The Ask
Re-imagine how the Enterprise Sourcing group does business.
Kroger Enterprise Sourcing group is responsible for finding quality and dependable partners to supply products and services to the Kroger stores. They have struggled with fragmented modernizations happening in silos and needed to unify the vision.
With a mix of issues from legacy systems, challenges with fragmented data and a desire to be able to apply modern technology to how they work, I was responsible for connecting the dots, directing the team and helping drive what the future could look like as well as how we could get there.
How do we build the Sourcing and Procurement Ecosystem of the Future?
We needed to :
- Understand the Enterprise Sourcing business and all of its pieces and parts.
- How can we use technology to minimize costs within vendor management, procurement and sourcing processes.
- How did it connect to other parts of the business - merchandising, stores, finance, buying, accounting.
- Understand core business goals and metrics.
- Understand how vendors / suppliers interact with Kroger and where we can do better.
- Understand our current technology as well as evaluate future technologies.
- Define a plan / roadmap on how what we can do and how.
Strategic Discovery
Interviews with key business partners, stakeholders and users identified:
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- Opportunities for better access to insights and the data needed to create the right insights.
- Needs for efficiency in ways of working.
- Tools they need to do their unique jobs better that the don't have access too or don't exist.
- The unique challenges across sourcing managers, category strategists, buyers and vendors.
Ecosystem Mapping / Service Blueprint
Finding connections and dependencies within processes, data sources as well as key touch-points for internal Kroger associates as well as our Vendors.
- We pulled a team of researchers, designers and service designers together from different teams across the org.
- Each brought their unique understanding of vendor and sourcing relationships within their space.
- We created a comprehensive ecosystem map spanning the org and all places that enterprise sourcing and vendors interacted with or were affected by.
- We identified issues and opportunities that were not front and center to our business partners.
Design thinking and systems workshops
Now that we have a better picture of whats happening, we wanted to talk about what "could be".
- We ran sessions to envision what a connected space may look like and how new technology could unlock capabilities.
- How could it be dynamic, personalized and automated.
- Envisioned how current systems could evolve, flex and mesh with new ideas
- Began to identify low hanging fruit and moonshots as well as their impacts and costs.
- We were able to envision ideas that pushed boundaries with AI, data flexibility and Low Code application development.
- Creating a North Star and a unified vision of what could be.
Data Strategy / Planning
- We identified core data sources across platforms that impact the decisions the business needs to make on a day to day basis.
- With this we matched insights to which data source informed them allowing us to define a data strategy roadmap.
Re-imagination Vision & Outcomes
What does the future look like?
- We continue to identify AI technology partners that will help enable our future vision.
- AI agents for automation of processes
- AI RFP Enablement
- Automation in contract management
- Category evaluation
- Payments and Accounting
- Re-design of the Supplier / Vendor funnel and how we onboard new vendors, manage current and off board.
- Create shared data schemas across business units to drive a shared data profile of vendors.
- Creating an integrated ecosystem plan to support connections between legacy systems, new application designs and modern technologies.
- Utilizing low code application development like Power Apps to help us rapidly build the tools and platforms needed.
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