Heminger leads Strategic Procurement & Planning at Caterpillar — one of the largest industrial-manufacturer procurement seats in the world. As SVP, she runs the function that designs and connects supply-base capability across thousands of part numbers and hundreds of suppliers, from raw materials through to dealer delivery.

The scale of the operating problem is what makes the role distinct. AI-driven sourcing at Caterpillar isn't a single-tool rollout — it's an organizational question about how to train procurement at industrial scale to use new capability without breaking decades-old supplier relationships. Heminger arrived at Caterpillar in 2020 from a 24-year run at Honda of America that took her to VP of North America Purchasing. She brings a manufacturing-procurement vocabulary built inside one of the most disciplined supplier-management cultures in the world.

What CC's editorial frame keeps returning to is leaders whose competence shows up in operating decisions rather than conference appearances. Heminger's seat sits at the procurement intersection where Caterpillar's geopolitical exposure, lifecycle-cost analysis, and supplier-risk modeling all converge. The work behind those decisions is what determines whether industrial manufacturing keeps moving.

Lopez occupies one of the most consequential supply-chain seats in specialty retail. Ulta Beauty operates more than 1,400 stores, partners with hundreds of beauty brands, and runs an e-commerce business that competes head-on with category disruptors. Behind every product on the shelf is a sourcing decision; behind every fulfillment moment is a supply-chain choice.

He has built that command from the operating floor up. Before becoming Chief Supply Chain Officer in 2024, Lopez ran Ulta’s supply-chain planning and operations and led its distribution network, after earlier operating roles at Target. That progression matters: specialty-beauty procurement has changed sharply, with accelerated launch cycles and post-pandemic supplier rebuilds making legacy playbooks obsolete, and the leaders recalibrating it well are building patterns the rest of retail will study.

CC’s interest in his work isn’t about the title — it’s about the operating reality. Building a supply-chain function that can keep up with the modern beauty-retail economy is genuinely hard, and Lopez is doing it at category-defining scale.

Foundever is the global customer-experience operator that emerged from the Sitel-Sykes combination — a workforce business operating across dozens of countries with vendor relationships spanning enterprise software, real estate, telecommunications infrastructure, and outsourced services. Gutierrez leads procurement for that complex.

The CPO seat at an operator this size is more strategic than it sounds. Customer-experience businesses spend enormous sums on enabling infrastructure, and every dollar of operational improvement gets pressure-tested through procurement. Foundever’s global footprint means Gutierrez navigates supplier consolidation, currency exposure, and regulatory variation in ways more localized procurement leaders don’t. He carries a procurement pedigree built over two decades — earlier leadership at Publicis Groupe and award-winning sustainable-sourcing work at PepsiCo, plus a U.S. patent to his name.

His seat is also one of the cleanest operating-leverage stories in the function: a CPO turning a sprawling, multi-country vendor base into a strategic instrument rather than a cost line.

Anand leads global logistics services at Jabil, the contract-manufacturing operator whose customers depend on its ability to move components and finished goods across electronics, healthcare, packaging, and industrial verticals. Her work sits where supply-chain orchestration meets the operating reality of products that have to ship on a customer's roadmap — not Jabil's own.

That dynamic is what makes contract-manufacturing logistics distinct. She's running 3PL/4PL orchestration across regulatory regimes, trade-compliance regimes, and inventory-positioning decisions that touch supplier qualification on one side and customer launch dates on the other. Twenty-plus years of supply-chain and logistics work — including TMS, lean six sigma, and digital-transformation programs — informs the operating discipline she brings to the seat.

What CC's editorial frame keeps returning to is leaders whose competence shows up in the work itself. Anand was recognized in 2025 as a Supply & Demand Chain Executive Women in Supply Chain honoree and a Global Procurement & Supply Chain awardee — recognition that tracks the operating work, not the title. Her role represents the kind of behind-the-scenes leadership that determines whether globalized manufacturing keeps delivering the products its customers need.

Nunez runs sourcing and procurement inside Baker Hughes, the energy-technology company supplying the equipment and services that keep global oil, gas, and industrial-energy operations running. He manages roughly a billion dollars of spend across a supply base where lead times, commodity volatility, and geopolitical exposure all compound at once.

His seat is one of the clearest expressions of this edition’s theme. Nunez has built his career on process transformation and the systems layer underneath sourcing — ERP and AI strategy, supplier-management programs, and the kind of spend-data architecture that has to exist before any AI tool can deliver. Two decades across energy and industrial procurement, including earlier sourcing leadership at Honeywell and at Tenaris and Exiros, gave him a vocabulary built for supply bases where a missed delivery is measured in rig-days, not retail days.

He represents the operating leader CC keeps returning to: not the executive talking about AI in procurement, but the one quietly building the conditions that make it real at billion-dollar scale.

Hilton Supply Management is the procurement-as-a-service arm of Hilton’s hospitality empire — running purchasing for thousands of hotels worldwide across food and beverage, linens, technology, furniture, and operating supplies. Saxena leads that operation as President & Global Head.

Hospitality procurement is its own animal. Volume matters enormously; consistency matters more. A flagship property and a roadside select-service hotel both need procurement infrastructure that delivers the brand promise reliably across geographies and supplier ecosystems. Hilton Supply Management’s model — taking that internal capability and offering it to third-party hotels — makes it one of the few procurement organizations operating as both an internal cost function and an external commercial business. Beyond the seat, Saxena serves on the AHLA Foundation board, investing in the talent pipeline the industry runs on.

Her role illustrates what CC’s editorial thesis keeps returning to: a leader running real operational scale in a function that rarely gets the spotlight.

Macaluso is Chief Procurement Officer at GSK — the global biopharma company whose recent operating reality has been defined by separating from Haleon, navigating the post-pandemic vaccine landscape, and executing across one of the most regulated supplier networks in the world. She stepped into the GSK seat in early 2026 after running procurement at GE HealthCare and a long earlier arc in indirect-services procurement at Johnson & Johnson.

The pharma procurement portfolio is distinctive because the operating reality combines API and biologic sourcing, contract-manufacturing relationships, clinical-trial supply chains, and the regulatory overlay (FDA, EMA, MHRA) governing every supplier in the network. Quality, traceability, and supply continuity are not metrics here — they are conditions for the business to operate. Every category decision touches patient outcomes.

Macaluso’s trajectory — J&J indirect-services CPO, then GE HealthCare CPO, now GSK Group CPO — is the procurement-executive arc CC keeps returning to: leaders whose authority shows up in operating decisions across the most consequential supplier networks in healthcare. Her seat is the procurement architecture under one of the most-watched biopharma platforms operating today.

Nielsen is SVP and Chief Procurement Officer at Nestlé and CEO of Nestrade — the procurement seat at the world’s largest food and beverage company. His mandate covers Nestlé’s three-year transformation program targeting CHF 2.5 billion in incremental cost savings by 2027, alongside the company’s responsible-sourcing and operational-excellence agenda across thousands of ingredient and material categories spanning every food regime in the world.

The Nestlé procurement portfolio is distinctive because the operating reality combines commodity volatility, multi-country supplier ecosystems, regulatory compliance across every market the company touches, and the long-tail sustainability accounting that comes with operating at this scale. The procurement function has to deliver on all of it simultaneously while serving as the engine of the company’s transformation strategy.

Nielsen has been at Nestlé for 15+ years, building up from Global Buyer through Global Head of Procurement at Nespresso, VP of Commodities, and into the Group CPO seat in October 2024. His procurement strategy has been notably AI-forward — autonomous sourcing for low-value spend, AI-guided contract lifecycle management, and probabilistic price forecasting using machine learning. What CC’s editorial frame keeps returning to is leaders whose operating substance shows up in the work itself. Nielsen’s seat is the procurement architecture under one of the most consequential consumer-goods supply chains in the world.