Our NaVOBA Corporate Advisory Council (CAC) completed its first meeting on Friday, November 14^th.  Leaders from corporate purchasing, procurement, supplier diversity and diversity programs, as well as from NaVOBA and Vetrepreneur magazine joined into the conversation.  Participants spent their time discussing real world veteran supplier diversity topics, sharing best practices and generally got to know each other better.

Rich McCormack, gave an overview of the current model being used to select NaVOBA’s annual list of “Best Corporations for Veteran Owned Business.”  After a review of other supplier diversity models for idea generation and best practice sharing, the CAC summarized the following recommended improvements to the model:

-Increase flexibility in reporting time frames.  Allow corporations to submit their most recent figures to allow for variation in fiscal calendars/ reporting periods.

-Increase data-flagging options to be sure all entrants are making an “apples to apples” comparison of spend data.

-Add criteria to assess executive level support of the program.  Does the CEO have a statement present on the company supplier diversity home page?  What other supplier diversity participation is shown by the company’s executive leadership team?

-Add criteria to reflect the dispersion of supplier diversity goals throughout the organization.  Who owns the supplier diversity related purchasing/ procurement goals within the organization?  Do the goals (and possibly related compensation) live solely within the supplier diversity program or are they shared among the “decision makers” within the purchasing groups?

Marcea Weiss, Veteran Business Advocate for NaVOBA gave an overview of what NaVOBA is doing today to benchmark veteran-focused supplier diversity programs across the country.  This data can be found at: http://www.navoba.com/f1000.aspx and has been found to be very useful for startup supplier diversity programs and diversity professionals as a whole.  Participants were generally interested in reviewing this data and location. 

CAC members brainstormed ideas on the council as a whole could best work together to continue to advance the veteran business movement.  They requested marketing material with a summary of the business case for creating and growing a veteran-focused supplier diversity program.  NaVOBA will create this material and make it available to all CAC members for use at the various supplier diversity events that they attend throughout the year. 

Chris Hale, President of NaVOBA, asked the CAC members to summarize the reasons that supplier diversity programs might resist including veteran suppliers from their ranks.  Overall, the group had varying opinions on this topic, but agreed that it is not a difficult change to make.  Jackie LaJoie from Merck Corporation described it as a simple matter or as a general “retooling” of most of today’s supplier diversity programs.  Charles Gillian from AstraZeneca recommended networking with the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) to make the most of the CAC’s efforts and agreed to take the first steps in building this relationship.  Art McClellan from General Motors Corporation gave an overview of GM’s effort to tie in with employee-based affinity groups to help in moving forward with supplier diversity and diversity efforts as a whole.

The next NaVOBA CAC meeting is currently scheduled for Thursday, March 12^th.  A sincere thank you to all of our corporate supplier diversity members and partners for their help in working together to advance the veteran business movement and to continue to Buy Veteran!

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