Discover the future of ethical sourcing as Bill Markmann, president of Counterpoint Consulting, joins us to reveal how the Ready RFX tool is revolutionizing procurement with a malleable platform you can customize to your sustainability needs. This episode promises to elevate your understanding of how businesses can navigate the complexities of modern procurement, ensuring compliance while championing ESG values. Ready RFX isn't just about cutting costs; it's a pathway to sustainable procurement, enabling companies to align their purchasing power with their principles for a greener, more responsible future.
Transitioning from paper to digital has never been more critical, and Bill guides us through this seismic shift in procurement practices. We dissect how ReadyRFX simplifies collaboration and risk management, offering a responsive system that keeps pace with ever-evolving environmental regulations. As we unpack the importance of data in shaping procurement strategies, we also highlight the tool's capacity to tailor sourcing criteria to resonate with a company's mission, ensuring that every purchase decision is a step towards a greater good.
Finally, we look beyond the nuts and bolts of procurement technology to the human side of the equation. Bill and David ponder the vital role procurement leaders play in crafting a legacy of sustainable practices, weighing the risks and rewards of integrating stakeholder interests into supply chain management. With ReadyRFX's customizable and user-friendly platform, we explore how companies can create lasting value that resonates with employees, customers, and the environment. Join us for a compelling look at how strategic sourcing is not just a business function, but a force for positive change in our world.
Learn more about ReadyRFx Here
Discover the future of ethical sourcing as Bill Markmann, president of Counterpoint Consulting, joins us to reveal how the Ready RFX tool is revolutionizing procurement with a malleable platform you can customize to your sustainability needs. This episode promises to elevate your understanding of how businesses can navigate the complexities of modern procurement, ensuring compliance while championing ESG values. Ready RFX isn't just about cutting costs; it's a pathway to sustainable procurement, enabling companies to align their purchasing power with their principles for a greener, more responsible future.
Transitioning from paper to digital has never been more critical, and Bill guides us through this seismic shift in procurement practices. We dissect how ReadyRFX simplifies collaboration and risk management, offering a responsive system that keeps pace with ever-evolving environmental regulations. As we unpack the importance of data in shaping procurement strategies, we also highlight the tool's capacity to tailor sourcing criteria to resonate with a company's mission, ensuring that every purchase decision is a step towards a greater good.
Finally, we look beyond the nuts and bolts of procurement technology to the human side of the equation. Bill and David ponder the vital role procurement leaders play in crafting a legacy of sustainable practices, weighing the risks and rewards of integrating stakeholder interests into supply chain management. With ReadyRFX's customizable and user-friendly platform, we explore how companies can create lasting value that resonates with employees, customers, and the environment. Join us for a compelling look at how strategic sourcing is not just a business function, but a force for positive change in our world.
Learn more about ReadyRFx Here
ESG covers very broad area of topics. There's a lot of lofty goals that we want to head towards, and we can't do that without A them being measurable and B there being a consensus around.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Emerging Hope, a responsibly different podcast sharing conversations about innovation and the good it can create. Welcome to another episode of Emerging Hope, where we explore how innovators are using technology for good. So how does procurement impact your sustainability goals and practices as an organization? Or how should? It is perhaps a better question. One of the questions we get frequently from you, our listeners, especially from startups, is how can businesses embed sustainability into their procurement processes? So our very own David Gogal, reached out to our friends at Counterpoint to answer that very question and share with all of you a tool that could benefit not just your procurement department but your entire organization. Counterpoint has a product called Ready RFX that is used by one of the largest global financial institutions for all their procurement needs. The software is malleable, helping procurement teams gain visibility, maintain compliance standards and increase efficiency. On the show today is their president and founder, bill Markman, to share with us one way software and technology can be leveraged in service of people and planet. Hey, bill.
Speaker 3:Hey, david, good to see you. Thanks for making some time here. Do you want to just introduce yourself for our audience? Yeah, of course.
Speaker 1:So my name is Bill Markman. I'm the president of a company called Counterpoint Consulting. We have been working in the procurement space for several decades now. We focus on bid management. We have a product called Ready RFX. That is a SaaS product for basically managing public solicitations, rfps, rfqs, rfis. I personally am kind of the chief married behind all of this, but David asked me to answer some business questions, so I guess I can do that for you. I'll do my best and yeah, so I guess we can dig more into the solution and all that as we go along. But I'm Bill, that's super helpful.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I appreciate you taking some time. You know the catalyst for this conversation was we were talking about all the conversation that's happening in the market around the role that procurement departments are playing right now as it relates to sustainability and the opportunity to play an even bigger role moving forward. In that. I know that Ready RFX is really built to automate a lot of the procurement processes that are challenging, especially for scaling organizations. Can you talk a little bit about, kind of in light of this changing landscape, how Ready RFX assists procurement teams and how the platform can be used to adapt to this era of holistic value and going kind of beyond just tracking potential like costs as it relates to a bid process? Yeah, of course.
Speaker 1:So obviously there is the aspect of cost management, right so, bringing things online, improving their efficiency, is obviously going to bring monetary value to the organization. So there is that aspect. But I think it goes far beyond that. Right? So when your organization is making purchases, you're obviously dealing with people on the other side of the transaction who are outside of your company, and that involves risk, right, and so one of the other things that we really focus on is risk reduction in your supply chain. Other factors like that, right so.
Speaker 1:Supply chain optimization or resiliency important Using your supplier base, being able to gain more value from that, being able to optimize for sustainability because of that, those are all important things, right, and so when we talk about delivering holistic value, obviously it goes beyond just the cost part, like you mentioned.
Speaker 1:Right so the software is intended basically to enable you not just to hit your KPIs for your procurement function for cost savings. It's also designed to allow you to measure metrics against other things like sustainability, esg factors within your supply chain, making sure that you're not one of the companies who ends up in the news because you're using child labor in your factories, things like that. So I think there's a lot of value that the procurement department, in its modern incarnation, can deliver to the organization that really wasn't a part of their purview before. It's really important to know who you're doing business with. It's really important to know how successful and above board, essentially that supplier has been in the past for you and for other customers, adhering to policy requirements in terms of certifications and things like that. These are all important things right. So it's not just cost, it's not just vendor performance. There's a lot of value that the modern procurement function can bring to the organization and it's really at this point, I think, it's the responsibility of the organization to optimize for those things.
Speaker 3:Yeah, totally, that's a great foundation for today's conversation. I mean, when we think about some of the points that you were just touching on. Right, we know that procurement is often passed with running a process that's aligned with the organizational goals. Right, and so, as we see more organizations setting impact goals, either tied to UN, sdgs or other, just ESG and sustainability metrics, can you talk a little bit about the way ReadyRFX helps organizations?
Speaker 1:Yes, A lot of it, like I was just mentioning a moment ago, it goes back to your vendors and who you're working with, right, obviously, la Jac zwee. You know, when you first think about bringing you know a paper-based process online, you're killing less trees, you're making things more efficient, right? So there's that aspect of things. But really, once you, once you bring this stuff online, you start capturing all this data, right, and you know I'm gonna make the argument that if the data that drives our ability To improve our sustainability and improve, you know, our supply chain behavior, or you know supply chain risk, it's that data enables us to start to see things like not only where am I spending my money, how am I spending my money, who am I spending it with? You know how successful my purchase is based on. You know relative to the requirements that were established based on performance evaluation. After the fact, we can start to marry these pieces up right and combine them with information that we have about our vendors. So it's the organizational performance in terms of you know dollars, but then the organizational performance in terms of hitting sustainability goals that allows us to, you know, gain these actionable insights and evolve the organization itself, not just the procurement department, but start to really affect the behavior of the entire organization and analyze the trends and how these things are changing.
Speaker 1:You know, are the changes that we're making to improve our sustainability Sustainability are they working or are we heading in the right direction? Can we measure this? You know a lot of what you think about. I think you know at least I do when I start to focus on non-monetary factors become more qualitative, right, and I think it's important, you know, in able in order to be able to manage those things right.
Speaker 1:If you're not, if you're not measuring, how can you manage it? So it needs to be brought into the realm of Quantifiable data, right? So when we look at our organization's performance, that quantifiable data needs to be there in order for us to improve and ensure that we're improving the function, and it's our ability to capture the data and Marry it together that really enables us to do this. We don't have, you know, anything like a, you know numerically assigned, you know Social credit score, anything like that. That sounds kind of dystopian, but you have your reputation Right and I mentioned before not taking these sorts of things into consideration as your organization is operating, you know, leaves you open to massive risk, reputation damage, if not financial damage, from you know it's you know a Greegus misbehavior within your organization or supply chain.
Speaker 3:Yeah, totally a minute. You touch. You touch on a few things that I'd like to unpack, the first being I wanted to talk about efficiencies and kind of the tie to sustainability there. But also, just, you talked about some of those, those risk factors, and I would say there's, you know, there's also a ton of opportunity factors as well, which I hope we can get to. But circling back to those efficiencies, something that Ben and our team are our director of impact often talks about is when businesses are More efficient, like just by definition, they're more sustainable. There's less waste there, and so I'm wondering, just because you touched on it, can you share a little bit more about the way ready our effects helps procurement Departments and teams be more efficient and how that might affect their overall kind of sustainability, both as a department and as an organization?
Speaker 1:of course, yeah, so Efficiency within the procurement department is, you know, obviously one of our prime focuses, right, and you know I talked about you know you bring these things online. They used to be paper-based, right. So I ran an RFP 10 five years ago. I was literally receiving mail from my vendors with their proposals. You know, I was literally printing out proposals, multiple copies, for everybody in the evaluation team to take a look at and score them based on that. So obviously there's efficiencies just on, you know, bringing things online. That's you know, we've known that since the 90s. There's nothing new. But there's additional efficiencies that I think can be enabled by um bringing processes online, and we didn't really talk too much about it. But, um, you know, ready, rfx is very much a process driven application, right, like it's, it's intended To make sure that everyone does things the correct way. You know, according to hoyle, every time, um, and there's, I think, two benefits, that kind of spin out of that.
Speaker 1:One, it's not that your procurement officers have to do everything anymore, right, a lot of what Needs to go into an rfp or an rfq Is just as, if not more, appropriate To be determined by the buyer than it is by the procurement officer. Right, procurement officer has no idea what type of widget you need, what color, what size or whatever it needs to be. It's the buyer that does that. And by Kind of optimizing and collecting data from the buyer before it even gets to the procurement officer, you know a lot of that upfront legwork can be done. We call it democratizing procurement, right? So essentially, letting the people who need this stuff Determine what stuff they need, bring it back to the procurement officer only when Things need to be actually looked at, signed off on, approved, all those sorts of things.
Speaker 1:So, from just from the perspective of the efficiency of the procurement function itself, right, whether it's one person or a hundred people, you know we're taking a lot off their plate and allowing them to do the actually important part of their job. So I think there's certainly that. And then, in terms of you know efficiencies that you gain outside of just that, you know the interaction with your vendors, the interaction between team members, all of that is also, you know, optimized. And and because you're not, you know, going out to email to search for something, I'm fine, something, because you know you don't have to like print out proposals and things like that, to your point about you know just the business operating more efficiently and being more sustainable. From that standpoint, you know, a procurement solution like ready our effects, you know, certainly enables those sorts of efficiencies that provide sustainability. So so to your point, I mean, it's it, the efficiency delivered by the software is, in a very real sense, improving the sustainability of the procurement function.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, that makes a lot of.
Speaker 3:That makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 3:I think that when you were talking about how that ties to Some of the risk like mitigating factors, if you will, there there seems to be some obvious ones right, but with the shifting landscape that we're seeing specifically around kind of Carbon taxes and then fines related to not following kind of new regulations that are rolling out it seems like there's even more kind of risk factors that procurement departments are going to need to be paying attention to and also Like the space seems to be evolving really, really quickly. So I'm wondering just for those, for those teams listening, or those for those you know, those folks listening that maybe are like just getting started on this journey, understand kind of what's happening in the space, but haven't really started to think about how they're, they're setting a plan to measure here. Can you talk a little bit about the way ready our effects would help them as they think about kind of their kind of bid management process and supply chain and mitigating some of the the risk associated with Unexpected carbon taxes or or kind of fines related to not following protocol?
Speaker 1:right. So you know we talked a little bit about risk mitigation and that comes to play, you know, when you're looking at putting into place a procurement or solicitation management solution, right? One of the things that is a difficult with risk management is predicting the future, right? Obviously, we can't do that perfectly. We have some idea of things that are coming down the pike in terms of whether it's a social trend or whether it's an actual, you know, law or regulation that we need to adhere to things like that.
Speaker 1:One of the Kind of foundational principles behind ready our effects is that it's not a static system I mentioned. It's built on top of a business process platform. Essentially, that lets us very readily Change the way that the application works to meet criteria, like you know, laws, regulations, those sorts of things. It's it's a very malleable process. What we aim to do is make sure, like I said, the procurements are executed the same way every time, so you don't necessarily need to know the intricacies of the procurement process to do it right and to follow all the rules. Well, the questions, you know, becomes you know what happens when I need to start tracking my carbon emissions? You know If we're, you know, entered into a carbon. You know Market, or you have to pay a carbon tax or what have you. What happens when ESG regulations get rolled into your procurement processes? Those are the sorts of things that you need to future-proof against by delivering a solution that can adapt to those changes.
Speaker 1:That can Change process or change business rules to match the evolving landscape is a really important consideration.
Speaker 1:You don't want to be stuck waiting for the vendor to release the next version to fix that thing. You know whether it's the Processes that we ship for an RFP don't match up exactly with your RFP, or if you're now subject to new regulations, the application is meant to evolve along with you, along with the regulations that you would need to adhere to. This is one of the reasons why we really view it as a fit for regulated markets. Right, these are Organizations that have to deal with very stringent procurement rules that happen the same way every time. I don't know if you ever work with the DOD, but if you ever read the FAR, which is essentially the set of rules that you need to adhere to when you're selling to the federal government, you're not gonna hit all of them manually. Right, you need something there to tell you this is against the procurement process. Right, we need to do X or need to do Y, and putting that in place is a huge part of risk management and future-proofing.
Speaker 2:I think there's other.
Speaker 1:There's other pieces to consider to you know, especially trust in the system right. By bringing all of the you know the manner in which the procurements are performed into a system that can guarantee that the rules are being followed, does a lot to increase the trust on two different sides, where it increases the trust amongst your stakeholders and buyers and increases your trust with vendors. One of the things that we see a lot in you know the government space primarily, is that you know there's a solicitation, solicitation. Somebody issues that may have an agency issues in RFP, awards it For one reason or another. One or more vendors who lost say Protesting right, you didn't do that, right, it's essentially pulls you into it's not a lawsuit but, you know, essentially pulls you into a legal proceeding and it becomes up to the agency that did the procurement to justify the way that they did Right. So how do you manage that risk? Well, again, it's by ensuring that you did it the same way as you've done every other procurement and follow the same rules that you follow for every other procurement, and those rules are transparently provided to all of the parties involved.
Speaker 1:Second piece of that is complete audit ability Right. So risk management through audit ability is important too. I can give you a list of every person that logged in and downloaded the Solicitation. I can give you a list of every action that was taken. I can give you a list of every piece of data that was changed. This is all incredibly important in terms of risk management because after the fact, it gives you, you know, that paper trail that says I did this according to the way that it was supposed to be done. So if you're protesting on those grounds, we can throw that out immediately. Right, and that reduces a ton of overhead. You know, especially, like I said, we see that a lot in government procurements, but Happens elsewhere also.
Speaker 1:And just, transparency in your supply chain, right. So who is your organization doing business with? Right, how, how do I trust that you are doing business with people that I also would trust? And having the ability to to provide that transparency into your supply chain and having the ability to Certify, essentially, that your suppliers are meeting the same criteria that you've set out for yourself, you know, is also really important and that trust, you know I mentioned reputation before, right, that's essentially what that gets back to.
Speaker 1:It's it's, it's not just that you're protecting your reputation from taking a hit if you did something bad, right. You're also putting your, your reputation out there and saying, look, these are the values that my organization is very much tied to and is committed to. These are the other third parties that we deal with, and we ensure that we don't deal with third parties that don't follow those same values as we do. And so it's trust All across the board, right. So I mean it's, it's radical transparency, it's it's putting your cards on the table, essentially, and saying, yeah, this, this is our goal. Right, this is what we plan to do for sustainability. These are the parties that we deal with. We're making sure that they have the same goals.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 3:I know anyone who's been like a long time listener of Responsibly different Podcast knows our guests often talk about supply chain Transparency and, knowing that many people listening to this conversation might be On an impact team or in the in a marketing department, can you talk a little bit about the ways in which your your platform would help other other kind of organizational services, other kind of organizational stakeholders get visibility into that transparency to use that for kind of like external Communications?
Speaker 3:I think one of the things that we right we talk about again on this podcast a lot is like hey, customers, both in the B2B side as well as in the in the consumer market, like they care and they want, they want to, they want to know who are you working with, what is your supply chain look like. But if you're an organization that that currently doesn't have, you know a platform that that gives that visibility and it's kind of a Siloed process that can be challenging. So can you talk a little bit about that in ways in which this you know ready, our effects, can give more, more visibility to multiple stakeholders, not just those.
Speaker 1:Yeah of course.
Speaker 1:So I think we, very early on in the conversation, touched on data. Right? We at this point you could say we have more data than we know what to do with. Right? And that's a challenge for a lot of organizations out there. Right? So your procurement office is generating a lot of data. You're probably capturing it in some way. It might be in spreadsheets, it might be in enterprise applications, it might be in your ERP system, but one of the things that I think is really incumbent on the procurement department is to figure out how to take that data and make it digestible for the rest of the organization. Right? So it's not just using a solution like ReadyRFX allows you to capture that procurement data. We also employed advanced analytics and things like that to start to understand across the organization, right? So it's not just that the procurement department starts to understand how well they're functioning. It's that we start to be able to push out information about our procurement function to other stakeholders in the organization, to our supply chain, to our customers, right? Obviously, there's different pieces of information that are relevant to all of those different groups, but in the end, we have the data at this point to give them how well we're tracking against what our sustainability goals are Right, actual, quantifiable metrics against those things. Essentially and I touched on this earlier being able to marry up the data that we've captured about our goals what we're tracking towards and the procurement information that we've captured that's purely financial and operational. Being able to marry those two things up gives us insights that we didn't previously have and, most importantly, makes it so that the other stakeholders primarily the folks above us in the org ladder or the org chart can see what's going on. Are we tracking towards our ESG and sustainability goals? Are we making changes that can allow us to track towards those things?
Speaker 1:I used the term radical transparency. It's something that's very important. Modern analytics, the ability to take all of that data and crunch it in ways that we weren't crunching it before is one of the things that enables us to not just deliver data. Anybody can deliver data. I can write queries all day long and send you tables and information. I can send you spreadsheets. It's actually digesting that information down into relevant, digestible, quantifiable fact metrics that we can point to and say our goal is X and we've hit X plus whatever, or we're gonna hit 90% of X or whatever that happens to be, if we can't track against that and our management can't track against that, we don't have any way of optimizing for it. I think a lot of the systems that we deal with and the data that we capture at this point is voluminous enough to give us the ability to gain those sorts of insights.
Speaker 3:That's really helpful because, again, I think a lot of folks listening are going to be coming into this conversation. They're in charge of their organizations, like B Corp, to figure out how do they have access need. Or maybe they are in charge of preparing the organization's impact report. They're being tasked with that data visualization side of it and turning it into internal and external comms by just getting their finger on it in a really simple and easy way. Not that I want to take too far of a step back, but also understanding that everybody is going to be coming to this conversation from a different understanding of procurement. This is not a podcast necessarily for procurement professionals. Can you just talk a little bit about this from a broad perspective the way your platform helps procurement teams adjust sourcing criteria to include organizational goals around environmental, social governance or sustainability, and how that can be factored into purchasing decisions to create a more purposeful approach to supplier selection?
Speaker 1:I think it would make sense to give a little bit of an overview about ReadyRFX and just kind of what it is and how we position it. We've been saying more procurement over and over when ReadyRFX kind of fits into. That is what we call public solicitation management, the president of consulting company. A lot of the work that we get we get by responding to RFPs, rfqs, what have you, that are issued by companies, government agencies and GEOs. When I talk about ReadyRFX specifically, I'm talking about the process that it automates, which is from the planning of creating an RFP or an RFQ or an RFI through its advertisement, through the actual issuing of the solicitation, to gathering responses from the vendors, creating an internal team to score those, scoring the proposals, negotiating an award, recommending the award and then, several places throughout that process, essentially approving something. An advertisement, before it gets published, needs to be approved. An obvious question is how does that enable us to kind of support those, whether it's an impact team or sustainability team or what have you, and then how can we help the organization as a whole kind of adjust to how the whole market's kind of evolving and how procurement in general is evolving? So to address the question basically of how we make sure, in the actual solicitation process and the selection and award process, that we're dealing with vendors who can hit our goals or align with our values comes down to a couple different things. So first, obviously, when you're creating an RFP, there's going to be evaluation criteria of some sort, right? How are you going to score these proposals? I mentioned essentially that there's a dedicated team that's formed for a solicitation to essentially score the proposals and they're given a list of evaluation criteria in order to do that. And what the system does is it suggests, based on the type of procurement, what the questions or evaluation criteria should be that the vendors need to respond to. And, as, like we've been talking about, as the market evolves and we start to focus on additional items that are important for our functioning, our efficiency, our reputation, all those sorts of things, it becomes important to adjust what those evaluation criteria are and what evaluation criteria are suggested in order to line up with our goals. So when somebody submitting a proposal, it's forefront in the minds of the evaluators that they also need to be adhering to these sustainability goals and not just delivering on some technical requirement, so making it an important part of actually the selection of an awardee when you're doing a solicitation becomes very important, just as if not, I would say. More important is, after the fact, vendor performance evaluation. And we've left vendor management as a whole thing out of this.
Speaker 1:We've been talking about vendor management in the context of solicitations and your supply chain. Vendor performance on contracts becomes very important. So once you've selected and awarded a particular vendor for some piece of work or for some purchase, obviously there is a buyer involved within the organization and obviously they're going to be in a place to give you feedback on how that vendor performed. And one of the things that ReadyRFX enables is the ability to capture post-award information about the vendor how they performed, how they hit the criteria. Was their performance in line with what our expectations were in terms of the way that they do business? Are they hitting the same goals that we've laid out for them for sustainability, esg, all those kinds of factors. And the reason that that's important is because that then enables you in future solicitations to know okay, I have my set of vendors who might be appropriate for this, but these guys didn't do a good job last time we hired them, and incorporating that back into your selection of future vendors optimizes, over time, the body of vendors that you're doing business with to align with your corporate goals. So I think that's really important.
Speaker 1:I think there's another aspect that is important from the perspective of making sure that if you have an impact team in your organization or you have a group responsible for sustainability or whatever needs to be represented on a procurement team just like you have an evaluation team who actually scores proposals and things like that there's the procurement team that's running the actual end-to-end for the procurement, which is to say, generally some are represented from the procurement office, generally some buyer elsewhere within the organization, so approvers that are appropriate for that spending level and department or material group or whatever however the purchase is being classified. I think it also becomes important to incorporate those additional you know whether it's sustainability team member or whether it's, you know even an impact team who are responsible for making sure that the organization is evolving in the ways that we were talking about before, including them on the procurement team itself, right? So when you're running a solicitation, it's not necessarily that it should be up to the procurement team itself to say you know these vendors match or these vendors don't. It's just as important to have steps in the process where that sustainment team or that impact team is explicitly involved. So typically what happens? You know you're running a procurement.
Speaker 1:You have to create an advertisement that's going to get issued to your community of vendors. That advertisement, before it gets published, needs to be reviewed by somebody for a whole different set of criteria, to make sure. Again, you know in some way damaging your reputation by issuing this advertisement. In that same way, you know, once we've established what the actual parameters of the work or materials that are being purchased are going to be, you know what are the requirements that go hand in hand with that, along with our sustainability goals. And it's, like I said before, because you know these processes are malleable and they're made to evolve over time to match your needs.
Speaker 1:You can incorporate anywhere along the line and, like I said it probably would be, after the requirements for the RFP or RFQ have been finalized, have the sustainment team come in or the impact team come in and they can also, you know, participate in the approval processes.
Speaker 1:Or, you know, when you have a gated review, they could have a sign off that says you know the plan for this procurement doesn't necessarily meet our goals in terms of, you know, putting in place controls that make sure that our sustainability goals you know the requirements here aren't in line, and if you don't do that up front and include, you know, your sustainability folks or your impact team up front, then you're going to wait until far too late in the process for it to be a cheap fix right and you have to rewind the procurement potentially. And once you do that, then now you've started to get outside the bounds of how it was supposed to be done right, and it's by incorporating those sorts of team numbers within the procurement team. Now you can start to address those challenges further up in the process. And if you go off the rails in that regard, it becomes less costly of a mistake and it can be rectified.
Speaker 3:No, that's really, really helpful. I you know it sounds like whether or not it's ready, our effects or another platform like something that allows collaboration between different teams early on in the process critical if you know we're going to realize this value. In that same vein, it does seem like the market has agreed that there's importance of procurement's expanded role going beyond stakeholder value, but still most of the metrics that are being reported on are focused on cost-saving metrics and things like that. Can you talk a little bit about the way your platform would broaden the scope and the spectrum of measurable impacts, in particular around mitigating some of the risks, around not falling through with some of those sustainability measures or ESG measures? Is that something you're able to speak to a little bit?
Speaker 1:A little bit More in general. I mentioned earlier that there's a huge portion of what we focus on is risk mitigation. I think when you start looking at, well, really, there's two aspects to this. There's risk mitigation, but then there's also just operating your organization in a way that aligns with your values In terms of risk mitigation. If you're not taking these things into consideration, if you're not incorporating these factors into the way that you're running your procurements, you're opening up your organization to massive risks.
Speaker 1:I mentioned reputational damage before, but that's not the only potential risk. If you're dealing with supply chain vendors, or if you have people in your supply chain and they're not necessarily operating again according to the values that you have, or, even worse, sidestepping regulations or laws or what have you, potentially there could become a very significant financial burden imposed on you. It's not just a reputational thing. There is also to the stakeholder, potentially a hit to the bottom line if you're not addressing these things up front. You mentioned some of the regulations that have been coming about in the EU. We certainly expect to see these things hit stateside. It's going to become more and more important to make sure that in your supply chain, you're addressing these concerns. It goes beyond just reputation. It goes beyond some of what I was talking about before and it actually can go back into stakeholder monetary value.
Speaker 1:Just to address a little bit about how RFX enables us to address some of the considerations that we've been talking about. I've used the word malleable several times. What really we ship the product with are suggested best practices. How do you run your RFPs? How do you run your RFQs, rfis, sole source procurements. We ship out of the box ready to do those things according to best practices that we've seen in the industry academic research, those sorts of things. It really addresses those problems around how to efficiently run a procurement. It doesn't necessarily give you the ability to make it so that you can add additional steps without the underlying platform that the product is built on. We build on top of what we call in the industry a low-code platform. Essentially, by looking at a picture of the procurement process and dragging things around, you can add steps.
Speaker 1:If you need a review somewhere within the procurement process, maybe before it's published and distributed to your vendors, your ESG team needs to come in and review things. The process can be changed in that way. If there's pieces of data that aren't on forms, those fields can be added. We tried to make every piece of the product as malleable as possible. Really, what that enables us in the context of this conversation, enables us to do is to start to take those sorts of things into consideration, if we haven't already. If there's some KPIs for your vendors that you're trying to track and we didn't think of that out of the box, but your organization needs it the platform is malleable enough to add that data.
Speaker 1:There's going to be things that are specific to your organization that aren't necessarily specific across the board. When we talk about sustainability, it's the business rules, it's the underlying processes themselves, it's the screens that your users interact with, it's the reports that you're reporting on your data, all of those things. Because of the flexibility of ReadyRFX, we're able to introduce those and drive by changing the software. Essentially, you're modifying the software, drive our organization towards hitting the goals that we're trying to hit, without being able to add those sorts of checks, without being able to change our business rules. You really have a hard time doing that. If you've worked with one of the big procurement vendors, you're familiar with the user experience and typically you're expected to change the way that you do things to do things the way that they do things, which essentially means that your impact team is sitting there waiting for the software vendor to make changes. Not ideal.
Speaker 1:We talk a little bit more about this. There's obviously the people aspect of it also In a number of different ways. Like I said before, sustainability isn't just about the environment. It's not just about some of the harder to quantify considerations. It's also about things like your users using this on a daily basis. How efficient are they? What are the points? Perhaps Does using your software make them want to come to work in the morning? Probably more to the point, does it make them not want to come to work in the morning? That's an important point. User experience of the application. We've again followed the best practices out there, but have the ability to change if required or as standards evolve. Those sorts of things. Those are the sorts of future-proofing that RFX enables us to address, as it's been adopted for running solicitations, but it can be used in order to more closely align your organization with your organization's long-term goal.
Speaker 3:That makes a lot of sense. I appreciate you taking the time to dive in there. It does make me think about where this is all going. I'm going to put you on the hot seat just for a minute. Considering this conversation that we just had about the expanding purpose of procurement, how do you see procurement leaders leveraging their position and, frankly, platforms like yours to leave a lasting legacy, both in terms of sustainability as well as a holistic value creation?
Speaker 1:I think it's interesting where sustainability folks and procurement folks fall within the organization.
Speaker 1:They're inextricably tied to each other.
Speaker 1:In order for our organizations to evolve and line up with these goals that are becoming more and more apparent that we should be adhering to, the sustainability function very much needs to be tied to the procurement function.
Speaker 1:It's incumbent upon us as somebody who's providing the tools that your procurement folks are using on a daily basis to enable them to drive towards those goals and enable them to work with sustainability folks in order to make sure that the procurement office is doing what it can to support the goal of the organization in terms of its impact team, in terms of its sustainability team, whatever metrics you're tracking towards, whatever structures you've put in place in terms of manpower to make sure that you're driving towards those things.
Speaker 1:There is an inextricable link between the purchasing that your organization does, your organization's supply chain, and those goals. As somebody who looks at this from the technology side of things, I view it as something that is incumbent upon me and is incumbent upon our organization to deliver a product that can enable that, that can help the procurement function line up with the organization's goals and improve the organization's performance in terms of those goals. If we're not tracking towards those goals, at the very least be able to provide the insights through analytics that can tell us why we're not or tell us how we can make changes so that we do.
Speaker 3:I wonder, Bill, if somebody's been listening to this conversation and they're asking themselves like, hey, I'd like to get more involved in the procurement function at my organization, or I want to better understand the type of tools and systems that we have to know if we're able to leverage some of the things that we've talked about. Do you have any kind of tips or suggestions on what people can bring to their internal organization to better unpack this with their teams?
Speaker 1:Yeah, of course. Obviously, there's an endless set of tools out there that people are using. I don't want to talk bad about any of those, so I won't. It's a conversation that really needs to be brought up in a very broad way within the organization. There's a lot of people in most organizations that might have a vested interest in saying I don't want anything to do with this, I don't know how it's going to affect my performance. I don't know how it's going to affect my bottom line, rather not deal with it From the organization standpoint. I don't think that that's a position that you can hold these days.
Speaker 1:Because of that, we need to be able to make sure that our organizations are evolving in such a way that the goals that we set for ourselves in order to do business according to our values are something that we can achieve and something that we can work towards. In the end, it really comes down to setting what those values are. How do you achieve that? You can't achieve it until you've decided, as an organization, we want to improve our performance here. That could be any metric that you pick. Sustainability covers a very broad area of topics. Esg covers a very broad area of topics. There's a lot of lofty goals that we want to head towards. We can't do that without A them being measurable and B there being a consensus around them In terms of bringing that into the organization. It's a conversation that needs to be had pretty broadly and needs to be had at the top levels.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of Emerging Hope. As always, we have links in the show notes for you to learn more about our guests today and their offerings, as well as any relevant links to the content we covered. If you're enjoying this episode of Emerging Hope on the Responsibly Different podcast, let us know and we'll keep them coming. Simply leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts for a responsibly different and share with us what you liked most so that we can continue to bring you more of it. It also helps more folks like yourself find this content, which helps us continue to produce it for you. We appreciate you. Till next time, be responsibly different. This content is made possible by Dear Go Collective, a media consultancy on a mission to turn consumers into activists, one purchase at a time. To learn more about Dear Go Collective, visit the link in your show notes. This episode was produced by Brittany Angelo and yours truly, ben Marine. Music was licensed from B Corp Certified Marmoset Music. To access more resources, visit responsiblydifferentcom.