Dru Krupinsky's path to procurement wasn't a straight line. He started his career teaching outdoor education and running ropes courses, earned a degree in energy management design and city planning, and spent years in sustainability consulting before landing at Gilead Sciences, where he's now a Senior Manager of Procurement focused on supplier risk and sustainability.
In a recent episode of The Sourcing Hero podcast, he shared what it actually takes to build these programs inside large, complex organizations and what procurement teams can learn from the effort.
Procurement: Start With What You Have
For procurement teams looking to centralize their approach to risk and sustainability, Dru's first piece of advice is to resist the assumption that you're starting from scratch. In his experience working as a consultant, an auditor, and now from inside Gilead, there's always something already in place.
The work is typically about enhancing existing programs, not building from scratch. That includes being deliberate about how supplier assessments are structured.
Rather than streamlining onboarding by removing questions, the more valuable investment is in how risk flags are assigned and acted upon across the business. At Gilead, for example, he explains how this has meant developing a branching approach to due diligence where a single data point, like a supplier's location, can trigger a chain of relevant assessments, from IT security reviews to emerging regulatory requirements like the DOJ rule around sensitive personal data transfers.
The goal is to create genuine symbiosis across teams so that one part of the organization isn't onboarding a supplier that another part has already flagged as a concern.
Supplier Cooperation Should Never be Taken for Granted
When it comes to how cooperative suppliers tend to be, Dru explains how it depends on a number of factors. The single biggest one, he says, is how invested the internal stakeholder is. If the business unit that owns the supplier relationship isn't engaged, the supplier is unlikely to be either.
The nature of the ask matters just as much. Supply chain mapping at the tier-N level, for instance, can run into supplier policies that prohibit sharing sub-supplier information with outside stakeholders. A well-designed program builds in decision trees that account for supplier criticality and business continuity risk rather than applying a blanket approach.
This is especially important in regulated industries like pharmaceutical manufacturing. FDA drug approvals are tied to specific suppliers and manufacturing locations, which means offboarding a critical supplier is rarely a straightforward option. Procurement’s due diligence framework has to be sophisticated enough to reflect that.
Making Automation Work in Procurement and Beyond
Like most large enterprises, Gilead is actively exploring how AI can support procurement workflows, and Dru is thoughtful about where it actually fits. The challenge at scale is rarely a lack of data. It's that the data lives in disconnected systems, with different platforms identifying the same supplier in different ways. That kind of fragmentation makes enterprise-level AI difficult to deploy meaningfully until the underlying data is more trustworthy.
Where AI is already adding value is in workflow automation. Gilead is piloting a platform that moves due diligence processes forward without relying on chains of manual email exchanges. When a supplier is flagged as high risk, the tool can autonomously advance the workflow, track the exchange, and identify where delays are occurring in the cycle.
The insight that emerges, whether a bottleneck sits in contracting, in the supplier response, or somewhere else entirely, is the kind of operational visibility that's hard to develop without that level of automation.
The broader principle Dru draws from this is especially noteworthy for any team at an earlier stage of their AI journey: automation doesn't necessarily replace manual processes. What it can do is make the data and decision-making that those processes generate more accessible and actionable at an enterprise level.
Moving the Needle Without Making Waves
When asked what being a sourcing hero means to him, Dru offered a definition that's likely to resonate with anyone who has tried to drive meaningful change inside a large organization without the budget or authority to mandate it.
His goal at Gilead is to make the risk and sustainability due diligence under his ownership feel like, as he puts it, "a vegan restaurant that you don't know is vegan." A supplier goes through the process of being selected and onboarded smoothly. The due diligence happening in the background is more rigorous than it was before, but it doesn't feel like another checklist or an added layer of red tape.
That's a useful benchmark for procurement teams at any stage of building out these programs. The objective isn't just to do the right things. It's to do them in a way that the business actually embraces… and that adds meaningful value along the way.
For more of this conversation, check out Dru's full episode of The Sourcing Hero podcast here.
