‘Our supplier diversity team is aligned with several strategic sourcing categories, and I manage the category of IT for supplier diversity," says Kathy Benn, VP of supplier diversity at Cardinal Health (Dublin, OH). "It's a significant area of investment for Cardinal Health," she adds.
Cardinal is a leading distributor of pharmaceutical and medical/surgical products and services and other supply-chain services for the huge healthcare industry. "Technology is very important to our business and we've found it a great category for diversity inclusion," Benn explains.
"If you look at Cardinal Health broadly, the clinical technology services segment is all about leveraging technology and supply-chain expertise to improve the safety and productivity of healthcare. Technology is also important to the efficiency of our core distribution businesses.
"If a small supplier can't trade electronically with us it's a problem for both of us," Benn explains. "So we take the time to help them get EDI-literate so they can trade successfully with Cardinal Health and other large companies they do business with."
Helping the little guys
Benn's previous job was VP of marketing, "managing our relationships with large medical/surgical suppliers." But the company needed to start connecting with small-, women-, minority- and veteran-owned companies, to meet its subcontracting goals with the federal government and to help other key customers increase their second-tier diversity spend.
"So I was asked to take my supply- chain knowledge and use it to help us grow our commerce with diverse suppliers," Benn says. About five years ago she helped launch the supplier diversity program at Cardinal Health.
"The first step was to identify our current diverse suppliers, and then to understand what we purchased across Cardinal Health, so we could begin the process of finding current suppliers that could meet our emerging sourcing and procurement requirements."
The second step was to become actively involved in organizations that could help Cardinal Health extend its relationships with diverse suppliers. The company joined NMSDC, became active in the Women's Business Development Center (WBDC, Chicago, IL) and the South Central Ohio Minority Business Council (SCOMBC). "We also began attending WBENC shows and other events that could help us connect with diverse companies and learn best practices from other corporations."
Huge educational effort
"It was a huge educational effort to help Cardinal Health's customer-facing and procurement organizations, across the company, understand that supplier diversity would be an important and emerging requirement for our customer base," Benn recalls. "We had to build relationships with our procurement people and help them include diversity spend goals in their own objectives. And we had to consult with all our business segments about their direct and indirect sourcing needs, so we could help them work with diverse suppliers to meet those goals."
They also asked their strategic business-partner suppliers, HP, IBM and Microsoft, for example, to offer first-tier supplier diversity solutions.
A lot of Cardinal Health's supplier diversity success has been on the hardware procurement side, as well as in staff augmentation, Ben notes. "If we find a strong, flexible, diverse small technology company that we can leverage across our whole enterprise, all the better."
Mentor/protégé leverages resources
Cardinal Health has a formal mentor/protégé program, Benn notes. "We try to identify companies that are positioned for growth but could use a little lift." Among the mentees have been two formal Department of Defense protégé companies.
Cardinal offers developmental assistance like lean Six Sigma training and technology business reviews. It offers the mentees access to senior sales people, and to quality-assurance folks to learn about ISO certification. "We try to leverage our resources so the small business can learn and improve its performance without having to pay an outside consultant," Benn says.
KellyMitchell finds IT pros
Cardinal Health operates a centralized enterprise IT organization, and Benn's supplier diversity team works with both IT and the strategic sourcing group to support supplier diversity requirements. On the staff augmentation side, when a Cardinal Health IT project manager submits a job requirement, it goes out to all the IT companies on the current preferred vendor list, and they have several days to submit likely resumes.
One of the companies responding will be KellyMitchell (St. Louis, MO), "an up-and-coming WBE that we're really pleased with," Benn says. The company is WBENC certified and its CEO, Cassandra Sanford, is active in the WBDC.
KellyMitchell has been recognized by Inc. magazine as one of the top 500 fastest growing private U.S. companies, and the St. Louis Business Journal calls it the largest IT consulting company in the area. It's on Cardinal Health's preferred vendor list for IT staff augmentation.
"When we need permanent staff or temporary IT pros in our three big data centers, Chicago, Dublin, OH and San Diego, CA, KellyMitchell is one of the companies that consistently connects us with resources that match our requirements," Benn says.
Technology consulting/staff augmentation
Cassandra Sanford, CEO of Kelly-Mitchell, notes that in addition to IT the firm does engineering staff augmentation. "We're a technology consulting firm whose specialty is in staff augmentation," she explains. Sometimes a client will need two or three tech pros, sometimes it might be fifty or sixty.
"They will be fulltime employees of KellyMitchell, but they actually work onsite at our clients' locations," Sanford explains.
Typically, Sanford says, there is no "in-between time" on the technology side. "We have a lot of people that we move from one client to another client or a third client depending on the work they need done. Generally our people will go in and stay for perhaps an eighteen-month assignment. As they're hitting the seventeenth month, we're focusing on finding them another position that starts right after that."
Nine-year history
KellyMitchell started in 1998. "Three of us worked at Boeing on staff augmentation needs for government projects in IT, engineering and aircraft," Sanford recalls. "Then Boeing started talking about outsourcing anything that wasn't in their core competency, so we decided to start a new company to handle the work.
"Actually," Sanford adds with a smile, "they didn't spin our area off until years later. But rumors go around and we were young and naive, and that's what we thought made sense at the time.
"I saw a lot of future in the IT side, and my two partners were on the engineering side. It's a simple sort of business, very much relationship-focused, and I really enjoy doing it." She is the CEO and majority owner; Mark LoCigno is president, and Rebecca Boyer is a third, minority partner.
Quality makes the difference
"We're in a heavily saturated industry with a lot of competition," Sanford says. "Our differentiating factor is our understanding that when companies in the industry need a volume of quality technologists, they need them very quickly.
"We're full service and we support about fifteen companies, the smallest being a Fortune 500. We pride ourselves on servicing any IT need that might possibly come down the pipeline."
So when a client sends a requisition to be filled within forty-eight hours, "We have a quality candidate waiting."
KellyMitchell's internal staff numbers about thirty, out of a total near 400 employees. It's no surprise that recruiters, continually working to bring in new technical folks, make up the largest segment of the internal staff.
Nationwide coverage
The company started in and around St. Louis, but it picked up larger clients with facilities throughout the U.S., and now it has consultants in twenty-seven states.
"I try to keep our brick and mortar down as much as possible," Sanford explains. "But in addition to our St. Louis HQ we have satellites in Chicago, IL; Minneapolis, MN; San Ram—n, CA and Newark, NJ. Everywhere else we have to travel to."
Certification brings opportunities
WBENC certification, along with Sanford's involvement in the WBDC, "have really opened doors for us," she says.
In fact, the relationship with Cardinal Health began at the WBDC annual conference in 2003. It was the first time KellyMitchell attended.
Kathy Benn and her team had a booth, and "I went up and introduced KellyMitchell and our services," Sanford says. "It was an opportunity to put KellyMitchell on the map with them."
Results took some time in coming. It wasn't until late in 2006 that Sanford officially landed a contract and started doing business with Cardinal Health.
Sanford doesn't think that's surprising. "It's a timing issue," she says. "When we met them they had just closed an RFP for IT services so we needed to wait for the next one to open up. In staff augmentation that's generally a two- or three-year cycle.
"Later I had the opportunity to actually meet the Cardinal IT procurement team. I know they took a long shot on us, but we won the business. We've been working with them since the third quarter of last year and we won a place on their 'preferred vendor' list based on our performance. We're really excited, and we can't wait to continue to exceed their expectations!
"When a company the size of Cardinal Health partners with a WBE like us it causes a lot of other corporations to take notice. It's obvious that Cardinal Health is committed to supplier diversity, and other companies are thinking, "Maybe we should investigate a little and find out more about KellyMitchell.' It's really helped put us on the map nationally."
First tier responsibilities
As a first-tier supplier to Cardinal Health, Sanford's company adds its own quota of supplier diversity. "Every year it's a little different from segment to segment: WBE, MBE, VBE and disabilities. But overall we're always above 20 percent in using small and diverse organizations," Sanford says.
"We have a reporting system and we let all our clients know we have our own supplier diversity program in place. Then if it's something that can help them as well, that's great."
When it comes to workforce diversity, "It's almost a little crazy," Sanford notes with pride. "Overall probably 35 to 40 percent of our staff are women. And we are fortunate that being in so many states we can find candidates of all ethnic backgrounds with strong skill sets.
"We believe it's important for diverse companies to focus on diversity both internally and externally," Sanford concludes.
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