Challenges facing the procurement industry in 2020 with Roger Davies and Amanda Earnshaw-Darg – Episode 4

Martin Smith, host of Talent Talks interviews two of the UK’s leading Procurement Experts whose experience spans across the aviation, retail and banking sectors, leading procurement divisions for brands such as British Airways, M&S, John Lewis, JP Morgan, RBS and The Body Shop. 

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This episode of Talent Talks covers:

• Automation & digitalization
• How the future role of procurement is developing 
• The importance of networking
• Advice on career and skills development in procurement
• Differing views on category management 
• The impact of Brexit
• Benefits of mentoring and role models
• “Cost vs Value Add” and the importance of understanding the overall business strategy

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Links & References

• Talent Drive: https://talentdrive.co.uk/
• Martin Smith: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martinsmith2009/
• Amanda Earnshaw-Darg: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanda-earnshaw-darg-fcips-7a053114/
• Roger Davies: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roger-davies-4377032/
• ProcureCon: https://procureconeast.wbresearch.com/
• CIPS: https://www.cips.org/
• CASME: https://casme.com/
• Procurement Leaders: https://www.procurementleaders.com/

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Read the full episode transcript

Martin Smith  0:04  

Welcome to the fourth episode of Talent Talks with me Martin Smith, Founder and Director of Talent Drive, specialist recruiter across the UK in procurement and supply chain. Now I’m very excited to start off 2020 with some great guests lined up for today’s show, in a brand new studio here in Bournemouth, courtesy of Podcast Labs – a big thanks to Andy and Kelly for letting us use the facilities today. Today’s a real coup for Talent Drive on what I’m sure I feel will be a lively debate with two procurement leaders in the UK that I’ve known both for a number of years. Firstly, Roger Davies – Roger joined British Airways as a procurement graduate and quickly worked his way up through the procurement team, procuring lots of weird and wonderful things from aircraft seats to air traffic control services. Before joining M&S to head up group procurement for nine years, and then recently went over to John Lewis Partnerships in 2018 where he led a transformational change and has recently left to take on new opportunities. So firstly welcome Roger.

Roger Davies  1:05  

Thank you Martin. 

Martin Smith  1:06  

And our other guest is Amanda Earnshaw-Darg, who also impressively worked her way up through the procurement ranks, and having started at ARAMARK she went on from the retail world into banking, at Mellon Bank, JP Morgan and RBS. Then into heading up procurement for UK and international at RSA and then venturing into the interim world where she’s led transformation projects at JLL, and more recently, just finished an assignment at The Body Shop, so welcome, Amanda.

Amanda Earnshaw-Darg  1:31  

Good morning.

Martin Smith  1:33  

Certainly a wealth of knowledge, so I’m going to do my best to try and keep up with you both today! So with the new year comes new challenges in the trends of the world of procurement. So prior to today, I asked Roger and Amanda to come up with some topics that they felt needed addressing, to help us be more aware and agile in 2020, so lots of stuff to talk about today. The first topic which has been highly publicised and had lots of chat in the market, is around automation and digitalization. So Amanda, to kick things off, how has this impacted procurement and why do you feel this is an important area to address?

Amanda Earnshaw-Darg  2:09  

Sure. So automation and digitalization certainly isn’t a new trend. Procurement roles have already become far more automated than in the past. Gone are the days of the duplicated order forms in those pre internet and pre email days, which can I just say I don’t know about, I wasn’t there for that bit! But certainly the thing that I am very familiar with is that we now have things like eRFX  e-auctions, digital contracts. All of these things are the norm for most procurement teams. So I think there’s a lot of automation and digitalization which has already come in. At RSA, I implemented a “what to buy where” guide, which was a SharePoint, a digital version, which basically helped our stakeholders to self service and took away a lot of the tactical buying that was taking up our time otherwise. And I think that trend is going to continue and it’s going to increase more rapidly and we will see much more automation and digitalization coming in. And soon, potentially, big data will mean that our business stakeholders themselves can be the ones that identify potential suppliers in the market, that they’re able to compare pricing and capability and potentially do all of that tender exercise without us even being involved. So I do think, we have to embrace it and we have to get behind it, otherwise we ourselves are going to get left behind. However, over time, it certainly isn’t that we’ve seen fewer procurement people in companies. Nowadays there’s very few companies out there that are medium or large size that haven’t got a procurement team and a significant procurement team at that. And certainly the likes of McKinsey’s, recognise the importance of strategic in procurement, and when companies are looking to do that turn around activity, are saying “well where are they?” So I think that procurement remains growth in terms of numbers, it’s just that the roles have changed over time, and the time saving and improved knowledge, that the technology, automation and digitalization is bringing, really is the thing that’s enabling us to do a better job. We’re becoming more strategic and more able to add value back to the business. So as yet, maybe not in 2020, but as yet computers can’t be strategic so it’s our job to do that for them.

Martin Smith  4:31  

I think there’s often that fear factor, where people associate AI and robotics, with a decrease in the population of the procurement and your headcount in teams will be diminished. But I completely agree, that actually it’s resulting in that investment of staff and still improving the growth of the team. Roger, what do you make of it?

Roger Davies  4:48  

I’m going to be a little more challenging here. I have already seen AI tools that are potentially taking us down a route where the whole sorting process becomes something that a user can do themselves. And so what procurement functions have done over the last 10-15 years is to move more and more to strategic sourcing as being their bread and butter, and being process orientated. And if we don’t move more into the relationship management and the commercial softer skills of managing our suppliers, getting customer of choice type behaviour out of our suppliers, I could see a scenario where the function disappears. Because the stakeholders will do the job, the tools will be there, and what will procurement add? We can say we will be strategic and try and be strategic, but at the end of the day, if it’s a process, and it’s managed as a process, which is the way we have led ourselves to go over the last 10-15 years, that ability to really dynamically change people’s mind and get the best out of our best suppliers, becomes very, very difficult for us and the stakeholders will own it themselves.

Martin Smith  5:55  

So if that’s happening over the coming years, what will that lead to for procurement then? What would the need be for a procurement professional in that function?

Roger Davies  6:02  

For me, the thing that we need to think long and hard about is how we change the skill set of our individuals and teams. In a way, it’s a “Back to the Future” type thinking where we get better and closer to our key suppliers, and have the ability to influence and build the relationships and be that almost “account management” role between the stakeholder and the business and our key suppliers. Such that we get more and the best out of them, as opposed to shoving everything through just a transactional relationship box. There is still a need for that, and I’m the last person by the way to say we shouldn’t test the market right, that’s been my bread and butter for ages. But I had a moment at a conference not that long ago where I heard someone speak and I was suddenly thinking “blimey if you extend this out, you get to a point where if we’re not careful there is a limited role for us if we stick to the running a process.” 

Martin Smith  7:03  

Amanda, thoughts?

Amanda Earnshaw-Darg  7:05  

Oh, I agree entirely. I think that tactical view and what we call strategic procurement at the moment, which we all call running a tender or running a project, I think that will become tactical as well. I think it’s really about influencing people whether that be your stakeholders, your suppliers, your competition. I think we’ve got to pick up our game and really think about what other business heads are thinking about, which is what’s happening out there in the marketplace in terms of competition, and how do we make sure that we are ahead of the game.

Roger Davies  7:36  

I think the average CFO doesn’t realise or think of procurement in that way. We’ve allowed ourselves to lose that influencing opportunity. We’ve pushed ourselves into tactical cost saving type mentality and it’s not everywhere, clearly, but because of that, if we’re not careful, that ability to influence at the exec level and the highest level will slowly, but surely wane. 

Martin Smith  7:59  

Right. Okay. Thank you both. I guess that leads quite nicely in terms of that marketplace awareness, which could be viewed as an internal thing as well as an external thing as well. So, Roger I know, we spoke before about how procurement professionals could become better networked and clearly for you both at the moment, you’re in that sort of candidate space in terms of getting out there to your own networks, so good to get your views on that really, and what you feel about the networking space?

Roger Davies  8:27  

Okay, so I think there’s some really good efforts being made by some leading individuals in the procurement world to try and formalise great networks. Unfortunately, for me, they’re probably not as well supported as they could be by industry bodies. And as such, we sort of lag some of our competition let’s call it, in different functions. And even at the CPO level, there are things arranged, but it’s quite often things that we pay for, with quite a significant amount, so we ask our businesses to help us pay for, and not necessarily the informal networks and learning networks that might be set up elsewhere.

Martin Smith  9:07  

Would you see more value add from those networks than the sort of more big corporate “ProcureCon”‘s and those type of things? Where do you think the value add would be more for someone like you and Amanda at your level?

Roger Davies  9:18  

Clearly I see a place for the “ProcureCon”‘s of this world. They do a cracking job of throwing some great events and those things encourage people into the function, give people a lot of excitement, all that sort of good stuff. However, I think there is that ability to talk with candour about experiences, admit fault, and discuss what’s gone well, and what’s not gone well, and learning experiences without giving away any sort of competitive secrets clearly, is something that is difficult to do in the procurement function. I think partly, we’re quite a competitive bunch, right, because of who we are, quite guarded as well. So that’s our fault, and we just think about how we do that, but it’s also partly because the formations of doing those aren’t necessarily set up in a way. And a lot of that’s down to us individually, and I’m guilty of this, sort of getting out more and trying to talk to more of my colleagues. But I think more support at the highest level, would then flow right through, and would be really important. I think as you go, further down the hierarchy let’s call it, I think it becomes even more difficult, and people tend to, or can’t help but, get quite introverted, both within their own organisations, and even more so within their own categories, which I know we’ll talk about more in a bit. So you get people who are very caught up in their own organisation and within that very, very caught within their category, and then where do they network and how they network and how they get the breath to be able to step cross categories or cross companies or who knows cross industries? Which seems to be more and more difficult for people to do now.

Martin Smith  10:52  

And share that best practice as well I imagine across businesses? Because often I’ve been to these events and like you said earlier, people will be happy to say “I’m doing all these wonderful things within my function” but actually, what are the challenges of that and having that almost real conversation with fellow peers in your network about “Actually I’ve had a real challenge with, I don’t know a P2P implementation in the business” or whatever it might be, I often find those things aren’t often there at those big events. 

Roger Davies  11:19  

No, I agree, because there’s an element of sales there so understandably. I think the other interesting thing is because we don’t have those more open networks, we can very easily get labelled. So I feel that I’m already labelled as a retailer. Now I don’t consider myself to be a retailer at all, I consider myself to be a procurement professional and my background was buying a range of weird and wonderful things, I think you described it as, and so I personally feel I can go and sort of work anywhere. But that’s actually quite a difficult thing when you haven’t talked across a range of industries and you’re not known to talk across a range of industries and there’s not those natural things set up.

Martin Smith  11:55  

So Amanda, you’ve also worked in a real diverse range of industries and recently also worked in retail yourself, so what’s your views on that?

Amanda Earnshaw-Darg  12:04  

I guess from my perspective, I get your point about they’re not necessarily being as many networks as we’d like at a senior level. But actually, I don’t really see the pull of people, below CPO level, wanting to get out there and network. And I think that’s actually a great shame that there seems to be this culture within the workplace, that you should be at your desk. And if you’re not at your desk, are you doing your job? But actually, when you speak to senior people, CEO’s, CFO’s, COO’s, what they’re really looking for is “what are other people doing?” So when I worked at RSA and got my role there, their ambition was to be best in class, and the only way I could know whether or not we were best in class, and what I needed to do to get us there, was to know what other people were doing in other insurance companies, in other industries, and other sectors. And not only from a procurement perspective in terms of how you should run certain processes and what tools you should be using, but also just generally in terms of what they were doing in their business, which suppliers they were using, and you know, what opportunities we had. And what I tended to find is that people get to CPO level and then they suddenly go, “oh, I need to build this network and I need to get this information”, and I think we should be developing these skills at an earlier stage with people. I was very fortunate as quite early on in my career, I got involved with CIPS, and did quite a lot of volunteering, and not only did I make the best network in terms of having a good knowledge of what’s going on, and knowing people I can pick up the phone to and say “what are you doing, what challenges you got, how did you overcome a challenge that I’ve got at the moment?” but actually, lots of those people have become very, very good friends with me. I was very fortunate, I was a founding member along with Shirley Cooper and two other chaps and we set up the CIPS fellowship but that is for CPO level and over my time I’ve tried to do things to reach out to that kind of more middle band that are trying to get to that CPO level, and we did “Fellows of the Future”. But I think there’s a lot more needed out there but I think it needs to come from both sides. I think there needs to be the push of offering these things but there also needs to be the pull of people taking them up and not waiting for their companies necessarily to organise it. Because belts seem to be being tightened for a long time now and whether there is that investment in terms of training in companies. I think people need to break out of that and go find it themselves.

Roger Davies  14:40  

I’d like to back up what Amanda said, “The Fellows of the Future” is a fantastic set up, and Shirley and Amanda the likes have done a cracking job of setting that up and I’ve been lucky enough to get involved at a limited level myself. But it’s a shame because it’s a really great network of CPO’s but for whatever reason, it doesn’t seem to have been taken on by CIPS, for example, as being able to help lead the function as a whole and help develop the strategy in the future of the function as a whole. And I do think if you get that sort of thing operating properly, and then the encouragement to networking will start to flow more obviously further down, and it’ll become an obvious path for folks. I agree with you entirely, in terms of the “future fellows” type mindset is brilliant, but we sort of need to get an acceptance that that group working together and sharing non competitive stuff is a really, really good way of helping the profession grow further. If we’re right and we are saying that actually, digitalization is going to fundamentally change the structure of the way procurement works then getting the CPO group to work together on how we translate the organisations and functions such that we can support that and how we change the function is going to be key.

Martin Smith  15:59  

I think it’s a really interesting point, because it’s almost about cascading that down to the future CPO’s. Because CIPS is a topic that’s constantly on this podcast, it will continue to be, the value it adds, there are conflicting views on that shall we say, in terms of what people see. I think the perception is definitely changing and having recruited it for 11 years, I’ve seen it from day one where it was kind of, “Have you got CIPS or not? It’s a black and white thing” but clearly these days, I know all the great work you’ve done with the fellowship, but I do think there needs to be more accessibility to those “Head of Categories”, “Head of Procurement” that want to be CPOs and actually don’t feel at the moment that they have a seat at the table, or how do they go about having a seat at the table? So maybe there needs to be more in terms of the advertising of that or maybe localising those events to certain communities. But I definitely think there needs to be more to allow that to be an access point because people just see it as a networking thing, “right, I’m going to go talk to my CFO, can have some money in the pot? No, sorry. Okay. No worries. Maybe next year”. Bit of a sweeping statement but I’ve seen it so many times when people are talking about that, and they don’t really know what’s going on outside the four walls of their office, and I think that’s really important.

Amanda Earnshaw-Darg  17:09  

And I think we should almost have like a BBC style statement here where we say there are other products. 

Martin Smith  17:13  

Sorry, yes, there are. 

Amanda Earnshaw-Darg  17:15  

There are the CIPS events, but there’s also, you know, LinkedIn that people could be using, CASME is a great network. You’ve got Procurement Leaders as well offering great information out there to people. There’s lots of ways to access these things. So there are those routes available. But I think there could be more. I think it is an uptake thing, though, I think if people engage with it more, I think there will be more available to them as well.

Martin Smith  17:41  

Yeah. Agreed. Next I wanted to talk about another trend, which when I put a message out last week on LinkedIn, a lot of the responses and private messages I had were talking about category management. Business A see category management in this way, Business B in this way. So, Amanda, what kind of trends are you seeing in the market in terms of category management and how could this impact procurement?

Amanda Earnshaw-Darg  18:09  

Sure, so another trend that has been around for a long time, this is not new. But I have to say it’s definitely becoming more commonplace. I don’t know whether that is because procurement teams are getting larger and so we’re looking for new ways we can organise them, we’ve done the project route and the business partner route, we’re now trying to look at something a different way to spin the numbers and look for the opportunities and so that kind of category management is really becoming much more common. And I’m finding that a lot of employers now when they’re looking to hire for people are looking for deep category knowledge, that’s what they’re advertising on the job specs.

Martin Smith  18:45  

Do you think that’s applicable to every category because for example in IT it’s obvious you need to know how to do a software licence agreement…

Roger Davies  18:52  

Oo I’ll challenge that! We’ll get into that…! 

Martin Smith  18:53  

Okay

Amanda Earnshaw-Darg  18:54  

I’m with you on that, so I am an IT buyer, I’ve bought lots of other things as well, and I don’t think you do nowadays

Martin Smith  19:00  

Really? Okay,

Roger Davies  19:02  

One of my best hires was someone who had never bought IT before and I put them as Head of IT procurement.

Martin Smith  19:08  

So why were they successful then?

Roger Davies  19:10  

Because they had the broad range of skills and procurement skills and enough of an interest in IT to be able to show interest to stakeholders, and enough empathy to be able to work for them, but they brought the commercial skills and that’s fundamental.

Martin Smith  19:24  

From my point of view, often when I’m getting briefed on roles, not from you two in the past, you have been more flexible, but other business and people I’ve worked with, where they’ve gone literally, “this is the category I need, I need them to have procured x, y, and z for this amount of years.” I’m not saying it’s right, by the way, but that’s often the challenge that we, and hopefully there’ll be some recruiters in procurement nodding on this, that this is a must have and I completely agree with you, they need to be a bit more flexible, but it’s interesting to hear that.

Amanda Earnshaw-Darg  19:48  

Possibly those managers don’t have that category knowledge expertise themselves and so they’re looking for it in their team to be able to rely on that, I think especially from an IT perspective. And I think candidates have very much responded to this because they have seen that if they do specialise, they can charge a premium. So it’s kind of worked both ways for quite a while and grown. But there is that risk. If you do specialise to such an extent that you have such a narrow field of knowledge and experience, you may have great in depth knowledge of very specific suppliers in the marketplace. But as we’re seeing with Brexit, marketplaces sometimes rapidly change, and actually those good old procurement skills are often the ones you need.

Martin Smith  20:31  

So just on that point there, what advice would you guys give? Because they’ll be people listening to this podcast that have been procuring purely HR services as an example, they’re at category manager level, they’re looking to make that step up. So diversifying the categories that they’re doing, perhaps sounds like an obvious thing. So what would your advice be to those up and coming senior managers? What do they need to do if they’re at the moment in just one category? What should they be doing? What do you think?

Amanda Earnshaw-Darg  20:54  

So I must admit when I was at buyer category management level, I used to just go up to my boss and say, “well I’ve done everything I can with this one, give me another category, let me have two!”

Martin Smith  21:03  

Okay so being involved in other projects with other people?

Amanda Earnshaw-Darg  21:06  

Yeah “so-and-so looks really busy, where can I go and help out for a while?” And just get a bit of extra experience. 

Roger Davies  21:12  

Yeah, I used to flip around. I bought very, very different things. I was lucky because British Airways at the time worked in that way. I don’t know if that’s still the case, but you moved, we mentioned it, from things like aircraft seats through to property through to air traffic control stuff. So you moved, that was a way of doing it, you asked for it as well. When you really said “what advice would I give?”, it depends what an individual wants. Because if an individual wants to be deep, and to limit I guess, potentially where they go by being a very strong category specialist and maybe moving into interim and getting a great day rate, that’s not a bad career, not a bad way of working. If you want to be someone who is working at a senior leadership team level or CPO type level. I would argue that ideally you want to have bought in more than one category and you want to experience more than one category.

Amanda Earnshaw-Darg  22:02  

And also, we were talking earlier about automation and digitalization, well, that specific category knowledge is likely to be the first thing that the internet and big data can deliver up. So, maybe in the next year, you’re going to be fine, but in the near future, you’re gonna find that that information becomes much more freely available and so you’re going to need to fall back on those more transferable skills.

Roger Davies  22:25  

Yeah, we sort of got ourselves into a catch 22 scenario where we’ve persuaded our stakeholders that they should expect to have category expertise really given to them. And so we go along to our stakeholders and say, “Look, what would you want me to recruit?” They say, “Well, I’d like you to recruit someone with great category expertise.” And if you throw up someone who has never worked in that category, or who has limited category, irrespective of how good their other skills are, you’re into a difficult conversation straight away. So we somehow need to find ways of breaking out and looking more at the capability of individuals more broadly, and going with gut and trust that they will be able to step into a category. And also go with gut and trust that actually the specialists of the categories are often actually the stakeholders themselves.

Martin Smith  23:12  

Does that also apply with the people management side? Because again, from my side of the coin, you’re seeing people develop up, they get to that “Head of Category” level, they’ve listened to the advice and they’ve done loads of different things. And then they’re going out for external jobs and they’re saying “you haven’t got people management experience”. For you, as hiring managers yourself, are you going a bit on the trust and gut and the characteristics you think they could be good leaders? Because often, the door gets slammed shut, because they say you haven’t managed a team at the moment.

Amanda Earnshaw-Darg  23:37  

Everyone has to start somewhere. You know, everyone at some point didn’t have any people management. So somebody has to be that person that will give somebody an opportunity to shine. And I think that’s often easier when you’re in a company, you can give that “one team member at a time” approach and let them build slowly and know something about that person to help them. But certainly, I’ve been very lucky in my career in the fact that people have taken “a punt on me” so to speak, and when I’ve made those moves in my career, I have taken that next step up and those new opportunities that come with it. Sometimes that’s people management, sometimes that’s been a totally new category or a new perspective on things.

Roger Davies  24:16  

Yeah within the confines of your own organisation, you’re much more likely to “give someone a punt”, into giving them the leadership opportunities. And personally, if you’re recruiting externally to your own company, it’s very difficult to give someone a punt, as to “oh sorry I’ve not managed a team,” and suddenly I’m going to give you a team of 10. I would much, much, much more likely go “give them a punt” into a completely new category, as I’ve done. 

Martin Smith  24:47  

Because that’s less risk?

Roger Davies  24:49  

If you’ve already managed a team really well, then you can transfer that into another category’s leadership. If you’ve never bought IT, I think you can learn it pretty well, particularly if you got a team below you who already have, then you can step above it.

Martin Smith  25:03  

Okay, good. So every month on Talent Talks we have some questions coming in from the audience. So Roger, I wanted to ask you, from one of our listeners, what advice would you give someone who’s just entering a career in procurement? How can they be successful?

Roger Davies  25:18  

It’s sort of aligned with what we’ve just talked about. For me, it’s get as much breadth as you possibly can. Take as many of your learning opportunities as you possibly can. Be curious, be curious as to what you can buy, looking at a range of things. Look for mentors, look for coaches, liaise with colleagues.

Martin Smith  25:36  

Do the mentors need to be in procurement, or could they be in the broader business sense in the area that you’re working in?

Roger Davies  25:42  

I think in the first stages of trying to build up a procurement career, my personal view would be try and get a mentor within procurement, if that’s what you do. Over time, for me personally, I always managed to get mentors outside of procurement as I moved through the organisation that was very helpful. I actually stepped out procurement for four years into marketing and having a mentor in a completely different function helped me with that entirely. But I think in the early stages, if you’re looking to get a career in procurement and build that up, then doing those sort of things. I would look at qualifications, which is clearly, a good badge to have and takes you through a certain line. But there are other great courses and great training you can do that you can take advantage of as well. But try and learn on the job as much as possible too. So just get as much experience as much breadth as possible. And almost, don’t worry about moving up too quickly, get your breadth first, and then that will come.

Martin Smith  26:44  

Get that foundation to grow, okay. And Amanda, one question here from someone, and I guess is kind of touching on some of the stuff we’ve already discussed, but what do you see as the biggest challenge that procurement face in 2020?

Amanda Earnshaw-Darg  26:57  

Oh goodness, I thought we were going to have a podcast where, we didn’t mention the B word!

Martin Smith  27:03  

We’ve already mentioned it once, we skimmed over itt!

Amanda Earnshaw-Darg  27:06  

I think that’s it.

Martin Smith  27:07  

Do you see that as an impact?

Amanda Earnshaw-Darg  27:08  

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, this year is all going to be about those trade agreements that the government is putting in place because of Brexit. And to think that our jobs won’t be affected in any way, shape, or form by those is just naive. And we could sit back and say, “well, we’ve got our contracts in order and we’ve done this, that and the other,” that is not the way to go about it. Get out there network, keep your ear to the ground, use LinkedIn, whatever it is, to hear what’s going on. And really, my message is stay agile, because you know, we’re not sure what’s going to happen, how it will impact your company. It could be a great opportunity, it could be the worst thing possible. But if you’re in procurement, managing a supply base, and you stay agile and are able to react as quickly as possible to whatever is needed, or ideally prevent something, then that’s really what I think is the biggest challenge for us, but also the biggest opportunity this year. 

Roger Davies  28:04  

Yeah, what a great learning opportunity. Brilliant for us all. 

Martin Smith  28:06  

Yeah, I agree.

Amanda Earnshaw-Darg  28:07  

The CV’s are gonna be amazing for me in years to come!

Martin Smith  28:11  

Let’s hope so. Okay, so I guess it kind of leads onto to the next thing, so we’ve discussed category management, we’ve discussed AI and automation and some advice for procurement people. Amanda, do you think it’s realistic that we can address all of these in 2020? And what advice would you give to people that can make a success this year?

Amanda Earnshaw-Darg  28:34  

Sure. I think we’ve actually given hopefully quite a lot of practical advice today and I think it’s just more about moving in the right direction. So we started off with the kind of automation and digitalization side of things, don’t ignore that, absolutely understand how you can optimise the use of that. But then get on to how can you make yourself more strategic? What is it when you look at yourself and you have that self awareness of where your gaps and opportunities are, you know, where can you be more strategic? Where can you influence people more? Where can you network more work? Where can you find out more new information? Where can you find a mentor? Or maybe just a role model? I think that’s the way and the direction to go.

Martin Smith  29:15  

Roger gave some great advice earlier about finding a mentor, someone internally. Did you also have that opportunity to have someone that mentored you in any of your jobs in procurement the past? 

Amanda Earnshaw-Darg  29:24  

It’s interesting, isn’t it. So I think when people hear mentor, they think it’s going to be really quite a formal sit down, you know, meeting every week or something. And I have some people that I mentor as well. But actually, for me, it’s much more about finding role models, sometimes in the company but often outside as well, that are people that I think “wow you’ve really moved your career in a particular way, in a particular direction that I would love to do,” and thought about how they did it, but also hopefully developed a kind of friendship with them, where I can say, “I’m stuck here” or “I’m thinking about moving to this company, what do you think to them, would that be good for me, what’s that cultural fit?” So I think mentoring is great, but I don’t think it always has to be a kind of formal mentoring as we talk about sometimes.

Martin Smith  30:09  

Yeah. One thing I wanted to ask you guys, we talked about some of the realistic challenges, obviously, in procurement we’ve covered today. One of probably the biggest themes that I’m hearing, which again, I’m sure will be continuing this year, isn’t Brexit, but is to do with cost versus the value add of a business. So the savings versus the value add. Sweeping statement, but often retail is a stereotype environment where you’re driving the bottom line cost savings, it’s less around the value add from the supply base. What are both your views on that in procurement, how should it be perceived in the modern day? Because it’s a commercial function, of course you’re there to make savings, but where are you on that sort of spectrum of cost vs value? What’s your views on that?

Roger Davies  30:55  

It’s a really interesting one, isn’t it. I personally feel more comfortable with driving value description of procurement, and linking to what we said earlier about AI etc, that the pure cost reduction stuff is a key part of the job right. But how much of that, such as tendering is going to be taken away from us? Whereas the value add side of getting a supplier to do something they would only do for you versus other competitors essentially is going to be the real skill set going forward. So the truth is both, right, and here’s the real rub, you mentioned it, is it depends what industry you’re in and what the state of that industry is. Retail is very, very tough. What the culture of the organisation is and where it’s looking. If your organisation is looking very short term cost reduction, then you know procurement have to get with the programme and it’s great fun to say “Oh look, I’m going to get into customer of choice type thinking with my suppliers” but no CFO is really going to thank you. They may thank you in 10 years time, if they’re still around, right? Whereas in a longer term more strategic industry, where people are thinking out there, you’ve got to get to that level of discussion. Because if you don’t, people will be looking at you like you’re tactical and a bit of a fool. So I think you have to judge it, depending on where you are. One of the things I would say as a CPO and all the way through my procurement pieces, one thing I’ve learned is procurement is different everywhere you go. And if you think you’re going to take the skill sets you had before and just translate them into the new organisation and ignore A) the culture and B) the industry, you’re going to be in for a difficult time. My experience of just changing within retail, is fundamentally different organisations, fundamentally different mindsets. Not to say one was right or one was wrong, but if I hadn’t gone into that with my eyes open a bit it’d be really, really difficult. I don’t think there’s a clear answer. I mean, I love the value add description, right, but I’m naive to think that’s even a priority or what you should focus on, you’ve got to do both.

Martin Smith  33:05  

Amanda, do you agree that?

Amanda Earnshaw-Darg  33:06  

Absolutely I think the thing that most frustrates me is that you often go into procurement teams, and they have this savings target, that doesn’t seem to be tied to the bottom line that I can see and doesn’t relate to your businesses budget, or what their business strategy really is. And so I think that’s the thing we as procurement, people really need to turn around, that absolutely this kind of long term value, especially with much more strategic partnership perspective around suppliers, is needed. But there needs to be the realism that the departments you’re dealing with those department heads, they need to meet their budgets. And so sometimes it will all be about the immediate savings, but other times, they may have enough budget and they actually want to invest, so they want to save money to invest in something else or to grow something. So I think it’s about having the understanding of what your business needs to achieve to then be able to identify what your procurement targets should be.

Roger Davies  34:03  

One of my guys would constantly go on about needing to get our business plan lined up. And I’d be going “what are you on about? We don’t talk business plans, we’re delivering cost control or whatever.” And then, over time and probably after we parted company and working together, I suddenly thought, you know what, you were right. That’s almost the way we should be thinking about it, more of a business plan type mindset, and like Amanda said, sometimes that’s about tight cost control, but quite often, that’s about investing as well.

Martin Smith  34:40  

Yeah. I think sometimes people often see the business partnering element almost as a luxury. In terms of “I need to get those deals in now, and then if I’ve got time, I can go out to the business, win the hearts and minds, go and have those conversations and those coffee chats to make sure that the CIO is happy with the agreement I’ve got in.” But I think from what I’m hearing, this is all joined up, right? You need to be doing that, the business partnering all joins in with the overall agenda of what procurement should be and what it’s about for you as CPO’s driving that?

Roger Davies  35:11  

Well, business partnering is another fascinating one isn’t it? We love to talk about the idea that where we need to move to is to be business partners, right? But what learning and development training and support do we give people in actually doing that? For example, an account management type mindset, if you’re in a sales organisation, that is fundamental. For procurement, you’re absolutely right, we’ve driven people down a process, task based mindset, and we say “come and be our business partner”, and then we just assume by their natural personality, that they will be able to. Whereas actually, the truth is, there’s a lot to think around a business partner in terms of personality types, influencing skills, a whole load of stuff that we don’t naturally think about in procurement and we have to get a bit more clever about that.

Martin Smith  35:58  

So procurement 2020 exciting place to be!

Amanda Earnshaw-Darg  36:01  

Absolutely.

Martin Smith  36:02  

Great. All right, well, thank you ever so much both of you for coming down today and sharing your views on the current themes and challenges facing procurement in 2020. I’m sure our listeners will take a lot from today in terms of practical advice. And I’ll publish Amanda and Rogers LinkedIn details when the podcast goes live. So feel free to drop them a note if you have any other additional questions. Or if you want to invite them to some of the networking events that we’re talking about today. Make sure to follow talent drive and keep up to date with all our latest news, and do follow us on our website www.talentdrive.co.uk. Join me again next month for the next podcast. Thanks for listening.

Roger Davies  36:41  

Thanks Martin. 

Amanda Earnshaw-Darg  36:42  

Thanks, Martin.