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Resources  /  Blog  /  Box and Arkestro—Procurement Key Performance Indicators and Actionable Insights For Enhanced Supplier Diversity
Sourcing Education

Box and Arkestro—Procurement Key Performance Indicators and Actionable Insights For Enhanced Supplier Diversity

July 12, 2022

Box is one of the most widely used enterprise technologies in the world for secure content management, workflow, and collaboration. Box continuously advocates for ESG and supplier diversity, but previous visibility into their supplier diversity spending was limited. That’s because Box didn’t have detailed information and access to 3rd-party databases to understand how diverse and socially responsible their supply base was. Until now. 

Supplier Diversity — Procurement’s Crucial Key Performance Indicator 

Establishing an inclusive and equitable supply base has become mission-critical for many organizations. According to McKinsey, diverse executive teams financially outperform other executive teams, and this has only strengthened over time. And the same is true for diverse supply chains. 

In 2020, Harvard Business Review reported that MBEs (minority-owned enterprises) generated $400 billion and created or preserved over 2.2 million jobs in the United States. Diversifying supply chains is more than just the right thing to do, it increases the number of potential suppliers. More potential suppliers means a decrease in cost and better products. 

Identifying Diverse Suppliers 

Locating diverse suppliers can sometimes be challenging. Most organizations rely on the survey technique. Businesses will send surveys out to suppliers in hopes they will respond with diversity information. However, suppliers get so many requests to fill out surveys such as these, oftentimes they just ignore them. It can take months of chasing suppliers. 

Predictive procurement improves the process of collecting supplier data. Using AI and ML makes it much easier to collect data, rather than trying to rely on manual surveys. Arkestro’s Predictive Procurement Orchestration platform helps Box to more easily identify, manage and calibrate the impact that their sourcing has. As a result, Box has the information to continue to build a more inclusive and equitable supply base and measure the impact of that supply base. 

The Box and Arkestro Partnership

Arkestro provides Box with actionable insights to perform historical benchmarking; diverse spend analysis; environmental, sustainability, and governing (ESG) reporting, and more. Box was looking for a solution that was automated and low touch to implement. Although their team had collected a lot of data, the majority of that data was raw and unstructured. 

Arkestro’s AI helped Box structure the data and create a dashboard so that their team could more easily identify the areas they wanted to improve. Metrics, year-over-year data, reporting by region, and volume are visible to teams rather than being on spreadsheets or email threads. 

Linda Chuan, Head of Strategic Sourcing & Procurement at Box, says, “Arkestro has helped us transform our supplier diversity initiative, and reinforce our company values in supplier diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Today, with Arkestro’s help, insightful visibility into our overall diverse supplier spend helps us be more intentional with selecting our suppliers  – for example, identifying minority, small, Black, LGBTQX, or veteran-owned businesses – then back it up with a procurement process that advocates and promotes diverse suppliers.”

How Arkestro Will Continue to Deliver for Box:

At Box, the role of procurement and sourcing is widely entrenched with

      • supplier negotiations
      • contract risk mitigations
      • supplier performance management
      • business operations
      • sales and marketing needs
      • daily procurement operations 

To help further establish an automated system that leverages machine learning (ML) to create a more diversity-focused procurement function, Box leveraged Arkestro to serve as their supplier diversity reporting and metrics dashboard reporting platform. 

With Arkestro, Box has been able to create greater transparency across their entire supplier ecosystem and provide actionable procurement KPI dashboards for leadership and GTM teams. As a result, Box has a level of supplier equity and diversity that is well above the market average, all while improving the overall control of their supply chain. 

“With Arkestro, we are able to evaluate and advocate for suppliers with fine-grained diversity data – giving us the best opportunity to not only expand our pool of suppliers where it makes sense, but to do so with inclusion and equality in mind,” continues Chuan.

The Bottom Line

Box clearly understands how important supplier diversity, equity, and inclusion is to their customers, employees, investors, and analysts. Leveraging Arkestro puts real-time supplier diversity and spend data at their fingertips. We’re excited to see where this information will take Box as they continue to pursue enhanced supplier diversity goals.