New GEP-commissioned Harvard Business Review Analytic Services survey finds that
just 8% of companies have achieved digital maturity across supply chain operations to mitigate disruptions.

**Clark, N.J., Sept. 22, 2021** — GEP, a leading provider of procurement and supply chain strategy,
software, and managed services to Fortune 500 and Global 2000 enterprises worldwide, today unveiled its “State of Global Supply Chain” commissioned survey of global business leaders conducted by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, which found the importance of supply chains — and the particularly urgent need to transform them — has dramatically escalated.

The report reveals:

- While 90% of executives say supply chains are a strategic resource that helps ensure their
company’s profitability and survival, **just 8% have achieved digital maturity** across six key
components of supply chain operations: warehousing and logistics, procurement, inventory
management, supply planning, demand planning and management, and supplier risk
management.

- As a result, companies are moving quickly to digitally transform their supply chains, with nearly
**70% accelerating their supply chain modernization** — with a greater emphasis on collaboration
tools and real-time demand forecasting analytics to foresee and mitigate future disruptions.

- Just **28% rate themselves as “leaders”** and as having achieved a high level of digital maturity
across key supply chain operational areas.

- **Half “lack the capabilities** to track end-to-end performance across the supply chain.”

- The **“lack of real-time data** about end-to-end performance of the supply chain” is the **biggest
barrier** to most companies.

- Only **one fifth can “quantify ROI** for its investment in supply chain transformation.”

“Many global companies spent the last thirty-plus years outsourcing everything from back-office
functions like IT to the last mile delivery to customers, and as a result, they don’t have sufficient control and are at a material competitive disadvantage,” said David Doran, vice president, consulting, GEP. “I am not saying to disregard outsourcing — in fact, the disruption to the world’s supply chains is going to get worse, so companies need to accelerate their investment to build resilience, flexibility, visibility and control over their complex, multitier, interdependent global supply chains. But they need to do it right.”

**The Path Forward**

In response to supply shortages, cyberattacks, skyrocketing logistical costs, volatility and inflation,
companies are rapidly transforming their supply chains expressly to reduce business risk and improve
resilience:

● Achieving agility and business reliance is a top supply chain priority for three-quarters of
respondents, along with reducing risks and costs.

● Two-thirds of organizations cite automating operations as a top procurement priority.

● More than half expect supply chain transformation funding to increase this year.

● Analytics, demand sensing, AI and robotic/automation are seeing the biggest funding increases.

● Supply chain ”leaders” invest significantly more in employee training and soft skills to accelerate
their transformation than “followers” and “laggards.”

**ABOUT HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW ANALYTIC SERVICES AND SURVEY METHODOLOGY**

HBR Analytic Services is an independent commercial research unit within HBR, conducting research and comparative analysis. Surveys are conducted with the HBR Advisory Council, HBR's global research panel. Interviews are conducted with senior business executives and subject matter experts from within and beyond the HBR author community. A total of 276 respondents, drawn from the HBR global audience (magazine/newsletter readers, customers, HBR.org users), responded to an email invitation and completed the online survey. The survey audience is global (NA 39%, EMEA 35%, APAC 23% and LATAM 4%), skewing to large 1,000+ employee organizations (98%) as well as executive- and senior-level management (62%). There are a broad number of industries represented, led by manufacturing (22%), technology (19%), health care/pharmaceutical (17%), and energy/utilities (13%). In addition, multiple functional areas are represented from operations/production (20%), general/executive management (18%), IT (14%), logistics/ procurement (9%), and finance/risk (8%).

Global Supply Chains Undergoing Massive Digital Transformation

This Article first appeared in longer form on Procuretech.co here: [https://www.procuretech.co/blogs/procuretechstars-with-jesse-lee/](url) 
 
ProcureTechSTARS with Jesse Lee, CEO and Co-Founder of Brooklyn Vendor Assurance
 
Jesse Lee, CEO and Co-Founder of Brooklyn Vendor Assurance, a SaaS-based platform uniquely focused on the Enterprise Vendor Management discipline.
 
During the conversation, Jesse shared his thoughts on ‘alerting up’, optics, unlimited grit, VendorOps, Allyson Felix and Pilsner…

1. What’s Brooklyn’s mission and your key point of differentiation?

Brooklyn Vendor Assurance’s (BVA) mission is to promote the Procurement, organization and its leadership to be a recognised and valuable strategic partner to the business.
“We will accomplish this by bringing supply chain resilience, sustainability, and value for money to the enterprise.
That is a holistic discipline which we call VendorOps.”
BVA are differentiated in a few very important ways.
We’re the only platform conceived and built to cover all major pillars of that VendorOps role. We are geared and designed to ‘alert up’ rather than be a repository for ‘drill down’. Since that covers all the major aspects of managing the supply chain, it opens up the ability to work pursuant to policy that leadership sets.  Leadership to set the policy — which Brooklyn automates, drives, measures, and audits — for how good governance gets done; and how great best practices across vendor management a.k.a VendorOps get done.
BVA is different as it is built from the very beginning around some lightweight workflow to push out best practices; many are in the box, but the platform’s ready for customer configuration as well. We can digitally profile – scan and understand – all the important supplier contracts using AI and natural language processing, and the platform will profile how a certain policy stacks up against a stack of contracts. For instance, today ‘How are we positioned around anti-slavery – or are we not?’ ‘When do I need to know about all the novation and termination agreements?’ For all these types of questions, BVA helps ask those questions in our engine, which traces through an unlimited number of legal documents to get a head start on answering them. It saves time, mitigates risk, and opens up a new era of control and optics across the entire contract stock, along with the constant change to those agreements.
BVA is unique as it consumes all the important management information around contract performance, risk controls, and other things in a consistent way by alerting teams when there is something they need to know. Vendors report in easy fashion right into the platform, re. their performance against SLAs and key control indicators (KCIs), among other things.

2. What have been the most significant decisions, milestones and innovations in the Brooklyn journey so far? 
 
The most significant decision was to be a broad platform that solves the challenge holistically, rather than be a narrow point solution that goes to the very depths for a narrow use case.
We think the procurement organization always seems to want one solution to solve many challenges today, which will continue supporting them as they move along their own maturity journey. Ubiquitously, leaders see more potential to be a better strategic partner which calls for our type of approach, that’s what we’ve bet big on now rather than on a narrow sharp tool solving one thing only.
I’d say our first major milestone was getting our first customer, Danskse Bank (based in Copenhagen) who liked our approach! In December 2019 they took a chance on a new company with a new concept. Another milestone I’m proud of is a very fine case study that has come out of that organization; among other benefits, they acknowledged achieving more than a 200% productivity gain on average per Vendor Manager across the entire bank.
We are also operating as a multinational, our customer Arm has users from San Francisco to London to Tokyo where we help accelerate their work and ability to extract value.

3. What do you look for in the perfect customer and what do they look for in you?

“Passion. We want a customer that is passionate about accelerating the roadmap of their business and IT organisation.”
They want their company to succeed and want to contribute. That is a step beyond the procurement organization that buys and hands stuff over to the users before moving on to the next one.
Our perfect customer wants to accomplish something transformative in a hurry.
In turn, customers look for different things in us depending on the type of leadership within their organization.
“They all want great optics – a need to see far into their supply base.”
Before Brooklyn, our customers couldn’t see much further than what they accomplished through holding meetings with the top few suppliers.
They absolutely want ease of use, people are tired of learning a new system, so you have to be intuitive and easy to use.
They want automation, what can be accomplish digitally in more ways than I can summarize here, but always tailored around that Vendor Manager role and its leadership.
They also want innovation and more value that they haven’t already thought of with suppliers.
Finally, great customers want to know that they can start where they want, to get where they want, as fast or as slow as they want. So, they want flexibility in terms of how they’re going to adopt BVA and at what speed.

4. What are the foundations of a great team?

In my 25 years of doing this there are 4 main things that make up a great team:
1. Trust (almost love!) within the early team, with everyone remembering we all have a positive intent.
2. Unlimited grit with a huge work ethic – we must work hard!
3. Superhero capability in the very earliest team.
4. “Diversity. A team with a diverse skill set, diverse people and backgrounds makes for a more complete team.”

5. What is the vision for Brooklyn for the future and what will be most important to achieve it? 
 
We want VendorOps to be a household name in this industry. We want BVA to be the work desk for vendor management across the board. It must be almost preposterous to consider working in this job without the assistance of such a thing, and we want to be the best among them all.
I want to hold a thick book of customer and partner stories of transformation, resilience, sustainability, value and results — powered by Brooklyn. In the end, we want the best community, practices and technology to create a powerful flywheel!
To achieve that, we need to have a history of thrilled customers that are willing to tell the world about their journey. As long as we do our end of it, that will help us build a better community and continue learning from those customers to build best practices, and in turn the best product that embeds those.

6. How are you doing good for the planet?

I’m very proud that one of the pillars of our product is sustainability and supply chain ESG.
We enable any customer or partner to measure, track and improve supply chain performance consistent with the United Nations’ 2030 vision and 17 Sustainable Development Goals. We partner with several partnerships including the Positive Impact Commerce Foundation, and have clients like the UK Ministry of Justice, where we drive measurement and business impact around people, planet, profit and society for their big suppliers. One thing we do is sell a product that improves the planet. Secondly, we try to give the absolute best pricing we can to non-profits, public service, and academia, for anything related to this ESG solution.

INSTANT JESSE INSPIRATION

1. Who is your favourite inspirational leader & why ?
Lately I’m super inspired by an entrepreneur: Allyson Felix.
She’s a track and field Olympian and entrepreneur who ran to a bronze and gold medal in Japan…in her own shoes that she designed and built!
She’s already on her way to being the most decorated track and runner in Olympic history, but she slowed down when she got pregnant, and her sponsor Nike wouldn’t protect her as she recovered. They parted ways and she couldn’t find a sponsor. Despite this and against the industry worth billions, she pulled together a few friends and built her own track shoe designed by women for women, exclusively, and then ran in those shoes to bronze and gold in the Olympics.
Today she has a company called Saysh of 10 people, she’s found a great niche, built an awesome product and showed it off herself on the world stage. That is incredible and I’m inspired by that. She then donated those shoes to a non-profit that helps professional female athletes get things they need like childcare or when they’re pregnant and recovering.

2. What is your favourite app or piece of technology ?
My favourite app (other than Brooklyn of course)  is MindManager, because I make mind maps all the time. I love it because it actually helps me think.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. ‘Alert up’ first before ‘drilling down’ into the finer details
2. Accelerate building capabilities to address the new normal working practices post COVID
3. Great B2B customers wants to accomplish transformative change at speed
4. Provide optics, ease of use, automation, innovation, value and flexibility to your SaaS customers
5. Trust (almost love), unlimited grit, superhero capabilities and diversity are cornerstones of a great start-up team
6. Partner up to embrace ESG factors and sustainability to build and sell solutions that help the planet
7. Remember to celebrate successes – whether that be on your own or together!
 



ProcureTechSTARS with Jesse Lee: VendorOps and the Brooklyn Mission

Brooklyn Vendor Assurance

The importance of sustainable supply chains to corporate environmental, social and governance (ESG) strategies has been well established. Suppliers, on average, account for 59% of a business’s impact on five sustainability areas, including the environment, human rights and fair business practice (*source: Building a procurement sustainability programme, Procurement Leaders, 2020*).

Although CPOs understand the sustainability goals they wish to accomplish, the path to successfully meeting these objectives is often obscured by a lack of accurate, up-to-date data and slow progress on the part of suppliers. More than one-third (37% of respondents say they struggle to obtain the data they need to measure supplier sustainability accurately while 35% consider driving process at suppliers to be a significant challenge.

Without knowing where the issues exist and baseline performance data, procurement teams will remain unable to set performance baselines and develop meaningful improvement plans.
Download Procurement Leaders' *Supplier sustainability: From intent to impact*, published in partnership with Interos, to access:

- Insights into CPOs' sustainability aims and the barriers their teams face.
- Procurement Leaders' supplier sustainability framework, which will help teams to promote supplier transparency, set goals and drive progress.
- Leveraging technology to gain greater insight into deeper tiers of the supply chain.

Supplier sustainability: From intent to impact

Risk Management Tools

Sourcing Technology

Responsible Sourcing Tools & Advisory

Interos

Automation offers a rich set of benefits for procurement organisations that are prepared to look beyond simple productivity improvements.

Forward-thinking businesses are already reaping these rewards. Yet, there
is plenty of room to improve by automating both strategic and tactical activities.

Download *Procurement automation: advancing to the future*, published in partnership with WNS Denali, to gain access to the insights into the following areas:
- Understanding best practice in procurement automation and progressing towards 'touchless' sourcing
- Quantifying the value of procurement automation provides the business
- The common features that characterise successful automation initiatives

Procurement automation: advancing to the future

Robotic Process Automation

WNS Denali

Being able to take a view of future input prices – for raw materials, transportation costs, and energy prices, among others – is vital if procurement organisations are to make informed decisions about when to buy, the price they should pay, contract length, and hedging strategies.

Furthermore, businesses are becoming ever-more reliant on procurement functions to deliver this information to inform strategic conversations throughout the organisation.

Download this Procurement Leaders whitepaper, published in association with Mintec, to gain insights into:

- The importance of fact-based purchasing decision-making, which will give buyers greater leverage over their suppliers.
- The business-wide benefits of effective forecasting.
- Real-life examples of organisations that have translated this data into effective insights and delivered greater value for the business.

The future, today: The strategic imperative of better forecasting

Supplier Intelligence

Commodity & Market Intelligence

Spend Data Management & Analytics

Mintec

A large part of a business’s environmental footprint lies not within the business, but in its supply chain. Scope 3 emissions – those in the upstream and downstream value chains – can account for as much as 95% of a business’s overall emissions footprint. This puts procurement at the heart of many organisation's sustainability efforts.

As environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues assume ever-more importance, CPOs and their functions can play a critical role in enabling businesses to meet the demands of the public, shareholders and regulators. 

Download this Procurement Leaders *Roadmap* whitepaper, published in partnership with GEP, to gain insights into the following areas:

- Identifying the organisation’s sustainability priorities and challenges.
- Leveraging supplier relationships and expertise within the supply base to make progress against sustainability objectives.
- Leveraging technology to assess supplier performance against environmental, social and governance criteria.

Sourcing sustainably: Greening the supplier base

Supplier Management and Collaboration Tools

During the first half of 2020, the rapid and unexpected spread of Covid-19 placed immense stress on global supply chains. The rapidly evolving nature of the pandemic required buyers and suppliers to forge closer relations with one another to ensure the survival of their businesses. 

Today, some 18 months on, forward-looking procurement chiefs have recognised this lesson from the pandemic and are looking at ways to maintain this spirit of collaboration to tackle a host of different challenges.

Download *Collaboration and competitive advantage: revolutionising supplier relationships* to gain insights into:
- The varied benefits of optimising collaboration with the supply base.
- The role of innovative technology can play in enabling collaboration.
- Overcoming common challenges to enhance collaboration with the supply base.

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Supplier sustainability: From intent to impact

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Sourcing sustainably: Greening the supplier base

Collaboration and competitive advantage: revolutionising supplier relationships

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