DONE_2025, ProcureCon MRO. Panel Transforming from Cost Savings to TCO (Total Cost of Ownership)

Announcer: Next up, this is on transforming from cost savings to TCO, and we are gonna be hearing from Julie Wirth, Anna Geller, and Pierre Blu, along with our moderator, Amanda Prochaska of Wonder Services. Let's welcome to the stage.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): Morning. Good morning, everyone have, that was a mic test too. Just so you guys know.

Welcome. You are making it through the morning of the first day. We have an esteem panel up here. We're going to be talking about total cost of ownership, which I think is a pretty important con concept and hot topic these days. So we're gonna go ahead and dive right in, but I'm going to ask you for two things.

I know it's early. Coffee's kicking in, hopefully. Okay, two things. Write down one thing that you've learned from this panel as we go. And commit to yourselves that you're going to implement it when you get back. Okay. That's item number one. We call those golden nuggets. Item number two is we're going to have some time, like 10 to 15 minutes for questions.

I will stand up here. We will all sit up here until we get questions. Okay? So write down some questions so you don't have to just stare us for 15 minutes. Sounds good? Yes. Okay. All right. Perfect. Julie. Your first step. Great welcome, by the way. Thank you. Julie's second panel. First panel. First panel second.

And we have

Pierre Beaulieu, Global Sourcing Lead – Computershare: multiple,

Julie Wuerth, Strategic Sourcing Manager – Busch Vacuum Solutions: many minutes.

Multiple,

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): a multiple experienced panelists. Okay. So Julie, it's all gonna be good here. How do you introduce TCO into conversations with stakeholders who are expecting, like these large changes, dramatic savings right away. Okay.

Julie Wuerth, Strategic Sourcing Manager – Busch Vacuum Solutions: Often they want to know piece price of the equipment.

Maybe landed cost, they go that far. But oftentimes they don't understand what TCA is and what TCO is. Total cost of acquisition,

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): yep.

Julie Wuerth, Strategic Sourcing Manager – Busch Vacuum Solutions: Is gonna be that piece, price that landed. Price, that price of the equip. TCO when you get into TCO, you start to get into the lifecycle cost of a piece of equipment or even an MRO item.

It often it takes into consideration things like repair costs, maintenance costs, and even disposal energy usage. Things like that. It really is a holistic view as to what something might cost. And explaining that to a stakeholder is very important because the work that you want to do to bring value to the purchase and value to the organization. Sometimes it's misunderstood. And so you want to explain that right up front, that you're not just gonna look at the piece price.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): Okay.

Julie Wuerth, Strategic Sourcing Manager – Busch Vacuum Solutions: So

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): have you had those conversations, any of the other panelists?

Pierre Beaulieu, Global Sourcing Lead – Computershare: Oh

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): yeah. Oh yeah.

Pierre Beaulieu, Global Sourcing Lead – Computershare: Multiple times. Yeah. So a lot of the stakeholders have this vision of we only have total cost of acquisition.

That's what's in the budget. I don't want to change, and we talked about change already. It's key change management program that we have to put in place to have TCO implemented. But once we start talking about. Return on investment, long-term viability of the equipment, downtime. That's where we start seeing the value and engaging with the stakeholders in a positive manner.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): Alright. Hey, and Julie, I thank you Pierre for that. Julie, I forgot to prompt you. Can you introduce yourself briefly? Absolutely. To the audience.

Julie Wuerth, Strategic Sourcing Manager – Busch Vacuum Solutions: I'm Julie Wirth. I'm a strategic sourcing manager for Bush Vacuum Solutions. It's a little bit of a typo on there. A company that produces vacuum pumps and systems for meat packaging medical markets, things like that.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): Very interesting. Okay, Anna, and I'll remember to introduce yourself at the beginning. Sure. Okay. Okay. So what advice would you give procurement professionals that are building a business case for TCO adoption?

Anna Geller, MRO Category Manager - Venture Steel: Okay. So my approach is very hands-on and I think Urdo did a very good job in their presentation, but I like to get it onto the floor.

So I'm collaborating with operations, I'm collaborating with maintenance, with shipping, and really seeing what their challenges are. I could spend maybe a morning with them and then I'm really identifying opportunities where, our MRO products could be a benefit to their day to day.

So what I do is I follow a template. So if I'm deploying a new program, whether it's like a logistics program or capital equipment, I'm looking at all the different factors. So first it's the total acquisition cost. So you're looking at, whether you're renting, buying, or leasing, and then you know, your three bid process.

But then you're also looking at your qualitative data and sometimes your qualitative data. You might find it hard to put a, assign a cost to it, but once you really peel the layers, you'll be able to find a cost to it. So maybe it's, this program is boosting employee morale and maybe your equipment that you're deploying has, better ergonomic option.

So you can dial it back and say, okay, this was the amount of time that was missed because of, a safety issue. So you can assign that cost, you can annualize it over the term or annualize it just to see exactly like you can pinpoint costs when it comes to qualitative. Okay. Data,

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): really great example, and I love how you talked about getting in and understanding, almost doing a walk around the site to understand exactly how it's being used and trying to find those different elements of the total cost.

Awesome. And I'll just, you wanna introduce yourself real quick?

Anna Geller, MRO Category Manager - Venture Steel: Yeah, sure. So my name's Anna Geller. I'm an MRO category manager for venture steel. So we're Canadian based but we have presence in the US and Mexico. So we take large steel coils and we split them down to smaller size coils for 70% is automotive and then 30% for like medical and construction businesses.Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): Okay. Awesome. Thank you, Pierre, you're up next. You ready for this?

Pierre Beaulieu, Global Sourcing Lead – Computershare: Sure, let's,

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): okay. All right, let's go for it. Let's do it. When evaluating MRO suppliers, how do you assess their ability to support your TCO goals? Like reliability lifecycle support or just anything that goes beyond quoting the price?

Pierre Beaulieu, Global Sourcing Lead – Computershare: Yeah you really have to define when you're evaluating suppliers I'll call it qualitative. And technical evaluation of the products. And then you have price. And in the qualitative, I think that's where the main differentiator is. Everyone's gonna be within 2% of each other. Whether their screwdrivers are blue and the other one is red.

The, there's minimal differences between service provider quite often for specific items. So what we do is we evaluate financial risk. So the, how solid they are financially where they are in terms of location rapid response, if we need more equipment, if we need parts availability.

If they have a good inventory, what is their source and where their supplies coming from. So if their supplies are all coming from China. It turns out we'll talk about tariff tomorrow, but there might be some increased cost there, so we need to make sure we are aware of those potential fluctuations.

No it's part of the evaluation and we wanna make sure that we have a strategic partner at the other end of the table, right? That they're gonna be answering, that they're gonna be managing our escalations and are gonna be able to help us deliver the success that our operations team is requiring.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): How and this is not, this is a bonus question everyone, this is off script. So let's see how PR does on this. So I'm just curious, so when you're evaluating a supplier, if they're an incumbent, that's a little bit easier to do 'cause what they do and how they show up and if they deliver on time and all of that kind of stuff.

If it's a new supplier, is that a challenge to understand what the total picture might look like?

Pierre Beaulieu, Global Sourcing Lead – Computershare: Yes. Yeah. It is a challenge, but at the same time, we have to do a, like a complete assessment, right? Yeah. If there is a risk that's been identified in switching supplier, what is the cost of that risk?

Yeah. We have to allocate cost tutoring. Doesn't mean to be a specific dollar. It just means you do a percentage of allocation, of transition of suppliers. You want to make sure that one, you switch a supplier to another, that there's minimal disruption. So there's additional interview process with stakeholders to talk to the suppliers.

Okay. I think it's very important that the end user is able to talk with every suppliers and it gets a good commitment from them when we do the selection process at the end.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): Okay, awesome. And can you introduce yourself so everyone knows? Yes.

Pierre Beaulieu, Global Sourcing Lead – Computershare: So I'm Pierre. I'll skip the last name because half of the room is gonna

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): good French

name

Pierre Beaulieu, Global Sourcing Lead – Computershare: mispronounced, but so I, with computer share, I'm the global head of sourcing for real estate and mal operations.

I've been with Computershare a whole two weeks, so I'm still brand spanking you in this role. But prior to this, I worked at CBRE and GLL and financial Institution for 25 plus years now yeah.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): Okay. So next time, next year, you're gonna be an expert at mail operations.

Pierre Beaulieu, Global Sourcing Lead – Computershare: I'll be a veteran.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): All right. A veteran.

Awesome. That works. All right, Julie from your perspective, what lifecycle factors are most often overlooked when evaluating MRO equipment?

Julie Wuerth, Strategic Sourcing Manager – Busch Vacuum Solutions: I think it starts with things like transitioning, that has to be considered. It can be anything from installation, training costs, it could have to do with yeah, installation costs, training costs repair costs, maintenance costs, maintenance plans and their costs.

As well as some, there are some, certainly some intangible factors that we talked about that you want to. Consider ergonomics and things like that. Other lifecycle costs include the energy costs and disposal costs, like I mentioned a little bit before.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): Yeah.

Julie Wuerth, Strategic Sourcing Manager – Busch Vacuum Solutions: Those all need to be considered when you're choosing between two pieces of equipment for sure.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): It's very interesting. Yeah. And you I just, I saw some light faces lighting up. Any other comments on that or are you guys good? We can move on.

Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Alright. That was awesome, Julie. So Anna, let's go to you next. What kind of pushback? Ooh, pushback. Pushback. Never happens.

Julie Wuerth, Strategic Sourcing Manager – Busch Vacuum Solutions: Oh,

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): no,

Julie Wuerth, Strategic Sourcing Manager – Busch Vacuum Solutions: never.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): Never. Okay. What kind of pushback do you typically get from internal teams when shifting away from lowest cost decisions to TCO and how do you address it?

Anna Geller, MRO Category Manager - Venture Steel: Okay, so we've I've experienced a lot of pushback. It's, and it's, I guess it's like human nature because you're changing up a routine.

It could be risky or be viewed as risky. So what we like to do is anytime we have a new preferred supplier deployment or. Any other type of program, what we'll do is we'll create presentations and of course we've had all these teams in the decision process in the beginning as well.

But we do presentations to say, okay, this is all the challenges that have initiated. To create this new change. This is the problems that we were facing. This is a little bit about the new supplier, information about the supplier. And then what's in it for them. Like people wanna hear if it's change they wanna see, okay, this is gonna benefit me in what way?

So you wanna angle that presentation to say, okay, these are the new benefits you're gonna see. Whether it's, removing some mundane activities from their day to day. Or any angle that you can take that's benefiting them. So I found that to be really helpful. And of course, your collaboration and creating those connections and that rapport with intercompany department teams.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): Yeah, absolutely. So I've spent my entire career leading change like that. That's what I've been focused on. And change is incredibly hard, but to your point, you can talk about what's in it for them, but I always love to talk about what's not changing.

Anna Geller, MRO Category Manager - Venture Steel: Okay.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): It's just a, if you've had kids at home or nieces, nephews, they like, like their security blankets, right?

Or their little dolls or whatever, stuffed animals and those that's the same feeling that people get when we talk about what's not changing. Like you're going to have the same reliability as your old supplier that is not changing or whatever it might be, because then it just gives them comfort.

My whole world's not changing. There are some things that are going to remain the same.

Anna Geller, MRO Category Manager - Venture Steel: Yeah, I'm gonna add that.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): Yeah. Perfect.

Pierre Beaulieu, Global Sourcing Lead – Computershare: And I think Anna also mentioned like bringing them early in the conversation is key.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): Yeah,

Pierre Beaulieu, Global Sourcing Lead – Computershare: It's

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): key.

Pierre Beaulieu, Global Sourcing Lead – Computershare: It's a big transformation and even if we don't see it as a big transformation, it is a big transformation for anyone who's switching suppliers.

You do this on a regular basis, switching suppliers thousands of times, and then they do this once, twice in their career. So they don't want that change to happen drastically. So bringing them early in the process, having every stakeholder understand why we're looking at that change, it doesn't mean that we're gonna change.

It just means we're looking at this option. We wanna make sure that this option's on the table for you. And then based on the outcome of our evaluation, this is the decision that we all came to agree to. So there's removing def like defense layers to make sure that we have the right opportunity in front of everyone.

And just to add a quick example, we had to do a LED conversion from

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): Ooh.

Pierre Beaulieu, Global Sourcing Lead – Computershare: Yeah. A

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): big one.

Pierre Beaulieu, Global Sourcing Lead – Computershare: So we ended up talking about total cost of ownership there, because not only you reduce your carbon footprint, you reduce your electricity bill, but you also reduce. The number of times you have to change the lights, you have to look with your local municipalities to get rebates on the energy efficiency system that you put in place.

And the cost, the upfront cost was much higher than just replacing t eights and t twelves. And so we ended up demonstrating the value to the organization and we ended up buying $35 million worth of LEDs. So it was a. A major project and the payback turned out to be less than the projection. So because there was no repairs anymore.

That's

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): a great example.

Pierre Beaulieu, Global Sourcing Lead – Computershare: It's

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): Pierre, let's stick with you on this next question. And you might be able to leverage that same example that you were just giving us. How do you ensure alignment between procurement and operations teams when implementing a new TCO approach? Especially when their priorities differ from each other.

Pierre Beaulieu, Global Sourcing Lead – Computershare: Yeah. Quite often the operations team is not cost it's delivery, so they're trying to produce whatever item that your organization is producing. So yeah, I got the benefit of working for facilities organizations in the past, and then we would manage portfolios of. Large organizations, but also pharmaceutical production equipment distribution centers, and so on and so forth.

And so everyone has a key metric that they're looking to stand by, and anything else is irrelevant in their world, right? So if they deliver X number of boxes per day, that's all it matters. Whether your, your forklift is charged with a specific. Charger don't care. So it's how do you bring them into the conversation?

Make sure that your objective always relates back to their objective, right? So their objective is always gonna be I want to deliver X by X day. While by switching your lights, you have a lower downtime. And you have a better health and safety because you get better visibility in your warehouse and therefore your employees are more efficient.

You can deliver five more boxes.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): Yeah.

Pierre Beaulieu, Global Sourcing Lead – Computershare: Then you know, you start connecting your goals through the total cost of ownership to their goals in production of verbiage. And I think that scheme. Yeah.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): I love that. We talk a lot about mission and measurement. Yeah. When it comes to change, what's your mission?

What's your measurement? And if you can align your teams, whether they're in operations, procurement, or elsewhere, if you can align them on what's the mission and what's the measurement.

Announcer: Yeah.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): Then it seems like it's a better picture for everyone involved. People will come along with the change a little bit better.

Correct.

Julie Wuerth, Strategic Sourcing Manager – Busch Vacuum Solutions: You have to speak their language.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): Yeah. A

Julie Wuerth, Strategic Sourcing Manager – Busch Vacuum Solutions: little bit. You really do.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): Yes.

Julie Wuerth, Strategic Sourcing Manager – Busch Vacuum Solutions: And change it up when you're talking to the finance department. Who doesn't want to pay a pri higher price, if you can tell 'em about the net present value or just in layman's terms, the total cost of ownership, really.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So Julie, thank you Pierre, by the way. Yeah. Okay, so everyone in the audience, I feel like my back is turned all you all over there? You guys good over there? Okay. We have about 10 minutes, 10 ish minutes, maybe 15 before I'm going to start asking you for questions. So if you haven't.

If you don't have any questions yet, start writing down your questions. You good up here? Yeah. Okay. All right. Okay. So Julie how do you balance supplier relationships when pushing them to support TCO model instead of simple price comparisons?

Julie Wuerth, Strategic Sourcing Manager – Busch Vacuum Solutions: I think talking to the suppliers in terms of cost performance instead of just peace price.

It's interesting. And I think, like Pierre was saying, providing a template, you might have a template internally. It does not hurt to have a template that you provide externally to your vendors when they're quoting and ask them to identify off those different elements that you're looking for.

Elements of cost or impact, and how does their product. Measure against it, so I think having the discussion with them and explaining that we are trying to be transparent internally to our organization about all of the impacts of this decision sourcing decision. We need your help.

We want to choose the right. Vendor for this product and providing full information is what's gonna get us there. Just become a partner with the Yeah. The vendor and collaborate more and speaking in those kinds of terms, definitely, I think helps.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): Yeah.

Julie Wuerth, Strategic Sourcing Manager – Busch Vacuum Solutions: To improve the transparency of the data that you get.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): Absolutely. So it sounds like you've modified, like your BID template or your RFP template to be TCO. Did both of you also do something similar? Yeah.

Pierre Beaulieu, Global Sourcing Lead – Computershare: Yeah. Oh, go ahead. Go ahead.

Anna Geller, MRO Category Manager - Venture Steel: Yeah, so I have a just standard Yeah, but sometimes it, it all depends on what, like what you're buying. Yeah. What you're buying.

Yeah. So that template can be adjusted.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): Okay.

Pierre Beaulieu, Global Sourcing Lead – Computershare: You always have to put, I feel in bid templates, two options. Because if you are too specific, if I want screwdrivers blue, 10 millimeters, this is what I want. Then this is what you'll get, Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): right? Yep.

But if you say, this is what I want, give me another option that you supplier think is more cost effective, short term, long term, doesn't matter, just give me another option that will deliver the same outcome to me. And then we can start looking at alternative bids and see if there's, opportunities and that's also part of the. Total cost of ownership.

We were talking about where you evaluate the supplier, you evaluate the innovation they bring, you evaluate the risk associated with the supplier the price, and then if there's innovation that comes out of it.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): Okay. Perfect. Awesome. Thank you Anna. Ooh. This is gonna be, this is a good one.

How do you bring in technical experts, like engineers and maintenance teams? Into your TCO decision making, so I know we've touched on it a little bit already. Yeah. But I would love to know your process,

Anna Geller, MRO Category Manager - Venture Steel: Because we're in MRO under that space, so it's critical. Yeah. That you bring them in from the very beginning.

Like they'll have that technical knowledge that you may not have. But again, if you're out, speaking with them and getting their insights, getting them to trial materials, being there when they're trialing, so you can gauge, their feedback to say, okay, whether this material will work or not.

Same with equipment. Maybe you're buying a new piece of equipment. How is that trial running? So get your engineers your maintenance group. In early get their feedback because they'll know if a product will work, maybe they can see ahead of time whether it will be a challenge. And they'll al also can see if it will increase production and efficiency.

Having that, relationship with them is just so important. Having their feedback and including them in the decision is going to be the success of your total cost of ownership.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): Yeah. Okay. So how many of you have noisy stakeholders? No. None. What? Yeah, everyone. I'm thinking probably everyone.

So here's something to add onto what Anna just said. Have you ever thought about your stakeholders as influencers? Like your social media influencers? If you're on social media, you know what they do? They try to sell you something, right? Or make a decision. You have those types of people in your organization.

So it's not just and engaging stakeholders is absolutely critical. But thinking about who has the influence? Who do other people naturally follow? And is there an influencer who always hates the change? How do you bring those people in and make sure that they're voicing all of their concerns all the time, even if it's the same concern, 10, 14, 25 times.

You wanna have that person close to you and activate them in some way and help support your program. So if it's talking points, if you ask them to do a presentation about all of their concerns or whatever you might, how decide to leverage them. Think about those, not just stakeholders, but think about who has the influence and how do we engage.

Julie Wuerth, Strategic Sourcing Manager – Busch Vacuum Solutions: I think you can get them excited about what you're doing.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): Yes. I

Julie Wuerth, Strategic Sourcing Manager – Busch Vacuum Solutions: think you definitely can By, by letting them vent. Yes. Letting them tell you what it costs to do this, that, and the other thing. And you're gathering the business case to make the change. Correct. While listening to them and saying to them, I'm gonna try and fix that for you.

Yep.

Pierre Beaulieu, Global Sourcing Lead – Computershare: And I think it, it brings a level of confidence to the decision maker that you did your due diligence.

That you've explored all the risk that you've. Talked about all the hurdles and potential problems of switching a suppliers. So there is not just, oh, here's the option, here's how we're gonna do it.

There is this transformation where you have, listen, we talked to everyone. We heard all the risk of everyone. And then with those risks considered, this is the best outcome.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): Yeah. Or you have an influencer who goes to the table with you to have that conversation. Yeah. So it's not just your voice. Oh, it's a bunch of different voices that are in support of the change.

Pierre Beaulieu, Global Sourcing Lead – Computershare: Absolutely. Yeah. And we, it's funny, I always start my conversations with the stakeholders that I know enough to know that I don't know anything. So now I'm leveraging their knowledge because. We can talk HVAC for a couple hours, but if you put me in front of an HVAC right now, I have no idea what I'm supposed to do.

So I need someone that's gonna be there, that has the technical expertise that can, speak the right language at some point.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): Absolutely. We've talked a lot about successes up here so far how we've been able to successfully do this, but we know that sometimes there's challenges.

So Pierre, what's one unexpected challenge that you faced when implementing TCO and how did you overcome it?

Pierre Beaulieu, Global Sourcing Lead – Computershare: We'll stay on the LEDs, if you don't mind.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): Okay.

Pierre Beaulieu, Global Sourcing Lead – Computershare: So great program. Everyone is, they don't. We're walking on water basically with this program. And then the LED modules that lights up all the LEDs when you put them in a fridge door and they close the fridge door, then they break.

Oh, and then those little modules are, three quarters of the cost of the system. And you need to make sure that they're set up in such a way that they're not in a hinge or a door, an action. So you need additional cable to have the module somewhere else. So at the beginning you start installing that.

The first thing you hear is I told you that this was not the right solution. And then, you start getting into the conversation. And what we did is we used it as lesson learned. Like this is an ongoing process. We're all in this together. We'll make a solution, we'll make it happen. And it worked in the end, but the first few that has resistance to change, we're slamming doors and see, it doesn't work.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): All right. We're gonna have one more, one more, if not two, depending on how long the questions are for each of you up here. Julie your question up next is, what role has data transparency? Or supplier collaboration. I should say, and supplier collaboration played in your success.

Julie Wuerth, Strategic Sourcing Manager – Busch Vacuum Solutions: That's a good point because you can't have one without the other.

It's one thing to gather all of the costs that you have internally. And it's quite another to try and get something comparable from the vendor. It's important to have. Both data transparency in internally and externally so that you can make an apples to apples comparison. But one thing that I've found interesting is something called decision analysis.

I don't know if anybody's seen a decision analysis template, but it's not just about the data, but about the intangibles and trying to gather some. Some information and this kind of a template helps you to kind of rate and rank the different vendor responses. Yeah. And it gives them a factor and a, an importance factor.

And weighs them out and helps you make decisions. So even if you don't have complete data transparency with your supplier, if they're not quite there yet there are still things that are tangible and intangible that you can put a cost to, as Anna was saying, or intangibles that you can or tangibles that you need to capture and track and understand, go to the floor and gather.

Sometimes you can't get all of that out of of a vendor. But using a tool like that can be helpful to make a comparison and make a good decision.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): Awesome.

Pierre Beaulieu, Global Sourcing Lead – Computershare: And to, to Julie's point. You don't need perfect data. And we talked about this earlier, we, you don't need perfect data when you start.

Just start, have an evaluation. It's not gonna be perfect. But it's okay. You'll have, you're gonna have your questionnaire and it's it is gonna be very subjective, the first few ones you do. And then as the team, the relationship evolves, it's gonna get more and more objective. And that's where you're gonna get the real value, but you have to start at some point.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): Yes. I'm so glad that we're saying that too, because I know we've been talking about bad data my entire career and. I started my LinkedIn writing journey because I was at a conference where they said, you can't do anything until we fix the data. I'm like, we've been talking about fixing the data for 16 years.

Yeah. So I'm glad that we're at the point that we should just we have enough information and enough insights to be able to proceed forward. Yeah,

Awesome. Alright, Anna. We are getting into October. Things are getting a little scarier. I'm joking. Can you share a story where your TCO analysis was like, shocking, a little scary, maybe made you change your direction of how you were proceeding forward?

Anna Geller, MRO Category Manager - Venture Steel: Yes. I'm not gonna say shocking.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): Okay.

Anna Geller, MRO Category Manager - Venture Steel: But like we recently did, we were looking at deploying a new inventory scanning system, so it was hardware. And originally our return on investment didn't really look that good. And we really our position is we wanted to deploy these because they were longer range in our minds.

It was gonna add efficiency. But at first when I was gathering my data from, operations and shipping, it was like, okay, our shipment, errors are only this many per month. So they were under undervaluing the actual number of errors that were happening. So then when you really delve deeper, you said, okay, look, you're actually, you have all these different errors and it's so by the end of it, when we revisited the analysis it actually was a shorter ROI like payback period. So it went from being. Not being pushed to approval to actually being pushed to the goal

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): to the end. Awesome. What a great example. You were probably like, you were probably like, thank thank heavens we have all of this information, right?

Yes. So you could be able to forge that path forward and actually get to approval. Awesome. Okay, Pierre, you're gonna round us out and then we're gonna be Sure thing, taking questions from this lovely audience here today. How do you measure success of a p TCO driven sourcing decision over time?

Pierre Beaulieu, Global Sourcing Lead – Computershare: So the way that you can do it, and that I find is important is always go back to the original goal that you defined, that you set yourself for, right? So if the return on investment was. Three years, and you have to monitor during those three years if you're actually getting the return on investments.

And through those three years, you'll have a lot of lessons learned, a lot of change in directions. But it's important to document them, right? Yeah. So sometimes the business was going into one direction. You help forecast into that direction. You help them in that direction a year and a half later.

They did an acquisition and now they have three systems and everything has changed. But you have to go back to the original view, the original knowledge and see the success that this view had. And if there's no the, it's not yielding the success that you were looking for, that's where you start going back into kinda lessons learned.

But I think it's important to, on a quarterly basis, sit down with your finance team. Have the understanding measurements of the performance of your initiative and have them sign off so that you then gain the confidence for all your other projects that you're working on. Saying, yes, we're not just selling, there's an expression in f it's called shoveling clouds, right?

So you're just going like this and there's, you're just sales pitching to the organization all the time. This will by circling back with finance on a quarterly basis, will then solidify future outcomes for your other RFPs and projects that you do.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): I'm gonna have to use shoveling clouds. That's a new one.

Is that like blurring

Julie Wuerth, Strategic Sourcing Manager – Busch Vacuum Solutions: smoke

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): or Yeah, blowing

Julie Wuerth, Strategic Sourcing Manager – Busch Vacuum Solutions: smoke, yeah.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): Nailing jello to a tree maybe. Little bit. I dunno. Okay. Very good. So it's your time. We're up here for you. You have all of the, this knowledge up here around TCO, so let's open it up for some questions.

No,

yeah, we have one in the back, two up front here.

Audience: Oh. And your name? My name is Stephanie Dupree. I'm the Director of strategic Partnerships for Highline. So I'm on the vendor side. Yeah. It's refreshing hearing from procurement people that are talking about TCO and not peace price. 'cause I, it's the world I live in. So a question I had that could help me on my side is.

Pierre pointed out when you're looking at pieces, most of the time you're comparing the exact same pieces. So that's where consultative selling and value added programs come into play. Could you tell me for you, on your side, what value added programs actually drive the most value and are the most intriguing and beneficial to you?

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): Who wants to take that one?

Pierre Beaulieu, Global Sourcing Lead – Computershare: Sure. So I would talk about. Value our program is industry knowledge and why the industry is going in a trend, right? So if you go back to maybe I saw gloves under someone's seat there, so safety gloves. They're great, by the way. Those ones. So safety gloves there's different colors, different strength, different types and different size for.

Women's hand and men's hand, which is surprisingly not standard in their organization. Like we have women's and distribution center that have men's gloves and it goes at the end like this. I think bringing the trends and then justifying your total cost of ownership through that trend is gonna yield value to the organization because this is something we can sell back within the organization saying.

Listen, everyone's gonna go there. Let's be the first, or let's be the second because it's already been implemented. There's a business case associated with it. So I think that helps. Great.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): Okay.

Anna Geller, MRO Category Manager - Venture Steel: Do

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): you wanna add

Anna Geller, MRO Category Manager - Venture Steel: on? Maybe I wanna add to that. Yeah. So I'm gonna echo on innovation. So if you have maybe you have two suppliers.

And they have the same price, and you're trying to decide between the two. Maybe what I would look at is how innovative is the company what is their, green strategy? Are you more sustainable than the other company? Things depending on the product, maybe you're afraid. Inco terms, who's responsible for what and at what point?

Maybe who's. Responsible for insurance. And then all the way over to your accounting, so your payment terms. So are you giving us a good term? We're always looking for a early payment discount, so if that's something that you can offer, we sway over to the, to that supplier that can offer that.

Okay. We had two up here. Yep.

Audience: Question will be Julie. Whoa. Julie, you mentioned a decision matrix, I believe Uhhuh. So I'm on the supplier side. Do you find that it often. Helps if you share the categories. And then I'm not sure if you were mentioning like a pew matrix where it, maybe it's weighted. Do you typically share that before with the suppliers or is that something that you find maybe not sharing, actually adds more value to the RFP process?

Julie Wuerth, Strategic Sourcing Manager – Busch Vacuum Solutions: I would take the attributes, the must and the wants, and I would share those with the vendor. Ask questions or it's, it's either an element of cost or it's a question that you can ask. In terms of, it could be payment terms, it could be piece price, but then the other things like, how close are you?

How quickly can you come and repair? What is your plan in this situation? Experiential questions and then their answers and get weighted against the other vendors or ranked against the other vendors. I wouldn't necessarily give the weight out. I think that would be giving a little bit too much.

I don't even like to give that out. I like to. I like to go through and get the weights with the internal stakeholders, but then hold them off to the side so nobody can see as you're ranking the vendors, which question had what weight, and let's just see how it shakes out, so I have one meeting to say, all right, how, what are your criteria and how would you weight them? And then when the quotes come back in rank them together it gives a certain level of objectivity. To making a source selection. But even if you wanna go with the vendor that doesn't have the most points at the bottom of the decision analysis maybe you have reasons for that.

So there's always the question at the end, what is the risk of going with the top vendor? What are the risks of going with the second vendor? What would you, can you mitigate those risks? Things like that go into making the final decision. I think if you Google it, you can find a decision analysis matrix out there.

Pierre Beaulieu, Global Sourcing Lead – Computershare: Yeah I just add to this as well, like you can be transparent in your evaluation matrix to your supplier, but to, I'll call it level one, right? So you're gonna say, okay, the interview process of the supplier is 10 points internally in the 10 points you have. Okay. Question one's gonna be word six, question two, two, and so on.

That you don't share with the supplier, but the interview, they know the interview is important or not important depending on the rest of the wing. So you can, it's being transparent to a certain extent.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): Yeah. I think it depends on what you're buying.

Pierre Beaulieu, Global Sourcing Lead – Computershare: Yeah.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): As we had, I think one more question up here or over here.

Okay.

Audience: Hi, my name's Matt. I work on the supplier side. My question centers more around centralized procurement versus decentralized, where procurement's not quarterbacking and driving the decision, but it's say maybe a plant manager, facility manager, operations. What are great ways to support procurement teams as they're trying to influence those?

Kind of decentralized stakeholders knowing that there's value in centralizing procurement and looking at TCO, from an enterprise level instead of an individual plant level. Any suggestions on how to better engage and work with kind of those decentralized models?

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): P smiling down there, you wanna take that one?

Or Anna?

Pierre Beaulieu, Global Sourcing Lead – Computershare: Anna, you wanna

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): go

Pierre Beaulieu, Global Sourcing Lead – Computershare: ahead? Sure. So I would say tell them to call their procurement team because they're not supposed to buy it directly, and that's the first step. But it's also, help them communicate it back to their sourcing team internally saying, Hey, there's an opportunity here.

We see that, if your organization as a whole would leverage what you're selling have them put you in touch with their procurement team because they might not have an internal relationship that's strong enough. If you send them a deck, they forward the deck and it goes into file 13.

So you wanna make sure that they have a quick introduction to someone, whether it's a sourcing specialist or the head of sourcing. Just someone that can, will understand the total cost of ownership and will have connection within the broader organization.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): Okay. I think unless there was really quick, we might have a half of a question left.

Let's do

Announcer: one quick

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): look. Okay. There's one up here I think.

Audience: Hi. So I'm Garino Associate Director for capital and MRO at Clarks. It's been only six months but a lot of background on, on this. Have you ever experienced to be in a very siloed company where you try to sell or explain the TCO? Because TCO tells everybody talks about TCO, the virtue of TCO and everything, but it's hard to make people embrace the holistic way of the TCO.

Like finance will just look at my free cash flow. And and all those kind of things. Engineering will just look at. I need to be on the spend. Okay. And that's it. The operation, it's okay, my changeover is my maintenance cost, which sometimes they don't ask those questions. Or Have you ever experienced how you breaked being a, in a siloed structure to make sure that people get the buying of that?

Because it's key, because TCO, it's a holistic thing.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): Yeah.

Audience: But most of company are very siloed. Organized and structured.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): We could have had the whole panel conversation on that question. Yeah,

Pierre Beaulieu, Global Sourcing Lead – Computershare: we're all pressing on the buzzer to

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): answer.

Julie Wuerth, Strategic Sourcing Manager – Busch Vacuum Solutions: I would say, I would definitely say get 'em all in, get all of the stakeholders in a room, because it's not just what's in it for one it's what's in it for all of them, like Anna was saying, what's in it for love

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): box?

Julie Wuerth, Strategic Sourcing Manager – Busch Vacuum Solutions: What's in it for me? But no, but you have to explain that it's the benefits across all of the stakeholders.

It may meet. One's goals, but not so much the others, but on the net effect is better for the company. That's one suggestion.

Pierre Beaulieu, Global Sourcing Lead – Computershare: Yeah. I would tell them find a reason not to go with TCO. What's the risk there of not doing it? And then how the impact, and, yeah, you'll make money this year and then in two years down the road your costs are quadruple, so might as well look into it.

Audience: Yeah. But this u it's a very long term. So approach in terms of how you see the benefits. So let's say for me, I'm a

Pierre Beaulieu, Global Sourcing Lead – Computershare: manufacturer, and let's say you look at a 10 year dere of the equipment. So you'll look at your TCO

Audience: on a 10 year perspective.

Pierre Beaulieu, Global Sourcing Lead – Computershare: Yeah.

Audience: So between,

Pierre Beaulieu, Global Sourcing Lead – Computershare: oh,

sorry.

Audience: So between the acquisition, the operation, and the disposal of the equipment.

You really want to before you talk about getting the feedback. Yeah. So getting the feedback from operation. Okay, the manufacturer said change over it's 30 minutes. Is it really 30 minutes? The conception of energy, is this the cost of the maintenance? Is this the part of the installation You can get quickly the feedback from that, right?

But the operation part takes time.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): You have to have a governance model around,

Audience: Yeah. And how in fact you convince people that they've never been in TCO that okay, you'll see those.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): Okay.

Audience: Find the result, but it's gonna be only 4, 5, 6 years from now.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): Yeah. You might not even be in the role anymore.

Pierre Beaulieu, Global Sourcing Lead – Computershare: Yeah.

Audience: Yes.

Amanda Prochaska, Founder & Chief Wonder Officer – Wonder Services (Moderator): Maybe.

Or retired.

So here we're outta time, but what I'm going to ask is if you can chat with these folks on the panel about, because it's a longer answer. I have a feeling. Let's connect in the hallways and maybe at lunch, and then we can go through it and anyone else wants to. Sit at our table and have that conversation more than happy to.

So with that said, thank you so much to all thank you. Three of you, Julie, thank you. First panel done. Thanks all of you for for being such a great audience today.

Pierre Beaulieu, Global Sourcing Lead – Computershare: Thank you.

Yeah. Alright. Thank you so much everyone.