Hire.Buy.Live. Newark is Changing Lives for Local Residents

Steve Adubato and Kevin Lyons, Associate Professor, Department of Supply Chain Management at Rutgers Business School, sit down to talk about the “Hire.Buy.Live Newark” initiative and how it is significantly making an impact on the city and providing Newark residents with jobs.

7/28/18 #217

Excerpt:

"State of Affairs is pleased to welcome Kevin Lyons, Associate Professor for the Department of Supply Chain Management at Rutgers Business School. Good to see you, Kevin. Nice to see you as well, Steve. First of all, describe supply chain management. Supply chain management came out of an academic exercise of taking procurement operations research, and then formalizing it so that when you are in a major corporation, let's say, and you need to acquire goods and services, that you do it in a formalized way, and that all your agents and customers along the way are in that chain. So, it's actually literal, what it says. We want supply, push it through a chain. Let's bring it into Newark. There's an initiative that we've done some programming on, we've talked to Ras Baraka, the mayor of Newark... excuse my voice... Mm hmm. ...and others, particularly the folks at RWJBarnabas Health who have talked about this as a part of their social impact initiative, it's called "Hire. Buy. Live. Newark" right? That's correct. Your team at Rutgers is part of the... Buy local. Buy local? Correct. What does that mean, "buy local"? We're in Newark right now, we want to remember buy local, support the economy, but what is Rutgers doing? So when we look at buy local, we're looking at the large institutions. So, that's Rutgers, NJIT, Prudential, NJPAC, Audible... and what are their buying patterns? So are we actually targeting our purchasing into the local economy so we can actually grow the local economy? So, instead of business as usual, where we can get goods and services anywhere in the world... could we refocus that procurement activity to our local economy, our local small business, women-owned, minority-owned businesses and then lift them as part of the economic development? You know, as I'm thinking about this... you are talking about PSEG, NJPAC, Prudential Financial, Prudential Center, Rutgers, NJIT, etc. etc. Mm hmm. As part of this initiative, how challenging is it to get folks who historically have been hiring people in a certain way... Right. Certain culture, talent pool is huge, and you say, "You know what? There's a lot of talent here in Newark. Yes. And we're asking you to try to find that talent, recruit that talent, train that talent, hard?" Yeah, what it really boils down to is that... keep your same processes... HR is always going to be HR, but can we expand that reach to include our Newark residents? Why should that be a thing? It shouldn't be a thing. I was sitting there going... you're in Newark, it's a big labor pool... is there something... is there..."