Archer Daniels Midland (ADM, Decatur, IL) is a worldwide processor of agricultural products like soybeans, corn, wheat and cocoa. The products are made into food and animal feed ingredients, renewable fuels and naturally derived chemicals. As its slogan declares, the company considers itself “resourceful by nature.”
John Taylor directs corporate and supplier diversity for ADM North America. The company’s supplier diversity program started in 2001, he says.
“We launched it in response to customers looking for second-tier information for their own supplier diversity programs, and also because we wanted to work with minority and women entrepreneurs, who would bring quality, service and cost advantages to our supply chain.”
First steps
“We developed a taskforce and a president’s council to determine how we were going to move the initiative forward,” Taylor recalls. The first move was to get buy-ins from ADM’s many divisions, and to determine what they hoped to accomplish through supplier diversity.
“Then we partnered with our strategic sourcing unit to leverage our spend across the entire ADM enterprise,” Taylor notes. The sourcing unit reports up to operations, while the supplier diversity function reports to human resources. “Our spend with M/WBEs has grown by 420 percent from where we started,” Taylor reports.
Certification encouraged
ADM strongly encourages certification through NMSDC and WBENC. In fact, “If we’re looking at an organization we think may do a significant amount of business with ADM, certification becomes a requirement,” Taylor explains.
Right from the beginning ADM has been deeply involved with the certification councils at the national level. The company is represented on two NMSDC industry groups: the food and beverage industry group, which Taylor co-chaired for four years, and the consumer products group, which he’s co-chairing now. He’s also an online instructor for a new NMSDC course.
The company is involved at the local level too. “We’re tied into the Central Illinois Supplier Development Council, a regional council of NMSDC, and we’ve sponsored a local kickoff luncheon for WBENC.”
Mentoring
Mentoring is informal so far. When Taylor’s people find likely M/WBEs, “We bring them in and introduce them to the buyers of the types of services and products they offer.” Within the purchasing function, ADM has supplier diversity champions in transportation, IT, facilities management, sourcing, chemicals and HR.
CGN: massive project, continuing relationship
ADM’s relationship with CGN & Associates started through the CIO’s office in ADM’s IT department, says Aditya (Eddie) Nath, CEO and founding partner.
CGN is a business performance consulting firm which currently considers itself a technology and business performance partner for Fortune 100 companies. It has been doing business with ADM since 1999, predating the corporation’s formal supplier diversity program.
“We had been trying to get a meeting with ADM’s CIO for a year,” Nath recalls. “When the meeting finally came about, we walked out with a single-page document describing a completely new electronic platform for e-commerce that ADM wanted us to bid on.”
Big-time business
This was big-time business-to-business, Nath notes. “It would let farmers trade grain while sitting in their cornfields on their tractors!”
Taylor agrees with that analysis. “If we can bring something to the farmers that makes business more efficient for them, it also increases our ability to gather the raw materials. A lot of our major producers are very savvy in electronic trading,” he declares.
CGN bid against some very large companies, won the project, and built the platform. “I think it’s still the only platform of its type in existence anywhere, and the bedrock of ADM’s e-com trading,” Nath says.
“It was worth more than $1.5 million back then, quite a massive project and very successful.”
More contracts working
Since that successful beginning, “We’ve probably put in a quarter of a million hours of work for ADM,” Nath says.
“CGN’s largest current project is an international system that will be used to settle contracts all over Europe. It includes functions like pricing, inventory management, trading and shipping.”
From the start, ADM’s Taylor notes, “It was clear to our IT folks that we can do projects on a world-class scale that are more robust and efficient, and bring them in under budget by having them done by CGN.”
The new system was developed on three continents at the same time. “It’s been quite a challenge but CGN and ADM stepped up to it together and I think we’re going to have a beautiful product,” Nath says.
He adds that his group has “worked on more than half a dozen interesting projects for ADM. We appreciate the opportunity the company has given us to bring these skills to the table.
“ADM has been instrumental in our growth, and as our projects grew we grew as well.”
Founding CGN
Aditya Nath, CEO and founding partner, Seshadri Guha, president and founding partner, and their colleague Patrick Cheung started CGN more than a dozen years ago. “We were all working for a very high-end engineering services company,” Nath explains. “We all realized the value of information in the globalization and outsourcing trend that had just started. We focused on business process and IT and started CGN with that theme, aiming to make our company a major player.
“I have enough of a technical background to be dangerous,” Nath notes with a smile. In fact, he has a bachelors in EE from the Roorkee campus of the Indian Institute of Technology, and MS degrees in EE and computer engineering from the University of Michigan. He’s also completed a year-long executive program at the Kellogg Management Institute. “My role in our relationship with ADM is to know their business and their needs. Our consultants and expert technicians bring that vision to life.”
Comfortable from the first
Besides ADM, CGN works with John Deere and Caterpillar, “so we understand the sophistication of the agriculture business quite well,” Nath notes. “I think that was part of the reason ADM felt comfortable with us from the first.”
CGN has also become a supplier to Ford, General Motors, Bell Northern Research, GE, State Farm, the state of Illinois and more. Its primary focus is in the manufacturing, financial services and government sectors. The company has about 175 employees in a number of offices on three continents; 120 of them are based in the U.S.
Mutual help at NMSDC
CGN has been helpful to and helped by the Chicago Minority Business Diversity Council (CMBDC), NMSDC’s Chicago affiliate. At a recent CMBDC business opportunity fair, CGN sponsored the registration desk, set up the event computers and participated as an exhibitor. “CMBDC has opened many doors for CGN,” Nath says.
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