I'm probably an unusual subject for this interview or broadcast because of my story so I'll just tell the story. I graduated from the University of Utah in finance in 198 so that dates me, obviously a lot, a time when we didn't even use personal computers in our education. The next year, I went to graduate school, I attended Northwestern University in Chicago and attended the Kellogg Graduate School of Management and graduated from there in 1985. At that time the supply chain was not an independent discipline that you could study, it was a subset you might get some exposure to it in finance or a little bit of exposure to it in production management but that was about the extent of it so it really wasn't something that was on my radar screen at the time. So after graduation in 1985, I went to work in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the commercial real estate, and I did that for about a year and a half and they passed the tax reform Act of 1986 and everybody knew that the provision of that legislation was going to kill commercial real estate and so there wasn't going be any reason to be doing what I was doing. So I decided that I needed to look for something and at the same time my father had a family business, construction business and he reached out to me and said, Hey, I'm tired of doing this, if you want to come back and do it, have had it. So I came back to Utah and ran this family construction business and literally in the blink of an eye, 25 years passed by. I hadn't really given a whole lot of thought about my career during that time. So towards the end of my time doing that, the recession occurred from 2007-2010, they were very difficult years for anybody in that sort of industry, and in our industry was we built roads and utilities for residential development, so obviously there was nothing going on, and our business was devastated. Nonetheless, I was trying to move forward and this opportunity came to me in the fall of 2011. I had an acquaintance who held a contract here at the Salt Lake refinery for Chevron to supply contract labor like technical contract labor to the refinery, and they needed somebody to fill the role of category specialist. I didn't even know what that role was and I decided to come down and interview for it and they offered that position to me as a contractor. I started in November of 2011 and in August of 2012, they opened the position as a Chevron employee, and I took that position. Though the roles that I filled here at Chevron is that time I started out as a category specialist, which is someone who and probably listeners know what that is but my specific area of responsibility was to support capital projects at Salt Lake refinery, projects anywhere from a $1,000,000 or less up to maybe $50 or $60 million and it just doesn't happen when I got here they were trying to build a new campus for the refinery and seven new buildings and a whole bunch of sight work, things with which I was very familiar but based on my experience as a contract. Companies like Chevron don't build buildings very much, very often or very well. They were looking at the project like it was a process unit project and trying to bring a lot of engineering and technical expertise that really wasn't called for. So I worked with the project manager and we straightened that out and we had a very successful project that gave me some credibility. There was an ensuing a very large project of several $100 million that was coming to the finery and I was given the role about 5 and a half years ago to be the project procurement manager on that project and fill that role until about a year ago when I transitioned into the category manager role. So just to give you a background, and then this will inform the rest of our discussion. So most major oil and gas companies, Chevron, obviously being one of the five or six supermajors in the world, they divide their business between the upstream and downstream and that means the upstream is exploration, drilling and employing oil out of the ground or the gas or whatever it is they are extracting and then there's the processing and the refining and the retail distribution. So the downstream of which I am a part or manufacturing is from the time that the product or the feed with the crude oil hits the refinery goes through processing and is sold through the retail channels, so that represents probably only about 15% of Chevron's business so we're the small tale of that process. Having said that, even though we're a small part of an incredibly large organization, but still, there are a lot of scopes, some very big projects to work on, a lot of interesting things are going on. I guess to finish up this question, I did not know at the time that this was a career that you could pursue, I did not know that I had the skills for it, but it turns out that most of my prior experience led directly into types of skills that I would need to fill this role so it wasn't planned, but it's worked out very well.

In the Category Manager role, we divide up our business and manufacturing into several categories, and the primary ones are engineering equipment in capital projects of which I am a category manager and we have a catalyst in chemicals, which there's a lot of chemicals and things that you have to buy and supply to the refineries and is a part of the refining process. Then we have maintenance and turnarounds so we find refineries every spring and fall and have to take a process unit down and basically go through refurbishing and rebuild to make sure that it's operating at peak capacity. So my categories engineering equipment in capital project and my particular focus within that category is engineering in capital projects. So my specific responsibilities are to manage the contracts for all of the refineries that Chevron owns in North America, and that's five refineries currently. Here in Salt Lake, we are a small niche refinery then we have two California refineries in El Segundo, California, and Richmond, California and then we have the largest refinery in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and then we just purchased a refinery from the Argentinean national oil company Petrobras in Pasadena, Texas. We previously held own refineries in England, Cape Town, South Africa, Hawaii, and Vancouver but over the past five or six years, we have divested those refineries. So I negotiate and manage contracts that would be applicable to capital project work and those refineries, mainly in the engineering space. So the model for projects in the oil gas industry is companies like Chevron don't actually do though we are a company of engineers but we don't actually do engineering and procurement and all of those activities on a capital project, we hire what's called EPC, EPCM and those stands for Engineering Procurement in construction, or procurement in construction management. A lot of what we do in procurement on capital projects is an interface between the business project, the Chevron Project team, and the engineering firm, their procurement team to make sure that they're implementing the strategies that the project team has determined that they want to pursue and that they're doing it according to our processes and procedures, that's a part of what I do. The other part is that in our network at the refineries, each refinery has one, two or three people who support capital projects at the refinery and my role is to mentor, help and support those people at the different refineries do their job. I work for elite category manager and so we implement every year a category strategy and plan. There'll be several initiatives and example of a primary initiative that I am working on right now is to formulate some processes and tools for performance-based contracting or incentive-based contracting, trying to come up with some creative ways to create value in our contracts instead of just trying to beat down the vendor and get the cheapest possible price to think about risk allocation and who should be rewarded for that and how do we create value in our contracting? So over the next few months, I'll be training probably 40 or 50 people on those processes and trying to implement that and then we have a target goal that we have to demonstrate savings from those processes. As far as travel, I actually travel quite a bit. My job is technically located in our headquarters in San Ramon, California, in northern California but they allowed me to have my office at Salt Lake although my responsibilities were not specific to Salt Lake refinery, this is where I've lived and they allowed me to remain here. Chevron is very sensitive to the work-life balance, so in terms of hours, we work and the entire industry works what's called a 9/80's schedule where you work 80 hours in nine days. So basically, you work 9 to 10 hours a day, four days a week and then on Friday, you work 8 hours and then on the opposite Friday, you have the day off and literally, the entire oil and gas industry works that schedule and most of the engineering firms with whom we work also adopt that schedule as well so time-wise, it's not bad at all. I probably traveled for 15 or 16 weeks last year, this year it will be somewhat less, but it'a good balance. I don't work for home very often, I generally come here to the office or else go out to one of the refineries and then once in a while, I will have meetings to visit with one of our vendors or maybe a negotiation and try to tie together some loose ends on a contract that's sometimes better done face to face.

So it's interesting that you asked that question. Right now, Chevron's going through what they call a digital transformation, trying to adopt a ray of digital tools, most of those haven't been introduced yet, but in my own job, aside from the obviously Outlook and PowerPoint and Excel, the main tool that we use is our eProcurement System and for the past 10 or 12 years, Chevron has used a system called Ariba and those systems serve as your really your end to end from contract negotiation, document repositories, order placement, vendor management all of those things are in that suite, and we're in the process right now of transitioning to a new program called Smart by GEP. I think one of the other major oil companies has made that transition and manufacturing our group is we're the first to adopt it within Chevron and we are right now kind of in the middle of it. Two of our refineries have gone live, one last fall and one this Spring right after the first year, and the rest of us will go live this year. It's quite challenging to straddle the two systems and also quite challenging to learn a new system so looking forward to that. Then they have brought several interesting tools to the forefront in the market intelligence space. I don't know if folks were familiar with the Power BI or Poweradvocate, but those are systems where you can model different cost scenarios, create different scenarios and really gives you a lot of power to negotiate with your vendors because you understand not just where costs are moving but what is the breakdown of that cost and what are the inputs to that cost that are causing it to move and are they really moving as much as it would appear? So those are some of the tools that we use.