|
The Nielsen Co works with Continental Resources, Inc
The WBE is a valued IT partner with capacity to handle the needs of a company like Nielsen. The relationship has helped ConRes expand its customer base
 Brinda Bradley has been a supplier diversity manager for more than twenty years. She was in the banking industry for seventeen years and at Office Max for a year, and has also worked as a consultant to minority businesses. She joined the Nielsen Co (New York, NY) in 2009, brought onboard by the head of global sourcing at Nielsen to manage and execute the new supplier diversity program.
"Nielsen recognized the need to have a formal supplier diversity program, and they were encouraged by their top clients and their HR people," says Bradley.
Building from the ground up
Bradley is laying the groundwork for the program: capturing the spend, setting up a sustainable program, working with the sourcing teams. Her team is putting proper tools in place: a registration site, database, website, internal and external Web pages, contract and RFP system and more.
"I have been able to accomplish so much in such a short time because of tremendous support from senior management. We have a supplier diversity executive steering committee that includes execs from across the business functions. We're on our way to having a world-class program," Bradley says.
Her twenty years of experience in supplier diversity have certainly helped. "I knew what to avoid and where to go. That experience helped me jumpstart this program," she notes. She adds that Ralph G. Moore of RGMA (Chicago, IL), a management consulting firm specializing in supplier diversity, played a key role as well. "I engaged his services and we put the program together."
Good progress and ambitious goals
Bradley has ambitious goals for the program. The focus at this point is to increase spending with diverse suppliers, and Bradley is looking at a number of opportunities to do so. Nielsen partners with NMSDC, WBENC, the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber. She is confident that the company met its five percent spending goal for 2010, and for 2011 Bradley hopes to hit ten percent. That's impressive progress; 2009 spend was one percent of total sourcing spend, she notes.
"Women and minorities are the fastest growing sector of the market, and it makes sense to include them. We want our supply chain to reflect that diversity," says Bradley.
ConRes provides IT services for big business
Continental Resources (ConRes) is a WBENC-certified technology solutions company headquartered in Bedford, MA. It's enjoyed a long relationship with the Nielsen Company.
"Businesses, government and educational organizations count on us to help them use technology to reach their strategic goals. In the process, our customers improve efficiency, become more productive and increase the overall return on their technology investments," says Ann Dempsey, ConRes marketing director.
Founded in 1962 as a test and measurement equipment leasing company, ConRes got into IT services in 1972. Today the test equipment division still rents, leases and sells brand-name, fully-calibrated test equipment to the U.S. and international markets, but 85 percent of the company's business is now on the IT side.
Many options for customers
"Our largest division is a hybrid value-added reseller (VAR)," Dempsey reports. It offers a broad range of IT products and technologies, combined with a full suite of professional services: virtualization, security, unified computing technologies, networking, storage and more, and even builds embedded computing and OEM IT appliances. "For our customers, the breadth of options results in unbiased, cost-effective solutions that resolve technology challenges and help organizations reach their business objectives," says Dempsey.
ConRes supplies products from Oracle/Sun, Symantec, Cisco, VMware and many others.
Dempsey has spent her whole career marketing technology. She has been with ConRes for more than twenty years and sits on the board of directors along with Mary Nardella, CEO of ConRes, and a number of other women execs. Today ConRes has about 300 employees, including more than 150 IT pros, about half of them solutions architects and engineers.
A decade of partnership
The relationship with Nielsen began about ten years ago. "At the time Nielsen was looking for an IT solutions partner. They met with John Gika, now the ConRes account manager for Nielsen, along with Sun Microsystems," says Dempsey. "It takes a relatively large VAR to handle the needs of a global organization like Nielsen."
ConRes is a certified WBE. It's also ISO 9001 certified and holds more than 250 technical certifications. There are nine offices across the U.S., and the company does some international business as well.
Being a supplier to a large corporation like Nielsen has helped ConRes expand its footprint in the media and publishing industry, Dempsey notes. "Clients look to our technical expertise to help drive their IT projects to completion. The result has been, and hopefully will continue to be, a successful strategic outcome for both our companies."
D/C
|
