a continued partnership where we can drive their procurement success and promoting B&G Foods on a global scale via unequalled networking opportunities at Procurement Leaders stand-out events.
“I will be attending and presenting a business case at the San Francisco Forum and this is a direct result from our partnership.”