HR and Procurement: A Master Class in Partnership

Episode Summary:

Developing a strategic workforce roadmap for human resources (HR) and procurement to optimize its contingent workforce, Mastercard unleashed a program driven to greater efficiency, compliance and scalability. AGS Managed Services (AGS) Executive Director of Client Delivery Dave Corrion hosts an in-depth discussion with Mastercard executives David Feldman, vice president of contingent workforce management, and Pratik Patel, director of sourcing and supplier management, on how this partnership has yielded lasting results. 

Transcript:

Allegis Global Solutions presents the Subject to Talent Podcast, a hub for global workforce leaders to unleash the power of human enterprise. Listen in as we explore the most innovative and transformational topics impacting businesses today.

Hello and welcome to the Subject to Talent podcast. At Allegis Global Solutions, we consistently connect with our clients and partners through events, roundtables and webinars. In this episode, we are sharing a discussion from our 2025 Customer Council event, featuring our partners at Mastercard.

If you would like to connect with AGS, we are excited to invite you to our upcoming events. On August 27 we will host a virtual AGS Live featuring a client’s perspective on making an impact with a blended RPO model.

In September, meet with us in person at the CWS Summit and at the HRO Today Talent Acquisition Summit. To learn more, visit AllegisGlobalSolutions.com and search for events.

Now, let’s listen in on the discussion with Mastercard executives David Feldman, Vice President of Contingent Workforce Management, and Pratik Patel, Director of Sourcing and Supplier Management; and AGS Executive Director of Client Delivery Dave Corrion.

David Corrion: Thank you both for joining. We named this, if you look in there, Master Class For Partnership. We were able to get master in there. So, we played around with the name. So, it worked out.

It really is about partnership. So, when you think about all the things we talked about the last couple of days, and how you build a vision that might be geared towards the organization, and what you expect the program to do. Then how do you turn that into an operational strategy that's highly adopted. That hits your goals from compliance, audit, cost savings – anything you might have out there. And then you throw in the globe and how do you do that around the globe? It's a lot easier if you've got friends.

It's a lot easier for collaboration in doing a partnership. And what we thought about this, and AGS has been fortunate, we've been partners since 2012 with Mastercard and we went through milestones of building the program around what we felt was very tactical, but very important staff augmentation.

And over the last 12 plus years, it has changed based on their vision but also these two individuals in the organization driving what is next for the program. But more importantly what's most important for Mastercard, their supplier community, the end users and business groups. And we've been able to watch this and be partners in this. So, we're very grateful for that. We see it every day.

We thought it was a great opportunity for them to share how they go about it. Even your podcast, I listen to podcasts probably four or five times and I think I've gotten a couple different notes every time that I've listened to it. But it is very unique how you guys work together and how you talk about it.

So, part of it, in talking about it, I got some questions. And we'll save time if we have questions at the end, but they're here obviously spending a lot of time with you guys afterwards. But I think to get it going, just talking about partnership, but more importantly, how you guys drive your global strategy will probably answer a lot of questions. And then I can kind of play for the bench on a few of those things. Does that sound good?

David Feldman: Pratik, do want me to start?

Pratik Patel: Yeah, please. Go ahead.

David Feldman: So, a little bit of background. I've been with Mastercard now a little over three years. And Pratik, how long has it been for...

Pratik Patel: Seven.

David Feldman: Seven years for Pratik. So, when I joined in 2022, Pratik and the current team, they were already on a journey to globalize our platform. And really that was an output of a lot of executive analysis of the space of contingent workforce management. There are a lot of key things that were identified that were needed. First was actually establishing a contingent workforce function, but more importantly is what is going to be that global infrastructure to really drive not only who we partner with, but why do we do that? What are the type of contingent workers? How do we go ahead and manage this? And to say it's going to say, oh, procurement is going to run this, or HR is going to run this. That's not feasible.

So, in joining one thing and learning from Pratik – as well as our other colleagues – we felt was really important to really establish what we called an ecosystem. And really within that ecosystem that I started framing up working very closely with Pratik based upon the integral role that procurement plays, or what we call sourcing and supplier management internally, we really wanted to delineate who does what in this space. Because as you all know, and I've heard this over here in discussions, it's not just where "it's owned." There are other needs, there are other interdependencies downstream that are very important to make this work.

And so internally what we decided to do was identify who are those key stakeholders, not just that are impacted by what we do, but need to have a say in what we do. And internally at Mastercard from a contingent workforce management perspective, the way we were thinking about it as a starting point was, let's think about it from a who, a what, a how, and a why perspective.

And what we landed on first and foremost is the who will always be owned by sourcing. Who do we partner with? Who are those suppliers? What is the strategy related to that? Okay? Because that's the front end of that supply chain.

Where [the] contingent workforce manager, my function, steps in really is that, “what is the what and the how.” What are the types of contingent workers we have – the governances [and] the policies that set those definitions behind that, based upon the who? And then more importantly, how do we bring them in? How do we manage them so that to be fair, we do things the right way, [and] we don't get ourselves in trouble? In a regulated business that's very critical, but you also need to think about how do you do it efficiently.

But what's also very important is the why. Why do you go SOW? Why would you go contingent staffing? Should you go FTE? And that's where I think there's a key shared approach here too.

So not only between our own functions where we implicitly set out what are the pieces of ownership from a programmatic perspective – from a technological perspective that's sitting in my space – but more importantly the key partnership that needs to be had with sourcing to drive that.

But then we included our business owners who have an ownership piece. What we call our shared services or GBSC. They help out with transaction, management issues, management tier zero, tier one, accounting and finance on the back end and invoicing. We need to bring in our technological partners as well, in terms of the actual coding, and management and triaging a system. So, by setting this all up – what it allowed us to do is understand how our spaces interface intrinsically well. Then if he makes the decision [or] if I want to do something, we understand the interdependencies, but then more importantly the downstream interdependencies that we have as well. So that's a starting point.

Pratik Patel: Yeah. Thanks, David. I think the key thing here that you have to think about is, it takes a village. For all of us, it takes a village to be able to truly drive the optimization that you want to achieve in your organization. And if I can take a step back, if that's okay, David. So, 2018, I come into Mastercard [and] they perceive this to be one of the toughest categories because I told them, "Give me your hardest. I don't care what it is," when I came in. And the reason is because there was an influence. You have to start with influence. You have to get that influence with the supplier base, the credibility that you're listening to them. You want to understand what their value is, what their capabilities are, and how that can drive value for us. You also want the business to understand that you truly want to know what their pain points are and how you can execute on those. So, it starts with that.

And so, we did that with a value stream mapping exercise in 2018 and we identified 61 pain points that we had from our value stream mapping. And then we built out what a future state looks like and we built out expectations that we have for our supply base. So, fast-forward from that, right? So, you kind of start establishing the foundation. Then we have this need for centralization because we have a procure-to-pay system where we don't have the ability to really understand what we are paying job role, job level, even rate without going SOW to SOW. Because there's no reporting that's going to give me that in a procure-to-pay system. So, we have to have a centralized system. But then at the same time, my role expanded, and I had contingent staffing from a category management standpoint. But no one else in the company was managing really contingent workforce unless it was the supplier coming back to us and telling us, "Hey, we need your help in this or we need the help in this area."

Beeline is our VMS. The technical owner for Beeline in our system was Allegis [Global Solutions]. So, we definitely saw gaps and we needed more support. And how we got there is leveraging SOW.

So when we centralized and put SOW into the program, we put a surcharge into SOW that the suppliers fund, but it's enough to pay for the additional support we needed in the program. And that's what enables us to be where we're at today, where we have David, thank God for David, because we work very closely together so that when I see things that we're doing with our supply base that is not in alignment and it's driving risk, I'll copy David, right? And I'll say that, "Hey, this is noncompliant for these reasons, but David, feel free to chime in." Right? And then he'll always align with me or vice versa. He'll have things on his side from a compliance perspective, how it doesn't align with our sourcing strategy. So, we're able to leverage each other, that brings even more credibility across the organization. But I'll let you go and ask any other questions you have.

David Corrion: I appreciate that. That part's really important not only for our North America team, but then our EMEA team and our India team. So, I think one of the things you guys have also helped as you focus on how you get the end user business units [and] community supplier community on board with what you're envisioning, and the role they play, so there's not a gray area that they feel like they sit in. More importantly, the extension of your teams – which is our teams – that's worked extremely well. We're in phase four right now with EMEA. They know there's phase five and other stuff behind that.

This one comes up a lot in a lot of our programs and I hear you guys talk about it, we don't talk about it all the time, but I think it's important to talk about [it]. How do you balance governance with the buyer's needs at the end of the day? It may be another way of saying that we know the business is looking to get work done and their priorities, and they might care less about the other things, like somebody else owns that. How do you guys do that internally? Because we know how important that is to Mastercard. And maybe you've done such a good job, we don't have to spend a lot of time on it, but it is clearly something out there that is a battle all the time. So, I'm curious, can either of you comment on that?

Pratik Patel: Would you be okay if I start?

David Feldman: Please.

Pratik Patel: All right. To me it starts with business continuity. We cannot impact our business objectives overall. But at the same time, that may conflict with what our compliance governance components are. And so, we need to ensure that we have the right mechanisms in place and how we manage those exceptions that we need to have to continue to drive that business continuity. And so, me and David will partner all the time. And we'll talk about those trade-offs that we need to make. I'm sure you know this, but most organizations – yes, you have a standard that you need to kind of follow from an auditing perspective – but if you have to go outside of that process, you just have to document it and get the appropriate level of executive approval. So that if an audit takes place, they see, okay, you have this exception and you had this approved, move on.

So, we're not always going to be able to follow exactly what we need to do to drive business continuity. And I think we have a great partnership to understand that there's a give-and-take when it comes to the risk, but we need to just ensure that we cover ourselves should there be an audit into the reason and the rationale for why we have what we have. Anything else you want to add, David?

David Feldman: Yeah. And even thinking about what we're doing right now, we're on a globalization journey. And it's a great call out because it's always, well, if you go to an SIA, you go to a Procurecon, there's always, well, how do you drive the buy-in? How do you get the executive support to do what we're doing? And it always in my mind, the phrase I use is a burning platform. Why are you doing this? What is the burning platform that's driving this whole thing? And as Pratik highlighted, not only was there just operational need within this space, there was intrinsic compliancy in this space. Especially in the work that we do, to make sure we weren't putting ourselves at risk, which is going to impact not only our clients based upon the payment we drive with them, but our own business.

So, as we started putting together this journey to globalize, not just to say, hey, we got to stand it up but also optimize as we progress. We needed to be able to continue to echo that burning platform. To be fair and as I have conversations, [and] we bring our next phase to our EMEA partners, yeah, this is a compliance play. This is why we are doing this and really hitting home on that. But also, as Pratik highlighted, making sure you understand what the end-user’s going to want. They want the least path of resistance to get their job done.

So, what we also need to be very cognizant of as we're driving risk mitigation and compliance, which is a big play that I have. Also, you just need to keep the people in mind too, which is a play I have as well in partnership with Pratik. So how do our processes need to support that? Right? And they'll never be perfect but making sure that along the way you're always thinking about that process and that end-user and how they execute. And if there needs to be an exception, okay, why and how. It's not a yes/no discussion. It should never be a yes/no discussion. That's too black and white. We all know it doesn't work. But it is a, why/why not/but how discussion.

And that's where I think from an exception, an audit comes in because you're explaining the why and why not. And here's how we can move forward. Here's a risk you're going to bear. Here are the implications if you want to do this. Here's what it means to you if something comes knocking on the door. So, I think that's really helped us in terms of driving the change in the space. Because again, it's not perfect. You have people that push back. And [you need to] sit down and have that discussion and pull in accordingly because there'll be different facets. There's a purchasing facet because of buy, borrow, bot. You're in essence borrowing through money. So how do you balance that? So that I think has helped us work well as we globalize and think about that end-user, that stakeholder and their experience, because a good process, a good experience drives adoption, adoption drives compliance and mitigates a lot of the workarounds.

David Corrion: Cool, thank you. Maybe one more question from me. How do you look at the program or maybe what do you see as far as evolution of the program is next? I know you hear us talk a lot about, [what] we have with you guys. What we envision we're going to work in [during] the second half of the year, but you already should be planning for the next year. But just when you hear that word and can you share a little bit about that from either one of your lenses?

David Feldman: I'll start and gladly hand it over to Pratik. So, one thing that I've always used, and we've been able to put together, is a rolling three-year roadmap. And so, we have a three-year roadmap. So right now, we're in '25, so '25, '26, '27 plus. Next year it'll be '26, '27, '28 plus. But in working with our teams and my team, there's a theme behind each year. So right now, it is continued expansion, right? We just got done going live on all Asia Pacific. Now we are building out EMEA as we speak, but with expansion, not just from a geographic standpoint, it's from a capability standpoint as well. How do we continue to leverage internal initiatives that are in place that we need to roll into our program from an automation perspective, from a data perspective, so that as we get to next year, we're going to globalize.

And once we are global the next step is how do you maximize all of that? And what Pratik likes to talk a lot about is crawl, walk, run. So, I want to bake that in as well. The walk to me is going to be global. Because once you're globalizing, you have a standard infrastructure in place, albeit that adapts to regions. Then you can really kind of slingshot this thing in[to] the future and really start maximizing all these capabilities that we want to have, that we know we have, that maybe we don't know we have, and we can continue to build forward.

Pratik Patel: Yeah. Just to build on that. So, like you mentioned, there's a three-year roadmap. So, in this three-year roadmap, we have a technology component, a governance component and a process component for each one of those. So, when you think about it from a procurement perspective – and really, I think from an HR perspective too – it's all about elimination of waste. Where does the waste exist? Where can we continue to optimize? We have lots of standardized processes that we've built in terms of how we assess our suppliers, our policies [and] our governance that we have established. But at the same time there's room for optimization there too. But those standardized processes allow us to have a rinse-repeat. So, as we go into these global markets and we continue to expand, it's actually not that difficult once you've established the foundation because it's a rinse-and-repeat exercise in the other markets.

And so, it's about continuing to drive efficiency, and how we go about doing that. For me, it's also about the fixed price deliverable, milestone base because that's the holy grail. And that's where I think a lot of companies struggle is the fake deliverables that are out there and how to truly drive the value that you want to see from a fixed price deliverable. And so, it starts with the technology.

So, I've been telling David, we need to be engaged with our VMS as it relates to what we need them to be able to provide to us from a metadata perspective that's going to drive that right behavior to be able to really identify those components of what makes it a fixed price deliverable. For us, it's the five Ws and the one H. It's the control. It's the dependency that has to be managed. It's how you define performance. What are the triggers for payment, that is truly what's deliverable. And so, maturing that, because we're not very mature right now when it comes to that, but I need to know what the technology limitation is so we can drive the process.

And from driving the process now we can drive the awareness, understanding, and action that people can take. So that's one of the bigger areas that we're kind of focused on is the fixed price deliverable. But at the same time from a technology perspective, leveraging technology, minimizing variability of data, rationalizing our supply base that's going to help us to be able to be better connected to our suppliers and their capabilities and how they can help drive that right need in the right location as we continue to expand globally from that perspective too. Is there something else you wanted to add?

David Feldman: Actually, yeah.

Pratik Patel: Yeah. Go ahead.

David Feldman: And that's an awesome call-out because I completely agree is the fixed bid is that final piece because we have all our T&M. And so, as we go into each region, what's kind of cool now is each regional implementation is very formulaic because we have a global standard process. And that I think makes it really effective in how we communicate, how we run our work streams. But with a fixed bid piece, there's that last piece of data from my perspective to bring in because, again, being in the HR space, a lot of the questions that I get, “how should we model our organization?” We talk total talent management, right resource, right time, whatever buzzword you want to use, to me it's a data problem. Right?

Can I map my contingent staffing spend, my SOW, my fixed bid, break it down to the individual level? You're probably having a flashback. And how do you model all that together with your full-time data to say, as a manager, I don't want to have to talk to my finance organization anytime I have a question, I want to come to them with a proposal. And the way I want to be able to leverage that is through a dashboard tools where I can model based upon my locations, different pricing points based upon the worker type. And then I have a more strategic, thoughtful discussion which in my mind drives better workforce planning decisions, better talent decisions. And to be fair, that's the reason why I'm in this role and why I like these roles because it is a data problem. But it takes a ton of stuff to get to the data solution. And that's a huge piece, and it all factors in. And it can't just be done by HR. It needs to be done by multiple teams and the accountability driven through it.

David Corrion: Thanks a lot, guys.

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you have questions, send them to SubjectToTalent@AllegisGlobalSolutions.com. Follow us on LinkedIn with the #SubjectToTalent and learn more about AGS at AllegisGlobalSolutions.com, where you can find additional workforce insights and past episodes. Until next time, cheers.