“Ultimately, unless you’re joining a start-up, then it’s not ever really a greenfield site. There’s going to be existing practices”
Generally a greenfield project can be considered one where the processes you implement aren’t constrained by prior practice, but the reality of breaking the habits already in place can be complex, particularly if your knowledge of the category is limited.
From his experience as Virgin Atlantic’s Head of Procurement in Engineering, Simon Feeney vouches that this lack of knowledge can actually be a strength, allowing basic questions to be asked and discovering novel opportunities to drive value.
Now the Procurement Director at Collinson, Simon offers his views on the importance of understanding a category’s nuances before implementing processes that work elsewhere in the business, and a fresh perspective on the meaning of greenfield procurement.
This episode of Talent Talks covers:
- An alternate view on greenfield procurement
- Introducing new procurement processes to existing category areas
- Balancing tactical and strategic activities
- How lack of experience in a category can benefit your approach
- Attracting more female professionals to the industry
- Collinson’s unique position to help restart the travel industry
This episode of Talent Talks is sponsored by Suppleye – a free to access platform that provides fresh insights, breaking news and unique sentiment scores on the companies that interest you. Know your suppliers inside and out by visiting https://www.suppleye.com/ and signing up in less than 2 minutes.
Links & references
- Simon Feeney, Procurement Director at Collinsonhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/simonfeeney/
- Martin Smith, Founder & Director of Talent Drive https://www.linkedin.com/in/martinsmith2009/
Episode highlights
“Ultimately, unless you’re joining a start-up, then it’s not ever really a greenfield site. There will be people within an organization who have been doing procurement before, so there’s going to be existing practices.” – 4:20 – Simon Feeney
“When you’re looking to set up a new category, it’s really then about understanding what the nuances are of that specific category, understanding how it’s been worked before, and how you would then think about rolling out and tailoring what you already do in other parts of the business.” – 6:20 – Simon Feeney
“Especially if you’re ever setting up a category where you don’t have that specialist background knowledge, it allows you to ask the basic questions. It allows you to really get under the skin of things and ask how, why, what, where, when, down to its simplistic sense.” – 11:45 – Simon Feeney
“If you’re the sort of person who’s going to sit in a meeting, not understand something, nod along, pretend and bluff, then you’ll be found out very, very quickly. If you’re the sort of person who’s going to stand up and say ‘You know what, I actually don’t know what that means. Can you just explain that to me?’, then you can pick things up quite quickly, and people respect that.” – 12:45 – Simon Feeney
“Procurement for me, and for Collinson, is about working with the business to drive as much value as we can through our third party supply networks. And it’s a value statement, not a cost statement.” – 20:35 – Simon Feeney
“The biggest challenge that I think you face is, whilst you grow your team out, making sure you keep reviewing how you’re spending your time? And on what activities? And are they the right things to do for the function at the right point in time?” – 28:50 – Simon Feeney
“We started looking in the summer at how we can help travel, so we introduced COVID testing for travel, working with airports.” – 34:35 – Simon Feeney
