How to be a Star at Your Company

[From iSource Business, January 2001] William S. Schaefer is vice president of procurement services at IBM Global Services, based in Raleigh, N.C. In 1999, IBM recognized his accomplishments along with those of the entire e-procurement team by awarding them Lou Gerstner's annual Chairman's Award for putting e-business into action at IBM. Partricia Moser is director of global purchasing at EDS Canada, a division of the Plano, Texas-based EDS. She has been recognized for conducting the company's most successful online auction for contract services to date. Her busy speaking schedule at e-commerce conferences (four engagements in the last four months of 2000) speaks to her status in the e-procurement field. Both Moser and Schaefer, also listed among the e-procurement leaders on page 62 of this issue, are superstars in their organization.

Neither Schaefer nor Moser planned on a career in purchasing. Schaefer spent much of his nearly 20 years at IBM in manufacturing and settled on purchasing only in the mid-1990s as the legendary Gene Richter was re-engineering procurement at Big Blue. For her part, Moser holds two bachelor of sciences degrees (in chemistry and psychology) and a master's of business administration in marketing. Her career path began 15 years ago in international marketing for a biotech firm and led to purchasing through the operations side.

Today, Schaefer and Moser are earning recognition as leaders in the purchasing field both for their own forward thinking and for where they are taking purchasing at their organizations. Their respective journeys provide two alternative routes for purchasers that would seek not merely to follow in others' footsteps but to become e-procurement leaders in their own right.

The Purchaser as Engineer

Schaefer still sounds a bit like an engineer: "I have always been a person who enjoys creating new things, seeing a problem and going after it until we solve it," he says. In addition to having a penchant for problem-solving, Schaefer boasts a chess enthusiast's affinity for planning several moves ahead. Clearly, these qualities have helped him on his path to e-procurement leadership.

IBM hired Schaefer out of a graduate engineering degree program at Georgia Tech, and he later obtained an MBA from Duke University. His first positions at the company were in an organization that supported outsourced product development and outsourced product manufacturing for IBM. Despite this initial experience with procurement, Schaefer went on to spend most of his early career at IBM in various manufacturing roles, and IBM eventually appointed him to the Corporate Manufacturing Staff and later to run networking hardware manufacturing operating in Raleigh. "At that time," Schaefer says, "procurement was buried within the manufacturing organization at IBM and was not recognized for the value it could contribute to the company."

It was not until IBM began revolutionizing its own buying processes under then-Chief Procurement Officer Gene Richter in the mid-1990s that Schaefer began to be excited by the opportunities purchasing offered. Schaefer was a member of IBM's original procurement executive council, set up to re-engineer the company's purchasing processes and oversee the e-procurement implementation. During IBM's procurement transformation, the company focused on re-engineering the process of procurement and payables and then exhibiting them with the appropriate Web technology. One of these focus areas, for example, in indirect procurement was maximizing "buyerless" transactions