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'We've had a supplier diversity program here at Novartis right from the start. Now we've enhanced it," says Sheri Shafir, senior procurement specialist at Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp (East Hanover, NJ).
Novartis Pharmaceuticals came into being in 1996, a merger of pharma giants Sandoz and Ciba. Shafir is one of four people who work on the company's supplier diversity initiative.
"In the past two years we've expanded our supplier diversity program in terms of budget, attention and number of people involved," says Farryn Melton, VP of strategic sourcing. "We're working on education, training and awareness, and we're putting some metrics in place to track overall effectiveness."
MSDC and more
Novartis Pharmaceuticals is a member of the Minority Supplier Development Council (MSDC) of New York and New Jersey, and now, says Shafir, it's getting more involved in events and section meetings. "We hosted a very successful supplier showcase for the first time in 2004. We had more than 100 corporations and suppliers at our East Hanover campus. There was a very positive buzz from the suppliers."
Also in 2004, the company created www.supplierdiversity.novartis.com, its supplier website, and went online with a new directory tool. The directory work was done by an MBE supplier, Shafir notes.
In 2005 Novartis plans to join the Women Presidents' Educational Organization (WPEO), the New York Metro area affiliate of the Woman's Business Enterprise National Council. The company is also a member of the Pharma Forum, which holds quarterly meetings where area pharmaceutical companies get together to share information on supplier diversity.
To cap it off, Novartis is sponsoring the CEO of NCS Technologies, one of its MBE suppliers, at a minority business academy training program developed by Rutgers, the New Jersey state university. The training was arranged through the MSDC.
Moving ahead
Shafir notes that Novartis' goal "is to improve the program and increase our spending with small and diverse businesses each year. The amount we budgeted for supplier diversity programs increased significantly from 2003 to 2004 and remains significant for 2005. That demonstrates Novartis' commitment to the process."
The company is also making an effort to proactively include minority suppliers when it sends out a request for information, a preliminary step before a supplier gets an invitation to bid. And it encourages its tier 1 suppliers to seek out tier 2 suppliers who are diverse. "It isn't mandatory yet but we encourage it," Shafir says.
"We also work very closely with human resources on diversity," Shafir reports. Melton confirms that "Novartis is a company that values diversity, and our supplier diversity initiative is an important subset of our larger diversity initiative."
NCS Technologies
NCS Technologies (Piscataway, NJ) is an IT consulting firm, typically working for Fortune 500 companies. Its introduction to Novartis came through a pharma-industry consultant who had worked with NCS at another company and was now working for Novartis.
"This individual said, "I know a company that does really good work,' and Novartis said, 'Call them.' It was classic networking," says John Eldridge, who was lead architect and managing director for pharma solutions at NCS when the relationship began.
The first work that NCS did for Novartis was in 2001, in the oncology area. "We worked in business intelligence solutions for them," Eldridge recalls. "We put together a set of reports and graphs of financial results, and made them Web-accessible to the leadership team of the global oncology group."
That was the first contact with Novartis, but NCS had done work for other drug companies, like Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer and Bristol Meyers.
"I went to the MSDC supplier showcase that Novartis sponsored this past spring," Eldridge relates. "I introduced myself to their folks and said, "You know we already do about three million dollars of business a year with you.'
"It really validates the fact that they have excellent companies doing great work who also happen to be minority suppliers."
Diversity sensitivity
"NCS is a $20 million company, relatively small, so to describe anything we have as a supplier diversity program would really be a stretch," says Eldridge. "But we do pay attention to diversity when working with other companies."
He cites a minority-owned recruiting organization and a woman-owned testing company. "They do good work."
In terms of the NCS workforce, "We certainly have a rainbow company here," Eldridge declares. "We have employees who are Chinese, Indian, Asian and all colors of American. The CEO and co-founder, Tony Orrico, is Latino.
"For me, diversity is one of the things that helps makes this an interesting place to work," Eldridge notes. "You draw on a lot of different kinds of people and there's different kinds of networking and bonding and common and uncommon backgrounds."
Work with Novartis
Since the start of the relationship, NCS has completed dozens of projects with Novartis. "We have dedicated teams right now managing multiple Novartis Web properties. We have long-term, annually renewed maintenance contracts. We had to earn that.
"Novartis is our largest pharmaceutical client at this point," Eldridge adds. "They truly treat our relationship like a partnership."
Ulrich Seifert, in the oncology unit at Novartis, worked with NCS on the first project. He notes that NCS was originally sourced because of their excellent project management and technical skills and general desire for a high standard of quality.
But the NCS contribution went farther than that. NCS went beyond the usual customer/supplier relationship by helping to establish a contact between Novartis and a cancer research facility in Pennsylvania.
Making the connection
"One of our customers is the Windber Research Institute in Windber, PA," Eldridge explains. Windber, he says, is a federally funded cancer research facility with a huge universe of data. NCS is partnering with NCR Teradata (Dayton, OH) to build the underlying data warehouse.
Some Windber people expressed an interest in networking with the pharmaceutical industry, so NCS introduced them to Novartis. "We went down to Windber with Ulrich and said, essentially, "You guys ought to talk to each other.'"
A nice relationship
"Right now NCS has every level of employment interfacing positively with Novartis," Eldridge says. "It's a nice, professional corporation-to-corporation relationship.
"It started relatively small, and when they found that we understood what they needed, we were able to grow it from there."
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