IVALUA NOW 2025: Interview with FCL's Tanya Roach

Ivalua NOW 2025, which took place in May in New Orleans, was a hotbed of innovation, fascinating new technologies and invaluable strategic insights informing the future of procurement. 

The event, hosted by AI-powered spend management leader Ivalua, brought together thousands of global leaders across a two-day schedule of panels, discussions and keynotes on themes including AI and the future of procurement, digital transformation, Gen AI, strategic sourcing, agility in a complex market and more. 

Best practice in transformation was a key topic, particularly as procurement teams face an ever broader scope of challenges. 

Tanya Roach, Director, Procurement at Federated Co-operatives Limited (FCL), knows about this as well as anyone. At the wholesaling, manufacturing, marketing and administrative co-operative in Western Canada she has led a ground-up procurement transformation, supported by Ivalua's innovative technologies. 

Procurement magazine spoke with her about this journey during the event. 

Tell us more about your role and responsibilities at FCL 

I'm the director of procurement at the business. I manage our team at the refinery, all corporate procurement within the organisation and our major capital projects team.

Our focus is driving value for the company. FCL didn't have a procurement team five years ago, so we've been in transformation mode and are now reaching the stage of maintaining everything we've built. 

Can you tell us more about why the transformation was necessary?

FCL has been around for nearly 100 years but had never had a procurement team. It had traditional category management as a retailer, but wanted to drive greater value across the organisation, which was the basis for the procurement transformation journey. 

What’s unique is that we just got started and then COVID hit, so we effectively transformed through COVID, built the team through the disruption all while driving value. 

How did you approach building procurement from the ground up?

We have a very unique model in the sense that we literally started with one person and built the team. 

We have an interesting way of building talent. We are a hybrid organisation, so we've kind of got the talent where it's at rather than limiting ourselves to the city of our home office – we look across the industry with a focus on getting the right people. 

It was a very agile approach. We had a very grand idea and knew the outcomes we were looking for, but also knew we needed a careful, phased approach.

As we built the team, we were agile on the categories we'd go after and worked hard to create that licence to operate – we would go and deliver value, which gave us the business case to continue to grow and brought a lot of momentum. 

All of it was built on three pillars: people, process and technology.

Where did technology come into the transformation? 

We knew that if we wanted to deliver value in a very complex organisation and still have a lean team, we would need technology to scale.

The most obvious place to do that was sourcing. If we could have really quick cycle times and deliver value fast for the organisation, it’s where we would see the most benefit. 

As we were thinking about the technology, we were bringing our stakeholders who would end up using the solutions along with the procurement team into the discussion – they were also involved in the implementation so it was happening with them, not to them. 

We're very close to 100% adoption in the organisation, but you really have to be very mindful of the change management aspect as you're growing, it was top of mind as we transformed. 

What are the benefits from being an Ivalua customer? 

The number one focal point for us was user experience. There's a number of solutions on the market, but we were looking for something that would create a great user experience, be simple to use and be intuitive. 

Ivalua checked all those boxes. As we were looking at the tool, we actually did have our procurement team go in and see how far they could get without training. It was a really unique approach we took together with Ivalua, and we've had the same seamless experience as we’ve deployed other modules.  

Strategic sourcing is a big focus. How has the way you select suppliers changed and evolved? 

We're actually engaging with our suppliers through Ivalua's tool, so they know what to expect. We now have more data at our fingertips as well, so we know when we've sent supplier RFPs, how they've responded and much more.

It’s created a real community within the tool itself in terms of interacting with our suppliers. It's also become our one source of truth across the organisation. 

How will you continue the relationship with Ivalua? 

We started with sourcing, but about a year ago started implementing the supplier information management module. We're currently looking at P2P, which will be the next part of the journey with Ivalua. 

The really exciting thing that we're about to do is deploy Ivalua’s IVA AI tool. We've been working with the Ivalua team to configure it and we're really excited to see the efficiencies it'll bring to our organisation. 

I think there's a lot of opportunity with AI if you focus on finding the right practical cases that'll benefit your organisation and bring real value back to the way you operate. 

How important are events like Ivalua NOW?

It's a great opportunity to connect with your peers and, as you're deploying other solutions, meet other companies that may be one step ahead to understand their experiences. 

It's also always great to connect with people across the world and understand how they're meeting the challenges of procurement and supply chain, and how they're mitigating some of those risks we all face together.