Nannette Kelley, based in Arizona, is supplier diversity manager for all of Motorola (Schaumburg, IL). She’s spent some twenty years in procurement with Motorola, including three years when she managed the small business subcontracting program for the company’s federal government business. So in 2000, when Motorola decided to extend that program to include all its businesses, “I was hired to put the program together,” she says.
“That was the most fun kind of job for me.”
Kelley does her work with a staff of two, LeiAnn Rideau in Arizona and Jeffrey Espiritu in Chicago. “We’re now part of Motorola’s integrated supply chain global procurement organization,” Kelley explains. “But when we started in 2000, we worked with separate businesses, each with its own purchasing group.”
Steady growth in diversity spend
In 2006, Motorola made 8 percent of its total U.S. purchases from diverse suppliers. It’s been double digit increases year over year for the last three years for Motorola’s spend with diverse suppliers, Kelley says. Motorola includes MBEs, WBEs, veterans, service-disabled veterans, HUBzone, small disadvantaged businesses, and gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender businesses in its supplier diversity initiative.
Going global
A few years ago, Motorola became active with the NMSDC’s Global-Link program. The program, headed up by the council’s Eric Vicioso, arranges for corporate reps and MBEs to meet with ethnic minority suppliers in other countries. Trade mission trips are arranged to host countries that have the potential for supplier diversity programs.
“We sent a representative from our facility in Brazil to participate in a trade mission there in 2003. It was definitely an educational and fact-finding experience.
“Another goal of the trade mission is to help U.S. MBEs globalize their businesses through relationships with MBEs in other countries,” Kelley explains. Motorola also participated in trade missions to South Africa in 2005 and China in 2007.
Kelley is part of a similar global committee at WBENC. “The goal is to engage MBEs and WBEs in global opportunities,” she declares.
Finding diverse suppliers
Motorola has a registration tool for diverse suppliers on its website, and “My phone number is published in every directory, I think,” Kelley says. “People contact me directly, we go to trade shows, and we use the NMSDC, WBENC and SBA databases consistently.”
She finds that most of the diverse businesses are “pretty savvy. They take time to do the upfront work, which is key. When they come to me they’re aware of where they can be used in our businesses. It helps a lot in getting them connected to the appropriate procurement team.”
Mentoring Glow
Motorola offers training opportunities for Six Sigma through its Motorola University, and companies doing engineering support work may receive product and technology training. That’s how it was with Glow Network (Dallas, TX), an ISO9001/TL9000 certified telecom engineering and consulting firm that started working for Motorola in 2005.
“Glow is not a company that came in through our supplier diversity site,” Kelley says. “Our business people actually recommended the company based on its technical capabilities. It was only then that we found out they were a diversity business.”
The company was recommended for its capability in a specific telecom technology area. “They were very successful,” Kelley recalls. “They were able to bring in niche skills that really added value to us and our customers.
“We wanted to continue to work with them, so we provided special training on some of our next-generation technology that they would be working with.” During the two-year relationship to date, “Glow’s work for Motorola has expanded and continues to grow,” Kelley says.
Dr Jay Srinivasan heads up Glow Network
Dr Jay Srinivasan is president of Glow Network (Dallas, TX), an engineering and consulting firm which caters to the needs of some of the world’s foremost telecom equipment vendors and carriers with wireless broadband, optical backbone wireline, VoIP, IP multimedia subsystem, enterprise products and more. Glow provides a range of managed engineering services plus skilled staffing.
Srinivsan got his bachelor of engineering from the University of Bangalore, India and his MS and PhD from Queens University at Kingston, Kingston, ON, Canada. His MBA is from the University of Texas.
In Canada he worked at Mil Systems on the design of military ships. Before that he held post-doctoral fellowships at the Royal Military College of Canada (Kingston, ON) and Queens University (Kingston, ON), specializing in engineering design and analysis.
“My last job was with Nortel (Toronto, Canada), working in their Richardson, TX facility,” he notes. “I always thought I would go out and start my own company as soon as I completed my MBA. I did that while I was working at Nortel, so Glow was next.”
Testing out Glow Network
He got good backing from Nortel for his new enterprise. “In fact, when I was still working for them, I convinced them that they should be outsourcing some of their detail engineering work. Glow became part of Nortel’s supply chain to its customers.”
The telecom market fluctuates with the seasons, Srinivasan explains. “The fourth quarter is always the busiest quarter, so a telecom company can save by outsourcing to a company that does other business and can balance the ebbs and flows.
“My Nortel sponsors said, ‘OK, we’re willing to test this out.’ They set me up doing optical supply-chain engineering, and that’s how Glow got started,” he says. “Nortel became our first customer and we gradually diversified, took on other customers and built them. By the end of the first year we had three of the big names in telecom equipment vendors. Today we work with pretty much all the major ones.”
Glow currently has about 160 people, regular and contractors. The company takes on projects worldwide, although most work so far has been in North America.
Responsiveness is the key
The company’s focus has been mainly the consulting engineering area, and, “We do that very well,” says Srinivasan. “We’re responsive and really agile. We have the expertise, we do our own training, and we’re always very proactive in terms of watching the new technologies and preparing for them before the customers come to us.”
Glow started working with Motorola through networking. “Being at Nortel I knew a lot of executives at a lot of telecom companies. I knew some people at Motorola and reached out to them; that’s how we got started with them.”
Motorola is headquartered in the Chicago area, but there was a project in Dallas, Glow’s hometown, and it was offered to the company. “We took it on and did a great job and that’s when our relationship with Motorola started. We ramped up quickly, and soon we were providing services to three different organizations within Motorola.
“It’s a combination of being diverse and also being the kind of company they’re looking for, that can provide the quality they need,” Srinivasan says.
Societies and awards
Glow is a member of NMSDC’s large Dallas, TX branch. “When we started the company in 2000 we were not an MBE since we were venture funded,” Srinivasan says. “But when the market went down in 2003 we recapitalized the company and qualified to be an MBE. Today, we are completely minority-owned.”
At the NMSDC banquet last year, Glow was nominated by Alcatel-Lucent for the diverse supplier of the year award. Nortel nominated Glow for the award for 2005. The company ranks fortieth on a list of the hundred fastest-growing companies in Dallas, and was ranked 382 among the fastest-growing companies in North America on Deloitte’s 2006 Technology Fast 500.
This year the company won the first DiversityNXT supplier award, presented at the DiversityNXT conference. DiversityNXT is part of NXTComm, a major trade event held in Chicago each year for telecom and info, communications and entertainment companies.
A variety of projects
One interesting project Glow is currently working on with Motorola is in the IMS and WiMAX area. Before the product was deployed in the field, Motorola wanted Glow to do interoperability testing with other vendors’ products.
“We did the testing for a year and a half, and then they successfully rolled out the first network in Pakistan.
“We’ve also worked with them in land-to-mobile radio networks,” Srinivasan notes.
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