ORO Labs' Sabih Rozales Details Importance of Improving People, Processes, and Systems: Pros to Know Award

Supply & Demand Chain Executive: My name is Marina Mayer, Editor-in-Chief of Food Logistics and Supply & Demand Chain Executive, and I am here with Sabih Rozales, Solution Architect at ORO Labs. Sabih is a recipient of this year's Pros to Know Award in the Leaders in Excellence category.

Let's talk about you. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey, and how you got to this current stage in your career.

Sabih Rozales: Thank you. I'm originally from Turkey. I studied chemical engineering, and then, as a result, I started in the chemical industry. I spent a few years there, but from laboratory to logistics to process mining.

I had the opportunity to learn the operations in much deeper sense.

And then I had the opportunity to work for Vodafone for 15 years in procurement organization in different roles. I became even a category manager at some point, then I moved to the Center of Excellence in the headquarters of procurement, not to manage the local spend, but also create a global impact, always with procurement, always side-by-side with digitalization, transformation, cost programs, which is always part of procurement.

And it's been more than 20 years since then.

Supply & Demand Chain Executive: One of the things outlined in your submission is how you bring a combination of deep supply chain domain knowledge, core procurement and sourcing expertise, along with architectural rigor and pragmatic leadership. Why are these factors so important for the success of today's supply chains?

Sabih Rozales: I think there are a number of things that we see. So first of all, when we look today, the procurement is not the procurement like 20 years ago, and this is maybe cliche that applies to any industry, practically. But when it comes to procurement, one of the core things that we see is, procurement is not just looking to the suppliers and the prices. Procurement just became an orchestrator, a gatekeeper, or accountable to identify risk and managing the entire supply chain.

So it's very important that there is no single skill, but whenever you have humans, we will talk maybe about the agents, that you actually need to have a view from different perspectives to find the right balance between your current partners, governance with them, and how you explore the market, so that you are not just looking to the price, considering the global risks, but at the same time, you have a view on how we can digitalize, how we can automate, how we can even make your decisions are smarter by leveraging the AI technology that comes to our door today. So, therefore, the decision frameworks are getting more and more complex, and you really need to be able to understand different perspectives before you actually make a decision for your success.

Supply & Demand Chain Executive: Also in your application, it talked about how you played a central role in shaping how the company approaches procurement orchestration. What does this entail? Tell us a little bit more.

Sabih Rozales: After those 15 years at Vodafone, and my last role that was Vodafone actually to build a procurement orchestration solution for autonomous sourcing.

And since I joined ORO, I continue to focus on the orchestration. So, what is really important when we talk about orchestration, which is not necessarily a new concept, but more heavily being discussed nowadays, is that you have, first of all, multiple systems. You have sourcing platforms, you have contracting platforms, you have P2P platforms, you have risk, and all these stakeholders that are around you.

Therefore, someone that's designing how an end-to-end process is to be orchestrated, that person needs to have some knowledge, some context about how does contracting works, how does a P2P process work.

When you have people that not necessarily have this entire view, then you are missing an opportunity to automate and give better experience to the users.

This is why at least as a humble person, what I'm trying to do, all the learnings that I had from my previous life, but as well as all the learnings that we get from customers, I'm playing to help them to understand what is the potential that orchestration can bring to them. What is the art of possible that they can move, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not in 5 months, but maybe in a year, so that they have a view on their roadmap in a way, so that they know where to start and what to follow by taking into account the entire procurement systems and the processes, the landscape, in a way.

Supply & Demand Chain Executive: So your focus for the coming year is to not just better software, but to better supply chain outcomes, and what is interesting about this is that everybody keeps pushing software, software, software, and you're saying, well, that's only part of the equation, so why is this?

Sabih Rozales: Even within the software example, we have people saying, I want AI, I want AI, we need AI, our boss is asking for AI. Sometimes it's not just even AI, maybe you don't even need AI, maybe there is another problem that could be another solution that can help with the problem statement that you have. So the first is to define what is the issue, what is the pain, what do we want to fix, or improve, or excel? That should typically be the starting point because that gives you your North Star on what is the better outcomes that you want to do.

And then the next step is, okay, do I need a solver for this? Do I need to put human skills into this? Or do I need to change my process to this? Because as we all know, when it becomes improving something, it's all about people, processes, and systems.

If you need a software, then yes, you need to decide which exact software is the best for you, and yes, with that software, whether you are going to rely on humans, or automation, or APIs, or AI agents to help you. But ultimately, it's not even within that software decision is good enough.

Actually, you need to look to all these aspects; that’s what makes an impact.

And if I can give you, as an example, we were working with a life sciences company. They have defined some thresholds where the people from the business can raise their purchase request, they can order to the suppliers, they can get without even involving someone from procurement. Because these were low-risk, low-value requests. But what we have proposed to them is, okay, let's keep your current software, but let's put an AI agent, in this example, that can loop to the quotation that comes from the supplier, and let us ask AI agent to check if there are any opportunities to negotiate, so that you can get a better deal for your lead times, for your payment terms, for your prices. Practically, software didn't change, but we changed our mindset with that customer that we have to say, let's leverage the technology to help the business, rather than audit something or bring a human into the loop.

This is why, depending on the problem statement or the ambition, then whether it's a software, but actually it is more about the outcomes to be planned.

Supply & Demand Chain Executive: The Leaders in Excellence category honors company leaders who've made outstanding contributions to the supply chain space. What advice do you have for other professionals in the supply chain space?

Sabih Rozales: I have my own experience, and this might not necessarily be true for everyone. But I think the recipe is to continue to learn, not giving up from learning. Don't think that, no, I know this, and I need to move to something else. Try to go as deep as possible with your knowledge, with your skills, to ability to understand, the ability to explain, ability to teach to other ones, so that you grow and grow, interact with others, learn from how others are doing. Yes, maybe one day AI will have knowledge to everything in the universe, and yes, maybe one day there will be an AI that is smarter than the combinations of all the humans in the world. Maybe, but still, I think what is really important that we invest into ourselves. We try to learn from the same and different industries, different people, more and more, so that then you can have a view on where you want to land in this industry, what is the role that you want to have, and how you want to potentially leverage the technology, if that role is relevant to you.

Supply & Demand Chain Executive: And what's something that we haven't discussed yet that is pertinent to the readers and the viewers of this interview? Like, a good takeaway?

Sabih Rozales: I mean, this might also sound cliche, but at the end of the day, it's all about collaboration. Collaboration between people, collaboration between systems, collaboration between AIs, but irrespective of that, I see the collaboration is where the strength comes.

This is also in a marriage, this is also in a big family, this is in a big large organization. So, you should find, obviously, not to overcomplicate things, but as much as possible, bring people. If I'm building, if I'm changing how our supply chain operates, ideally, it's best to bring more people that has a diverse perspective, inputs to this, so that we can, as a team, create something more impactful, achievable for those organizations, and this is what I try to do. Maybe sometimes I talk too much to those people, but I try to learn, I try to collaborate, interact more and more.

And so that we can create an impact, and this will also be my recommendation to everyone, and ultimately patience and resilience. It might not be one day, but there will be a day that they will happen.