Burns & McDonnell
Melody Birmingham is SVP of Supply Chain and CPO at Duke Energy. Brittany Bennett is Assistant Department Manager-Industrial Electrical Solutions Group at Burns & McDonnell. Byron Witherspoon is Director of Supplier Diversity at Ameren. Sydney Furbush is Manager of Supplier Diversity at SDG&E.
It takes lots of planning for energy and utilities companies to maximize supplier diversity. This panel at the Burns & McDonnell Utilities Diversity Roundtable discussed the importance of a strong network of diverse suppliers for all utility operations and how it impacted business resilience in 2020.
Assistant Department Manager-Industrial Electrical Solutions Group, Burns & McDonnell, Brittany Bennett: We're going to discuss maximizing diverse supplier utilization, what this truly means, how to advance, and set goals. Also, talk about what's been going on during COVID, as well as within our strong network of diverse suppliers for all of our utility operations.
Director of Supplier Diversity, Ameren, Byron Witherspoon: From Ameren's perspective, we talk about the impact of COVID from a diverse business perspective. We've grown our diverse spend last year by twenty-five percent, but intentional business practice does lend itself to moving the needle.
Time will tell how this goes, because we all had to pivot so quickly with respect to technology. This was not limited to diverse companies and the smaller companies in terms of the digital divide and some amplification in the digital divide, in terms of having the scalability to have the technological resources needed to stay present.
We haven't seen it yet, but I think you're going to start seeing an amplification there with respect to how do we get companies to get in, and what sort of technological platforms will we be using? What's going to fit within our diverse suppliers, small local companies, and resources, because for us, cyber is an increasingly big concern.
When you start talking about some of our cybersecurity metrics, we have to make sure we don't unintentionally have any onerous language that may unnecessarily preclude diverse companies from engaging because of cyber issues. That's a balance that we have to walk.
SVP of Supply Chain and CPO, Duke Energy, Melody Birmingham: What tells me if our culture is evolving is when our business unit partners come to us and make sure we have diverse suppliers in that mix.
I measure how we're dealing with supplier diversity, not only using those quantitative goals, our spend percentage, the number of events we host, and the number of mentors or proteges that come out of that, but also how we evolve as a culture, where our employees, and business unit leaders are wanting to ensure that we're engaging.
We're reaching out to diverse suppliers and have been able to evolve in that way by enlisting champions within each of our business units, so they can share in our objectives to advance supplier diversity. They come to us instead of my organization's supplier diversity having to go to them with these opportunities.
Manager of Supplier Diversity, SDG&E, Sydney Furbush: In spite of the pandemic, we had an amazing year. We did over 41.6 percent of our total spend in goods and services with diverse suppliers.
As we look at 2021, we're increasing that goal, because what we see is there are always opportunities where regardless of the challenges that we're facing, a lot of our suppliers have been able to pivot, make adjustments and take some leadership roles, as we've seen during this pandemic.
Next year, we're looking at a forty-two percent goal, in our total goods and services for our suppliers. In addition, we noticed some of our minority suppliers took a hit this past year. So, we're taking an increased focus and ensuring that specifically as an African-American sector that we do more work in trying to bring more suppliers in that space and to help identify unique opportunities so they can be successful in the area.
You talk about differences between diverse and local suppliers. There was one thing that we looked at in San Diego, and it's not just SDG&E as a utility, but all the other large corporations in San Diego County.
We noticed a lot of our small businesses struggled during this pandemic. We've taken an extra effort to help those small businesses not just get back online but help them thrive post pandemic.
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