Box Establishes an Inclusive and Diverse Supply Chain

The Challenge

Foster equity, inclusion and diversity while widening the pool of suppliers

Address inequality and injustice through supplier diversity, in order to maximize shareholder value.

Leveraging advanced analytics to automate supplier diversity

Developed supplier diversity dashboards across 1,800+ active suppliers — empowering decisionmakers with insights to create a more equitable portfolio of suppliers.

Overview

Fostering equity, inclusion and diversity while widening the pool of suppliers

Box is one of the most widely used enterprise technologies around the world for secure content management, workflow, and collaboration. Although Box is a cloud technology company, the role of procurement and sourcing is still widely entrenched in daily operations — from supporting sales and marketing needs to daily operations.

As our communities continue to struggle with systemic racism, the opportunity to enact change and serve as leaders in the fight towards equality is now. Box has always been a socially responsible company and this theme is ingrained throughout the DNA of the company. Within the procurement organization, Linda Chuan, Chief racial injustice through supplier diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in hopes of promoting an inclusive approach to procurement.

With Arkestro, Box has been able to transform their procurement operations, creating transparency into their entire supplier ecosystem and providing actionable insights via diversity KPI dashboards to leadership. As a result, they have created a level of supplier equity and diversity that is unrivaled, all while improving the overall control of their supply chain.

Approach

Breaking barriers to make a positive impact

With a vision to ensure Box’s supply chain is proactively setting an example for other companies when it comes to supplier diversity and inclusion, Linda realized that the current processes and systems in place were not enough. Although the procurement organization tried to, they had limited visibility into the metrics they needed to make informed decisions that supported their diversity and inclusion initiatives. “When I joined Box, I saw how important diversity, equity and inclusion was to our customers, investors and analysts,” explained Linda. “We had the opportunity to make a huge impact with how we manage our network of suppliers.”

Prior to Linda taking the helm, the impact of supplier diversity and equity wasn’t measured beyond classifying suppliers by business type. Furthermore, only those who owned the relationships with the suppliers had more insights into diversity indicators such as whether the business was family, minority or veteran-owned , but even that was limited and difficult to scale. They lacked detailed information about workforce makeup, how socially responsible they are, etc. And when they did capture diversity data on their suppliers, pulling reports was highly manually intensive which served as a deterrent to even evaluate diversity as a decision factor.

Result

More than 24% spend with diverse suppliers and growing

To help establish an automated system that leverages machine learning to help streamline the efforts to create a democratic procurement function, Linda brought in Arkestro to serve as their underlying procurement and sourcing operations platform. Box utilizes Arkestro as a supplier diversity solution with KPI dashboards and exception alerts within the Arkestro platform.

“Visibility into supplier diversity was limited to the types of businesses we were working with. Arkestro has given us more control and visibility we partner with, allowing us to take our diversity and inclusion program to the next level.” – Linda Chuan