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Delores Johnson-Cooper is director for Verizon's merged supplier diversity group, which serves the three strategic business groups of Verizon Communications (New York, NY): Verizon Wireless, Verizon Business and Verizon Telecom.
She explains that the current Verizon supplier diversity program is part of the company's services organization which was developed in 2006 after the purchase of MCI.
"Within Verizon Services we've housed many business functions that cross all three strategic business groups. Supply chain services, which includes sourcing and procurement, is of course one of them, and the supplier diversity function is within that. It's now managed as a single Verizon program."
What about duplication of services from one group to another? "As contracts come up we review them," Johnson-Cooper says. "It's a managed process of identifying our requirements and the appropriate suppliers for them."
Johnson-Cooper has spent her entire career in various aspects of marketing. She joined a Verizon predecessor in the late 1980s and took on her current role last year, reporting to Tanya Penny, Verizon's VP of sourcing and procurement operations.
Certification and more
Verizon, Johnson-Cooper notes, insists on certification. It accepts NMSDC, WBENC, U.S. Pan Asian American Chamber of Commerce (USPAACC) and others, including a variety of state certifications.
The company asks its major contractors to employ their own diverse contractors, with targets of about 18 percent diversity spend per contract.
Verizon, Johnson-Cooper notes with pride, is one of the charter members of the Billion Dollar Roundtable. "Last year we spent $2.58 billion with our diverse suppliers. Although there is always room for improvement, we feel very good about where we are and our plans to move forward."
The value of supplier diversity to the corporation is clear, Johnson-Cooper reflects. "More and more we're seeing large corporations requiring that we assure them of how much we'll spend with diverse suppliers if we get their large contracts. Today, supplier diversity is a strategic imperative for us."
And in addition, she notes happily, "It's a wonderful thing for us to do business with people who purchase our products and services, enhancing the communities in which we all live and work!"
Show-going and mentoring
Verizon attends conventions sponsored by a variety of advocacy organizations including WBENC and NMSDC's mammoth events. "They are very good sources of feeder streams of suppliers that we know are qualified."
For regional shows, "We have folks locally that we pull in to talk to the suppliers better than we could," she explains. Some of Johnson-Cooper's staffers are on the boards of the regional councils. And anyone who's interested is welcome to hit Verizon.com/supplierdiversity and learn all about it.
Mentoring for likely diverse suppliers can be either formal or informal at Verizon. As a federal contractor, the company sponsors a formal mentor-protégé program in conjunction with federal government agencies, Johnson-Cooper notes.
"On our own, we like to help our suppliers grow and get ready to do major business with us and perhaps eventually become strategic partners. We support our advocacy groups in trying to develop the supplier base."
With all these efforts, Johnson-Cooper says, "We're working to continue to grow the program and eventually get where we would like to be.
"Our program has been in place for more than twenty years. I'm hoping that it becomes part of a natural process and a natural evolution." She wants "to get to where it's not needed; it's just the way we do business."
TCGI works with corporate America
Avis Yates Rivers is president and CEO of Technology Concepts Group, Inc (TCGI, Somerset, NJ), a Verizon supplier. TCGI, which offers IT solutions, infrastructure, networking, helpdesk and more, is a successor to PC Pros, Rivers' original business.
"PC Pros was an SBA 8(a) company and eventually did mostly federal government work," she explains. "When we graduated from 8(a) I elected not to continue to concentrate on federal business, and in 1996 I formed TCGI to work with corporate America, where I started my own career."
The DECALS project
"We go back to the 90's with Verizon," Rivers explains. "The group we work with used to be WorldCom and then MCI and now it's Verizon Business. It provides solutions to corporations and government.
"In 2002 we teamed on a major project, which is still ongoing, for New York State's Department of Environmental Conservation."
The project is the Department of Environmental Conservation Agent Licensing Systems (DECALS). It's the annual license arrangement for folks who "want to fish or hunt or shoot turkeys or whatever anywhere in the state of New York."
The licenses are available from municipal agents and retail agents like sporting goods stores, and in connection with the project TCGI has supplied a million dollars' worth of dedicated computer equipment and printers to municipal and retail agents.
"We deployed the equipment to 1,800 sites throughout the state," Rivers recalls. "Verizon developed the software but we bought the equipment and brought it into our warehouse where we imaged and kitted all the components for each agent. Then my guys took it out to the 1,800 sites and physically installed every piece of equipment. At that time we had eight teams of techs in vans.
"This solution has a very healthy communications infrastructure," Rivers says. "It's Web-based and Verizon hosts it on its server." New York, she notes, is the fifth state for which Verizon Business has implemented this application, but the first involving TCGI.
"It was a big logistics challenge but I like things like that. It was fun," she says.
In maintenance mode
Since the deployment was completed, TCGI has maintained the equipment and inventoried all the spares in its warehouse. "An agent with a problem calls the Verizon helpdesk and Verizon dispatches the calls to us. My technicians monitor the helpdesk throughout the day. We ship out replacement devices overnight. The problem equipment comes back to our warehouse, goes on our bench and is repaired and reinventoried.
"We can tell Verizon where each piece of equipment is at any point in time."
The original four-year maintenance contract, up last year, segued into a five-year extension. Both parties are well pleased with the relationship. "It gets better over time," Rivers says. "We've incorporated better ways of doing the work and we just launched a TCGI/DECALS web portal.
"We didn't actually make any money on the equipment," Rivers confides. "But I was looking at the four-year maintenance agreement. That's where I knew I would make money." And now it's turned into a ten-year maintenance agreement: better still.
Building relationships
TCGI got the DECALS contract through MCI's supplier diversity office. "We were recommended because I knew the supplier diversity manager there, as I do most of the supplier diversity managers in most companies," Rivers says .
"It all comes down to building relationships: you never know when someone is going to need your help. We had never done this before, but I had enough staff and enough resources available to me and I knew we could support it."
TCGI's first contract with Verizon started in 1997 with the former Bell Atlantic. The seven-state telephone company, Rivers says, "was looking to strengthen its ties with residential telephone customers because they knew the competition was coming."
Bell Atlantic created a "sales mentor" program and wanted support on the pilot from a team of experienced salespeople who could come in and work with the company's own customer service reps. "So my seasoned salespeople, who I recruited personally, would sit with the customer service reps and monitor the conversations. They provided on-the-job training on how to bridge a call into a sales opportunity.
"It was a wildly successful program. The year after we started Bell Atlantic and Nynex merged. Then they merged with GTE and became Verizon. At every point my contract would double. When I sold that division in 2001 I had forty people on the project."
"I'll be back"
TCGI has close relationships with PSE&G, New Jersey's major electric and gas utility, with a major university, and many more. Right now DECALS is TCGI's only project with Verizon, but, "I'll be doing more," Rivers says.
"My company excels in these new, interesting, unique types of projects where we can distinguish ourselves. For both DECALS and the sales mentor project, we were selected because of our ability to provide solutions. These are the kinds of long-term relationships I look to."
Rivers has just fifteen techies on staff these days. "Our current business model involves partnering. Our long-term relationships are just between us and the customer, but in most of our new projects we work with a strategic alliance partner.
"I'm not partnering with any big companies right now. They're all small, but collectively we have about a hundred resources we can call on for any project."
Dual certifications and more
Rivers' two companies were certified by NMSDC almost from the beginning, she says. TCGI is also WBENC certified, and Rivers is on the board of WPEO, the regional WBENC affiliate. She's also involved with the National Center for Women and IT (NCWIT, www.ncwit.org). "We're trying to bring together all the organizations working to get women into the IT field," Rivers explains.
Overview with Exxon
After graduating from New York's City College in 1970, Rivers worked for Exxon Corp (now ExxonMobil) for years. She was in HR, public affairs, tax and the Exxon Education Foundation, "getting a real corporate overview," she says. She ended up in an office systems subsidiary, selling pre-PC technology, like word processing systems, high-end electronic typewriters and first-generation faxes. "It was corporate sales, and not too many minorities or women did that then. I was selling to large and small companies on Wall Street."
In 1985 Exxon sold the business and Yates went out on her own. "I worked by myself, doing training mostly since the Exxon word processing equipment was so new then." After a year she hired some people, started up PC Pros and the rest is history. "I just followed the technology wherever it went," she says, "building solid relationships along the way."
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