Nestlé USA (Glendale, CA) is part of international food giant Nestlé S.A. (Vevey, Switzerland). The company's slogan is "good food, good life," and its products are found in nearly every food and beverage category.
Karen Blackwell manages supplier development and diversity at Nestlé USA. The company's buyers, she says, are clearly "the people who have the most opportunity to make a difference in supplier diversity," but she's part of that solution, too, with supplier diversity as her sole responsibility.
"My role is to help the buyers implement supplier diversity strategies," she says. "I help them identify diverse companies and identify opportunities for bringing them in. We sit down together and work out a strategy to make it happen."
The company accepts most third-party certifications, including WBENC and NMSDC, and helps small businesses understand the benefits of registering with the U.S. Small Business Administration.
Reengineering the program
Nestlé's supplier diversity program has been reengineered over the past two years, and "We're seeing plenty of progress," Blackwell says. "Diverse suppliers are being added to the vendor base across buying categories, and are becoming successful bidders.
"We recognize that to have a strong supply base you have to identify the best talent out there. So we're increasing our awareness of qualified diverse suppliers, and the role they can play in making our supply chains strong and viable.
"Once the value of diversity in the supply chain is understood, everybody in the purchasing environment works to maximize the benefits for the company. We want to have a strong platform, including second tiering, and we're looking for ways to work with our strategic suppliers."
Blackwell has been with the company just two years. "The program was started in 2000 but put on hiatus while the company formulated its combined business services unit to handle strategic sourcing," she explains. "That turned out to be perfect timing. I left the mayor's office in the city of LA and came here." She had been doing similar work, administering the city's minority business program as assistant deputy mayor.
"This is a great fit," she says.
M&L Power works for Nestlé in NJ
Milind Bagle, CEO, notes that MBE M&L Power (Old Bridge, NJ, mlpower.com) has been in business for twenty-five years. It's a niche company that performs testing and repair of electric power distribution systems in large industrial and commercial facilities, including shutdown work and twenty-four-hour emergency service. M&L is one of just a few dozen companies in the U.S. certified through the International Electrical Testing Association to do this kind of work.
One of M&L's regular customers is Nestlé's Freehold, NJ beverage manufacturing facility. "We've been working with this plant on a support and annual testing basis since 1993," Bagle says.
The association began with a cold call by Bagle himself. "The plant became one of my first clients. We initially bid on a project to do switchgear maintenance and testing," he says.
Starting M&L
Bagle's father Steve founded the family-owned business in 1982, and Milind became CEO at the beginning of this year. He had worked in the company almost from the beginning. "I have an associates degree in engineering from Middlesex County College (Edison, NJ), but most of my technical know-how was acquired in the field," he says.
The family comes from India, where the elder Bagle was a technician with Air India. General Electric (GE, Schenectady, NY) built turbine engines for the airline's Boeing aircraft, and Steve Bagle worked on the engines. He was asked to move to the U.S. to work out of GE's base HQ.
"That's how he came to this country, and he stayed with GE until he left to start his own company," Bagle recounts.
Reliability based
From its mid-Jersey HQ, M&L supports mainly New Jersey facilities. "Because we're relatively local we can come over and take care of problems very quickly. And because we're in a densely populated part of the nation we do fine working out of one office," Bagle explains. "I can go ten miles from my office and literally find 500 companies that need our service."
M&L has a dozen fulltime people in the office and out in the field, taking care of inspections and equipment testing that does not require shutdown. "It's not a big organization because of the niche work we do," Bagle says. "Most of the planned shutdown work is done on weekends, and at those times we can bring in two dozen of our regular contract people."
Identifying opportunities
When Steve Bagle started the company, his son reminisces, "He used to go knock on the doors of likely industrial plants, tell them who he was and offer his services.
"I'm the next generation and I know we're in an age where corporate culture is very complex. If I know what corporate doors to knock on that helps me. So we go to regional NMSDC conferences to make contacts, and of course some local government facilities have their own outreach programs."
As Nestlé's Blackwell notes, "Sometimes the tough part is just understanding how a major corporation's procurement process works."
That's why she's currently making contact with long-time suppliers to Nestlé's various operating companies and getting to know them better.
"I think it really speaks to the tenacity of M&L Powers that they were able to secure this work through the competitive bid process back in '93, before most corporations even had a supplier diversity program up and going," Blackwell says.
Quality first
As Bagle sees it, "We're happy when a company values our quality first and looks at the supplier diversity connection as being value added. Our diversity affords us some opportunities to get in the front door, and that's the start of everything.
"Saying I work for Nestlé Beverages always sounds great when I try to deal with IBM or other major corporations."
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