We sat down with Amit Mizrahi, the Head of Strategic Operations at Wix.com. Amit is
extremely knowledgeable in all things asset management and is a master at strategically planning company growth through foundational principals.
In this interview we talk strategic thinking, tackling new projects and what automation means in the procurement space.
Enjoy!
Topics Covered:
Intro to Amit
It’s always interesting to me how procurement people, asset management, the strategic operations folks get into the industry. Because this isn't necessarily something as a kid, you decide you know what? I'm going to grow up to be in strategic operations. So Amit, what’s does your story look like?
This was not my background at all. I came from entrepreneurship and building companies.
But I’ve always liked when things were organized. So, what the role itself held, the possibilities of organizing everything was, and is, very appealing.
And it’s really interesting to see how we can take this asset management field, this sort of gray role and bring a lot of interesting methodologies and take things from different areas and different industries to make sure that we are actually utilizing new processes and a new way of thinking.
Even looking at how assets are behaving in a company and how we're measuring those assets, or how we create processes that make sure we are not creating waste.
And we do this while increasing our team's efficiency and productivity. And we can then align with business velocity and not waste money just to grow. Which is something I’ve seen happen.
You come to be an enterprise-sized company, still with the mentality of a startup. Which is good in many ways, but it can definitely lead to SaaS sprawl. And that’s where you have chaos and a lot of waste. That waste then creates an inefficient way of working.
New Project
Last time we spoke you were working on a new project at Wix. Are you at liberty to elaborate?
In our previous conversation we talked about VICO, which is the Value and Impact Center of Excellence. And one of the things that we are starting now is building that framework and how it's going to work.
We are always talking about this high level of optimization, what we want to achieve and what's the desired state.
But, practically, what does that look like?
We're taking different tools, different processes, making it better and making everything connected.
So, for example, whenever operations teams are working in one area, the relevant information will also be sent to finance where they can actually review it.
So this kind of process is where we create governance, accountability and visibility in general.
A Line In The Sand
Where do you think that line starts to form where you need strategic operations, asset management, or these types of roles to come in and start organizing?
I think it truly depends on the company. In many companies, the problem or the challenge starts when you get siloed information. You have different departments, maybe you are starting to work globally or have different procurement teams working with different kind of functions in the company.
This is usually the point where data gets siloed from each procurement team working independently.
That’s when you can miss a lot of duplications and miss out on volume discounts or consolidating everything to one asset.
And everybody knows, in the first stages, the founders themselves or the first employees are the ones that are actually buying. They know how to use everything because they are buying and then using.
But that’s different than a large procurement team that is buying for the business. Sometimes there's not an alignment between what the business wants and what the business needs. And we need to basically understand, once we have that situation, we need to have a funnel into a single point of contact or department where we’re just making sure, do we use that? And do we need it?
My point is, it doesn't matter if you have a thousand employees or one hundred. It matters when wants and needs start diverging.
That's when you need this specialized role to come in.
Preventing Overlap
So this is this is a tricky part of the role. Sometimes there's a bit of overlap between asset management and procurement. Where does where does one start and the other begin?
When looking at the different roles we face the same problem. The business says we need everything, we want everything. And procurement doesn’t always have the procurement teams in place to have the capacity or the technical knowledge to deep dive things like unit economics impacted from scaling. Procurement is certainly capable, it’s just not the primary function.
ITAM is a part of the procurement process, but ITAM is not stopping the procurement process. ITAM is all part of the asset life cycle, because ITAM should be before the purchase, before procurement even comes to the picture. We have to understand how we're measuring, what is the requirement, and how it affects the business, the procurement.
But also post procurement. We may have to find a way to avoid true ups, optimize usage, make the teams more efficient or sunsetting an asset.
Teamwork Makes The Dream Work
So then how do ITAM and Procurement actually physically work together? We know what they should do, now how do they do it?
So that's amazing. This is exactly how I started the conversation. How do we build that framework that everybody's working together?
Everybody's getting the right information at the right time. And we basically started working with what we call user journeys, right?
We build the process so everybody has a chance to ask the relevant questions regarding that agenda or tool to approve.
Once we built those processes, and we understood who are the stakeholders in each step of the way, how are we approving it from a budget perspective? It’s all about automation.
We really wanted to have a zero-touch environment where everything is just happening. Renewal alerts, automatically tagging everybody that's relevant to that asset and so on.
And that’s not necessarily asset management. It’s just common sense.
That's A Wrap
Amit, that wraps our time here today. I appreciate you hopping on. Thank you for the great conversation.
It was my pleasure, have a good night.
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