Supply Chain LIVE Chicago Q&A: Patric Stadtfeld, Siemens USA

With more than two decades of experience in Supply Chain Management, Patric Stadtfeld, Chief Procurement Officer for the Americas at Siemens USA, has guided teams through operational complexities, driving process innovation and efficiency while delivering sustainable growth.

Currently, Patric oversees procurement operations exceeding €10bn (US$11.3bn) with a team of more than 500 supply chain professionals, supporting over 75,000 internal stakeholders across multiple business units and countries throughout the Americas.

Following his executive session, titled The Evolving Role of Supply Chain Leaders, Patric discussed the most pressing operational challenges impacting his organisation.

What does a typical day look like if there is such a thing?

Yeah, I think there's no such thing as a typical day these days anymore. I mean if you would ask me a year ago, I would tell you it's pretty consistent. And since about January 20th of this year, my world has definitely been upside down and every day is different. So I judge my day on the daily tweets from our administration to figure out what my daily workload will look like.

What have some of the big challenges you've been facing since January?

I think one of the biggest challenges for us right now certainly has been the tariffs discussion, right? As a huge manufacturer in the United States, it's certainly something that kept us quite busy understanding our impacts of tariffs and how that impacts our overall bottom line as a company.

Tell us about your session. Did some of those topics come up in your session? What were the key themes to emerge?

Disruptions and tariffs were certainly highlighted a little bit, but we didn't go into details of it. But I certainly think about the disruptions and how important it is for supply chain and procurement organisations to be more resilient in order to manoeuvre through these disruptions more successfully. It's been quite a challenging time for many organisations and I think that the one thing we can say is expect the unexpected is kind of the motto we live by these days.

You mentioned those risk mitigation strategies that are becoming so crucial. Is there anything you can tell us about internally at Siemens that you've found success with?

I think one of the things we learned early on back in 2016 was that we had a very global footprint from a sourcing point of view and we started to begin localising our supply chain more and more over the last 10 years. Certainly that has been quite a success factor for us over the last few months since the new administration came back in is that we have local for local content.

I think that has been very helpful for us as a company to position ourselves in the market and be able to provide products to our customers on time.

We're here at Procurement Supply Chain LIVE Chicago in co-location with Sustainability LIVE. What have you made of the event so far?

It's been a great event. I think one of the key topics that we hear a lot about is actually two topics. One is the importance of creating value for supply chain and procurement organisations and then of course the impact of digitalisation and AI in the future. 

Some of the key takeaways is to make sure that we don't underestimate the importance of human involvement in AI. And there's still going to be a social dimension that needs to be taken care of. I think a lot of times we think when AI comes in, AI will take over everything. I think AI will do a great job on taking a lot of tasks away, but our focus in procurement will shift to not procuring widgets anymore, but negotiating and solving complex business problems. And for that, you need procurement folks that have the emotional intelligence in order to successfully negotiate these things in the future. 

Why would you say it's beneficial to bring together not only procurement and supply chain leaders, but the sustainability execs as well?

I think they work hand in hand. If you think about sustainability at a company like ours, there is a huge impact that the supply chain does have on the overall success of sustainability, particularly in the CO2 carbon footprint that we create in procurement. So bringing the two together and sharing the information and understanding sustainability even more will help both sides to work closer together, collaborate and figure out how to reduce that carbon footprint in the entire value chain of a company. So I think it's a great setup and I think it's very beneficial for procurement folks like myself and others.

You mentioned collaboration, focusing on Siemens, is that something that's going on as we speak, that increased collaboration between procurement, supply chain and sustainability?

I think we work hand in hand on these topics. Certainly there is the impact of our CO2 footprint within the supply chain which certainly has an overall impact on our overall goals. So we are working very closely together, but also in our case, we actually create an opportunity to now use sustainability and procurement to help create a top line impact because we can actually talk to our suppliers that need help in decarbonising their footprint and help sell some of our solutions to them. 

It's a very unique position to be in as a company like Siemens to really also have now the double role at the end of the day. Not just on the procurement side, but helping also generate top line impact. So I think it's a very close collaboration and I'm very excited to see where this takes us.

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