Ivalua NOW 2025: Interview with Honeywell's Steven Velte

Steven Velte is the senior director of Honeywell's functional and digital transformation, as well as its supply chain resiliency programme. In the role he drives enterprise-wide change through strategic technology deployments, AI enablement and digital innovation.

These themes and more were at the heart of Ivalua NOW 2025, the two-day industry leading procurement event at New Orleans' Caesars Superdome. There, senior procurement leaders from some of the world's largest companies discussed the latest technologies, strategies and methodologies for advancing global procurement functions.

Supply Chain Digital spoke with Steven about the rapid growth of technology in the sector, the role of AI and how Honeywell works with Ivalua to drive success.

How does Honeywell benefit from being an Ivalua customer? 

Honeywell has been an Ivalua customer since around 2017, and we’ve leveraged their full and comprehensive suite from the offset. 

We love a lot of the aspects about their supplier management, ER effects and source to procurement process, catalogue punch out and more. We use Ivalua’s savings and ROI tracker a lot to make sure we're hitting our goals and meeting out targets. 

That's something that Ivalua is able to do very well by leveraging the spend information and the insights inside of its platform.

How does Ivalua integrate into Honeywell’s complex IT system?

The comprehensive suite that Ivalua has, including the flexibility and scalability of the solution, allows us to manage and maintain our business goals, as well as our objectives from a corporate and holistic IT strategy perspective. 

It also enables that modular need that we have, which is really what we’ve looked at for a partner to go forward. It means that, when our business grows, we know we have the ability to scale at speed and with pace.

You spoke about Honeywell's AI journey and the idea of a governance council across multiple functions. Could you elaborate on that?

The first approach we took in our AI journey was safety first. We wanted to make sure that we develop AI solutions that fit the corporation's needs but, at the same time, think about how we also make it so that we're using AI ethically within our organisation. 

You then have to consider how that drives down into our solutions stack and not disrupt anything within there because, for us, safety is the number one priority and then ethics on top of that. 

Other key steps were understanding the data quality and data fidelity that we leverage and how the solutions that AI provides meet our long-term goals.

How do you see AI transforming the future of procurement? 

That’s a really important question. Our view is, if you look at procurement as a whole, there's a lot of value that can be unlocked. With AI coming to the forefront, we're able to accelerate that unlocking. 

It revolutionises what our procurement playbooks are from the point of giving data insights quicker, providing predictive analytics at pace, giving recommendations to our organisation from a category manager down to a buyer, and even pulling those out so we can bring them up into the executive levels. 

It also helps us look from the perspective of what we can do to automate tasks that typically take time from an individual so they can refocus their time to have deeper supply relationships, develop new strategies, look at their commodities or their categories in a different way and think about more disruptive solutions. 

AI is really redeveloping a lot of our playbooks and how we go to market from a procurement and sourcing perspective.

What about the event? Why is it so important from a procurement perspective?

Bringing procurement together allows organisations from all levels, from Fortune 100 down to those that have just started their journey, to come and hear what works and what could be improved upon, and share insights and innovations that help us move forward. 

Peer-to-peer networking is also key. It's always great to have face-to-face conversations where you can really get into more detailed conversations and share real insights in a different way, or potentially innovate around current solutions.

What have been your highlights of the event? 

There’s many. It’s fascinating listening to the keynotes and understanding where Ivalua sees procurement heading in the future and how it’s transforming both its technology and how it’s going to market with a lot of that technology. 

Being here is an opportunity to get best of breed insight about what procurement looks like now and where it’s going to be in the future at scale.