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Aflac grows its initiative and takes it nationwide
A meeting at a business opportunity luncheon led to a flourishing partnership, plus MBE-developed
portals for Aflac and all thirty-nine NMSDC chapters
 The Aflac supplier diversity initiative started in 2002, recalls Eric B. Seldon, who is VP of strategic partnership and a number of other admin departments at Aflac Inc (Columbus, GA), and heads the supplier diversity initiative at the highly rated insurance company.
“Until then we were not doing as much as we would have liked to with diverse suppliers,” Seldon admits. “At the time I was in charge of corporate purchasing, so I was asked to kick off the program, which I did.”
He did it very successfully indeed. In fact Seldon, who is a member of the Georgia Minority Supplier Diversity Council (GMSDC) on behalf of Aflac, recently received the council’s executive of the year award for “operating as an integral force” in the company’s supplier diversity efforts.
The program, Seldon recalls, had executive buy-in from the start. “CEO Dan Amos has been very supportive from the program’s birth right up to now.”
“We understand small businesses”
Aflac started in 1955. “We’re home-grown into what we are today: a Fortune 500 company
that insures more than 40 million people around the world,” Seldon recounts with pride.
“With that background we understand small businesses and we understand the importance
of diversification.”
In fact, in the Aflac business model many M/WBEs are customers as well as vendors, “and we play an important role in mentoring those businesses as well.”
When the program began Aflac was doing less than an annual $1 million with M/WBEs. “We closed last year at $30 million plus, so the program has grown and is doing extremely well,” Seldon says. “It’s the right thing to do and we’re finding some great partners out there.”
Aflac gets growing
Seldon began his work locally, reaching out to diverse businesses around Aflac’s Columbus,
GA HQ. “I found very quickly that we needed to become part of the things that were going on statewide,” he recalls. “So I joined the GMSDC board of directors and the Georgia Women’s Business Council in Atlanta and began to work with them. My goal was to expand beyond Columbus to Atlanta, Savannah and Albany, GA, and these things have occurred.”
Now, of course, Aflac’s supplier diversity reach is nationwide. “We’ve attended the NMSDC and WBENC national conventions ever since we joined those organizations,” Seldon says.
Aflac also encourages its large suppliers to have their own tier 2 supplier diversity programs. “We really, really push it,” Seldon affirms. “We ask them to get involved and report their second-tier spending back to us.”
In addition to its important supplier diversity efforts, Aflac was named a best company for diversity by Black Enterprise magazine this June, and has been similarly recognized by Hispanic and women’s business magazines.
Open Systems Inc: technologists, strategists and innovators
Open Systems Inc (OSI, Alpharetta, GA) is an MBE that does technical consulting, Web-based business process management and professional staffing. “We are technologists, strategists and innovators, and our goal is to help empower the adaptive enterprise,” says OSI’s founder and CEO, Satya (Sid) Ahuja.
Aflac’s relationship with Open Systems started right at the beginning of its supplier diversity drive. Aflac’s Seldon and OSI’s Ahuja met at one of the bimonthly business opportunity luncheons put on by GMSDC in Atlanta for its corporate members and the MBEs they would like to get to know. As Ahuja remembers it, “We met multiple times.”
The lunch is designed as a networking event, not unlike a dating game. “There are several minority-owned business reps sitting at each table along with folks from a couple of corporations, and at certain times between courses we switch tables,” Seldon explains.
Importance of certification
Open Systems has been in business since 1994, but it wasn’t certified by the GMSDC until 2002. Ahuja explains how it happened. “The NMSDC had its national convention in Atlanta, GA in 2000, and I went to the convention although I was not certified,” he says. “Then my eyes opened up and I saw I needed to join the organization!”
Good thing he did, as Aflac insists that its diverse suppliers must be certified by NMSDC, WBENC or a state agency. William Haley, Aflac’s program manager for supplier diversity, chairs the GMSDC certification committee.
“Being part of the GMSDC board and being involved in the certification process, we can
walk prospective M/WBEs through the process and help them get more comfortable with it,” Seldon says.
Ahuja agrees: “It gives us the opportunity to be considered.”
Mentoring
Aflac participates in the mentor-protégé program sponsored by the governor of Georgia. “We’ve been part of it for two or three years now, and also work with the mentoring program for small businesses put on by Columbus State University,” Seldon says. He’s been involved with small companies from florists to IT groups. “We try to help business owners develop into CEOs and show them how to present their companies to large corporations like Aflac.”
The mentoring, he notes, may involve visits to subject experts at Aflac, even getting into
areas like HR and legal. The company also helps fund business schooling for its protégés.
“The mentoring portion lasts about a year and a half but the relationships continue on,”
Seldon says. Besides the GMSDC, Aflac partners with the Hispanic and Asian chambers of commerce and others, and takes part in quarterly matchmaking events put on by the U.S. Small Business Administration.
The portal opportunity
Open Systems’ Sid Ahuja has technology and management consulting experience with IBM, Delta, Alltel and AT&T. Ahuja has a BSEE from IIT Delhi (Kanpur, India), an MS in computer engineering from Clemson University (Clemson, GA) and an MBA from Georgia State. He was twice awarded the title of “entrepreneur of the year” by Catalyst magazine.
The company’s first major contribution to Aflac was building its supplier diversity portals. “It has been a tremendous help to us. The partnership has been growing since we started and
we look forward to continuing on with OSI,” Seldon declares.
The portal opportunity began at the business luncheons. “We met Aflac’s Bill Haley,” Ahuja says, “and from discussions we got to know that the company was looking for supplier registrations. As it happened we were just completing our own in-house platform for process automation and supplier management, so we got into discussions with Bill. After that we came to Aflac many times, made presentations and demonstrated our product and technology.
“Aflac went through the due diligence, looked at our technologies, and that’s where things got started. We’ve actually done multiple things with Aflac since the portal implementation. We had some other products we thought Aflac could use so we did some prototypes and showed them and we moved forward with that.”
In fact, OSI is now in the process of launching portals for all thirty-nine affiliate councils of
the NMSDC, Ahuja reveals. “We’ve completed about twelve, ten are in process and soon we’ll complete all thirty-nine. Aflac and other clients paved the way,” he adds gratefully.
“It was one step at a time, and our relationship with Aflac was certainly one of the steps.”
Growing and hiring
A few years ago OSI was a protégé in the governor’s program. “We had a relationship with an IT staffing company for a year and a half. It was a good relationship: they brought us in and showed us how they do stuff and we showed them how we do stuff. At that time we had fifteen employees and they had 500.”
Today OSI has seventy-five employees: a couple of dozen in California and the rest in Georgia. The prime West Coast client is the Department of Energy, through the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.
Since the initial work, OSI has done several portal additions and revisions for Aflac, and other work for the company’s IT group. “Every job we’ve done has helped us move forward, so we’ve grown steadily, year after year,” Ahuja notes.
Is OSI currently hiring? “We are always in the market to hire the right people, both in Georgia and in California,” Ahuja declares.
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