Two weeks ago on January 28th and 29th, I attended the second annual ProcureCon Facilities Conference in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

It was another great event from Worldwide Business Research where hundreds of the top Procurement Professionals in Facilities gathered to share industry best practices.

I was able to attend a good number of this year’s events.  Here are some of the highlights I captured.

On the first day we began with a keynote speech from Meena Nieto, Assistant Vice President at West Coast Aviation Planning.  Meena is former Senior Manager of Corporate Real Estate & Facilities at American Airlines.  Meena shared with us all of the new innovations being used in airport design.  Ms. Nieto told us how airports are exploring the concept of multi-use buildings and introduced us to the concept of Performance Based Zoning.

A great panel comprised of John Sklet, Senior Vice President -North America Facilities and Construction Procurement at Citi Bank; Dusty Duistermars, Senior Vice President at Digital Solutions, JLL; Jennifer Ahrens Director of Integrated Facilities Technology Sourcing at Intel; and Henry Chacon, Global Integrated Facility Category Manager at Boeing followed Ms. Nieto talking about how digitization is changing the way we look at facilities.  They shared a number of great concepts and ideas including how the leading obstacle to digitization is data integrity.  The panel also shared how pilot programs are a great way to test and drive innovation.

Phillippe Lamote, Director of Indirect Sourcing at L’Oreal shared great details about how L’Oreal is using biogas from an existing landfill for energy generation,

After Phillippe inspired us all to think green, I had the great privilege of moderating a panel discussion on the big trends in Real Estate.  The panel I moderated included Gerry Hodson, Vice President of Sourcing at Wells Fargo, Mark Delph, Head of Global Real Estate at Groupon, and Michael Koch Vice President at LOC Associates and former Director of Store Development at Samsung Electronics.  Together the breadth and depth of experience from this group gave us insights into the trends and challenges of real estate procurement in corporate, retail, and manufacturing spaces.

Day Two was just as exciting.

Mike Koch from LOC started our day with an inspiring and forward looking talk on how big data is being used by companies like Samsung to make business decisions.

Felipe Niles from Google shared with us the strategies and the challenges that Google faces in their construction procurement program.

A panel made up of; Richard Navarro, Sustainability Program Manager at Google; Anthony Guerrero, Director of Facilities and Sustainability at Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC); Matt Mazzola, Director of Sales at Energy Management Collaborative talked to us about how they are implementing sustainability into their facilities and shared how to deploy these initiatives without adding expense.

And I am happy to say that I closed the day with a lively talk on construction cost categories and strategies for benefiting from self-performing contractors.  I will share a summary of my presentation and share my PowerPoint deck in a future post.

All in all I had a great time. I benefited from some great new ideas and concepts and met an amazing group of people.

I highly recommend the ProcureCon Conference series. If you were able to attend the ProcureCon Facilities Conference this year but did not connect with me, I invite you to send me a note and share your experience.

If we did meet at this year’s conference, please keep in touch and feel free to reach out anytime, and if you did not make the conference this year I hope you will consider attending next time.

I hope WBR will invite me back again next year, but even If they don’t I will certainly be there.  I hope to see you there too.

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