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Qwest is reaching for the top;
Actiontec is a vibrant MBE
“Our employee base is as diverse as our customer base,
and our supplier base should be too,” says the Qwest VP for corporate responsibility
 Ric Padilla is VP for corporate responsibility, sponsorships and diversity for Qwest (Denver, CO). Qwest provides voice, video and data services for wired and mobile broadband, video and voice solutions. Its services are used by residential customers, businesses and government agencies.
Supplier diversity, Padilla notes, “is not new to our company at all. As one of the legacy Bell companies, the understanding of community involvement, both in general and in support of the business, has been around for at least thirty years at Qwest and our predecessor companies.”
Padilla is well-versed in supplier diversity. “I used to be responsible for the purchasing and supply chain for the company,” he explains.
A legacy of corporate involvement
“The legacy of corporate involvement is alive and well at Qwest,” Padilla declares. “As part of that continuum, our supplier diversity program has evolved to be one of inclusiveness in our community.
“Not only is our employee base as diverse as our customer base, but we strive to make our supplier base equally diverse.” Qwest’s supplier base, Padilla reveals, is “fourteen percent minority-owned, women-owned, veteran-owned and disadvantaged companies. Many government contracts require only a 5 percent minority spend goal. It’s our goal to maintain and increase this number.”
Active programs
“We accomplish so much because we work at it,” Padilla declares. He cites the company’s active programs to solicit minority involvement, its work with minority chambers of commerce in Denver, Seattle, Minneapolis and many other parts of the country, and its involvement
with NMSDC.
“We are very strong with the Rocky Mountain Supplier Diversity Council, our local affiliate with the national organization. Our purchasing VP sits on that board, and we’re proud to say we recently won the RMSDC corporation of the year award!”
Equally important, he adds, “is our requirement that our major suppliers, those at $500K and greater, have active supplier diversity programs of their own, and that they measure and report on what they’re doing.”
A variety of certifications are accepted, but most suppliers are certified through NMSDC or WBENC, Padilla reports.
Revitalization
Though interest in supplier diversity is a company legacy, it had lapsed a bit in the early years of this century. It took off again six years ago, Padilla notes, with a new executive team spurring involvement from the top down.
“We’ve been building the program since then, and we feel that we’re still making great progress.”
Seeking quality and more
Qwest cultivates relationships with suppliers “that provide 100 percent quality and 100 percent delivery and make a good business statement for us, while saving us money and being able to serve our customers. And our suppliers are reflective of our communities.”
This, Padilla says, is “what our employees want and what our customers want, and it’s also very business-savvy from a bottom-line perspective.
“I cannot stress the business part of this enough,” he adds. “Whatever the supplier is, big or small, it has to be able to face the challenges of stringent customer requirements so we in turn can serve our customers well.”
Among those customers are “some 95 percent of all Fortune 500 companies who use our services in some way.”
Qwest’s total product portfolio is not just telco service, of course, but also wireless, Internet and video, “areas where there is a tremendous amount of competition.”
Partnering with like-thinkers
Qwest has developed various business partnerships. “We recently announced a partnership with Verizon in the wireless area. We like to align ourselves with companies that think as we do, and Verizon also has a very vibrant supplier diversity program. We are extremely excited,” says Padilla.
It’s also notable that “a lot of new development today is coming from small companies. We may be getting in on the ground floor with the next big idea simply because we are open to working with small businesses!
“We realize that we cannot find good suppliers by waiting for them to call us,” Padilla emphasizes. “It is imperative that we reach out actively, and that is one of the key
things we do.”
MBE Actiontec serves telcos
“Our telco customers are a very select group,” says Brian Henrichs, VP of business development in the telco division of Actiontec Electronics, Inc. Actiontec HQ is in Sunnyvale, CA, with branch offices in Colorado Springs, CO, Taipei, Taiwan and Shanghai, China. The company’s universe of customers is small and select, Henrichs explains, because the telco division sells only to major telecom companies, not to individual purchasers.
Actiontec was begun in 1993 with the aim of offering a full range of broadband connectivity and broadband-powered solutions that support today’s all-digital lifestyle. The founders were Dean Chang, now president and CEO, who has a BSEE from the University of Taiwan and an MSEE from the University of Florida; and Minsiu Huang, now VP of ops, who has a BSEE from the University of Taiwan and an MSEE from the University of California-Santa Barbara.
Chang, Huang and another techie worked together at Micronics. When their employer went public they left to form their own company. Starting with analog modems, Actiontec moved into DSL routing, networking, fiber and all the broadband solutions it offers today.
Actiontec is certified as an MBE by NMSDC. It also has ISO and TL 9000 technical certifications, and “We are moving toward becoming certified as environmentally friendly,” Henrichs notes with pride.
A history with Qwest
Actiontec’s history with Qwest goes back over five years. “We supply them with digital subscriber modem and gateway products, including the industry’s first truly modular
high-speed Internet modem with plug-and play ports for wireless, Internet and voice,”
Henrichs notes.
Actiontec also manages the inventory it supplies for Qwest. “We provide the product, track it, count it and deploy it as an enabling service for them. Actiontec has worked hard to ensure that we deliver what we say we are going to deliver.”
The company has more than 300 employees and is always in the market to bring in more good talent, Henrichs adds.
The shootout at Qwest
Before Qwest, Actiontec worked with AOL and then directly with AOL’s customer base. Techies at Actiontec evolved the Installation Buddy, a package which combined color coding, lots of pictures and simple text to make it possible for subscribers who were not technology-savvy to install their own modems.
In the meantime Actiontec was talking with Qwest, which was then working with a big-name company, about high-speed Internet products. Qwest decided to stage a direct comparison of Actiontec’s Installation Buddy with the big supplier’s offering. “We responded to Qwest’s request for proposal and had a shootout,” Henrichs recalls.
The participants were two Qwest senior execs, neither of them a dedicated techie. One had to install a modem from the big company, the other did the Actiontec installation.
‘The clock was started and the exec with the Actiontec package set up within fifteen minutes. The other exec didn’t even have the product out of the box and on the table!” Henrichs reports with a reminiscent chuckle.
“That was the huge deciding factor. Qwest realized that we were well-suited to their customer base.” Actiontec also scored very highly on follow-up studies with Qwest’s customers, and Installation Buddy won the contract.
The relationship has continued, sparked by productive brainstorming sessions with Qwest. “They are open to our suggestions, we are open to their suggestions and a lot of the development is joint,” Henrichs concludes happily.
Supplier diversity at Actiontec
Actiontec is a sizable and substantial company. It’s on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing private companies in the U.S., and considers itself the market leader in “solutions for the
digital life.”
Not surprising, then, that this MBE has a supplier diversity program of its own and actively updates and reevaluates it. “It’s across the board,” says Henrichs, “from how products are manufactured, where we buy components, where we get our services, phone networks, even cleaning the building. We foster the same philosophy through our supply chain that we use in fulfilling product to our customers.”
That, he adds, includes “establishing objectives for what we are doing, and tracking numbers
to show we are active and proactive in fostering that environment. These are very reportable statistics, and we keep our customer companies updated on what we are doing.
“For us, it’s all about doing a good job.”
D/C
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