Kumar Kannan, Director of Global Sourcing - Indirect Goods & Services at Owens Corning

Kumar Kannan


Director of Global Sourcing - Indirect Goods & Services
Owens Corning

Check out the incredible speaker line-up to see who will be joining Kumar.

Download The Latest Agenda

Practitioners-Only Day—The Rise of Procurement 3.0

Monday, October 2nd, 2017


10:55 Information Technology

With every department in your company spending some of their budgets on IT, each with different needs and different processes, it’s important to have a unified and coherent program. Discuss during this session:
• Developing relationships with the IT Stakeholders and getting the CIO’s buy-in
• Understanding future needs- not just current ones
• How product lifecycle and upgrade cycles impact the cost and buying process
• Exploiting your sourcing knowledge to show how it dovetails with their category expertise
• How the emergence of cloud and SaaS platforms impacts sourcing strategy
• The interplay of IT with other indirect categories- who owns the project?

Talent: Leadership, Management & Development

Saturday, December 2nd, 2017


11:15 Panel: Redefining Skillsets for a Next Generation Procurement Team

Attracting and retaining great talent, while also grooming for the next generation of procurement leaders, is a perennial challenge. Your procurement leaders of tomorrow require different skills than your leaders of today possess. This panel will help you decide how to determine what qualities you want in your new hires, how to spot potential leaders, and develop a comprehensive training program.
• Determine the skillsets Generation Y needs to ensure success
• Is your company willing to put the people in place, and spend the time to realize the savings?
• How a CPO can work with universities to align curriculum to real life procurement skill-set needs
• How to develop a stable recruiting source
• What must-have skills are CPOs asking recruiters and headhunters to find for them?
• Developing an internal organizational culture to nurture them, and win the retention battle