Company: Hilton Supply Management
Company Description: Led by President and Global Head Anu Saxena, Hilton Supply Management (HSM) is the procurement division of Hilton, leveraging over $11B in spend to negotiate competitive contracts with industry-leading suppliers that ultimately reduce hotel costs and increase owner value. As the only global hospitality procurement powerhouse, HSM services 11,000+ properties across 140+ brands in 120 countries.
Nomination Category: Product & Service Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Best New Product or Service of the Year - Business Services
 Nomination Title: Centralizing Corporate Procurement by Adopting Procure-to-Pay
- Which will you submit for your nomination in this category, a video of up to five (5) minutes, explaining the features, functions, benefits, and results to date of the nominated product or service, OR written answers to the questions? (Choose one):
Written answers to the questions
- If you are submitting a video of up to five (5) minutes in length, provide the URL of the video here, OR attach it to your entry via the "Add Attachments, Videos, or Links to This Entry" link above, through which you may also upload a copy of your video. If you are submitting written answers to the questions, please provide them in the appropriate spaces below:
- If you are nominating a brand-new product or service, state the date on which it was released. If you are nominating a new version of an existing product or service, state the date on which the update was released:
HSM released the first iteration of our Coupa procure-to-pay tool, internally called SmartSpend, for all Hilton Corporate users in 2021. We have since made numerous enhancement updates to improve the product based on supplier feedback and internal system upgrades. Our most recent platform enhancement took place in April 2023 with the introduction of Coupa’s Risk Assess platform to integrate our legal due diligence, supplier privacy assessment, and EcoVadis sustainability assessments together to harness the ability to review our supplier base from all angles within one tool.
- Describe the features, functions, and benefits of the nominated product or service (up to 350 words):
Total 284 words used.
Two years ago, Hilton’s Corporate Procurement team, led by Dorothy Hildebrandt, along with Vance Carpenter leading Hilton’s Center of Excellence team, embarked on a journey to significantly enhance the purchasing and payment experience for partnering suppliers. After researching available options and evaluating supplier needs, we launched our procure-to-pay tool powered by Coupa and internally branded “SmartSpend.”
SmartSpend is a cloud-based platform that allows HSM to take a comprehensive approach to spend management and supplier relationship activities, conducting all payment requests, e-sourcing, supplier risk assessments, and contracting functions in one centralized location. Using SmartSpend, our corporate suppliers can receive electronic purchase orders (POs), digitally flip POs into invoices, access invoice and payment status online 24/7 and enjoy increased visibility to all transactions.
Internally, SmartSpend enables our Corporate Procurement team to seamlessly manage key interconnected information about our suppliers, including contact and payment information, supplier contracts and associated amendments, supplier risk assessments, required approvals per Hilton policy, and payment tracking within Accounts Payable.
Prior to our team’s adoption of SmartSpend, HSM operated under a more center-led procurement model, with certain contracts funneling through Corporate Procurement and others managed by various functional leaders. The lack of a universal contracting process or platform meant HSM could not effectively track a supplier’s total contracted spend or view all negotiated contract terms in one place, leading to gaps in our organization’s negotiating capabilities.
Since our adoption of SmartSpend, Corporate Procurement has become a centralized processing hub where all Hilton business functions submit both spend and contracting requests. The implementation of this cloud-based platform has created significantly greater spend visibility across our enterprise, as well as strengthening partner relationships with our pipeline of over 3,000 suppliers around the globe.
- Reference any attachments of supporting materials throughout this nomination and how they provide evidence of the claims you have made in this nomination (up to 250 words):
- Outline the market performance, critical reception, and customer satisfaction with the product or service to date. State monetary or unit sales figures to date, if possible, and how they compare to expectations or past performance. Provide links to laudatory product or service reviews. Include some customer testimonials, if applicable. (up to 350 words):
Total 229 words used.
As is often the case when introducing new technology, the initial adoption rate of SmartSpend among our partnering suppliers was slow. HSM conducted numerous trainings to help suppliers with SmartSpend implementation, and we also distributed regular communications on the platform’s adoption in the early stages of the launch.
Over time, we have seen a steady and marked increase in our customer satisfaction, particularly regarding the platform’s efficiencies around the requisition-to-PO process and the ability to view supplier payments against POs.
Most significantly, HSM’s Corporate Procurement team managed $300M in spend in 2022, according to SmartSpend reporting. Just one year later in 2023, our team is managing nearly $1B in spend and those numbers continue to climb.
We are also leveraging SmartSpend’s capabilities to help us more effectively track progress toward our organization’s ESG goals, as the platform’s integration makes it easy to measure the percentage of our spend invested with small, diverse and locally-owned suppliers. As of July 2023, HSM’s YTD diverse share of spend rose to 15% (two points ahead of our YTD target), and in May of this year, our organization saw its best month for diverse share spend to date. Our ability to track total supplier spend and diverse spend share in real time is helping us stay on track toward our overarching goal of creating a more inclusive and sustainable supply chain for all partners.
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