“What is procurement to an organization? Always come back to that.”
The power of business partnering is an often unfulfilled potential which can massively improve a procurement function’s impact on a business. Overcoming that first hurdle and making those connections is made easier through proper collaboration with the rest of the business, and helping stakeholders to understand the value in procurement.
On this episode of Talent Talks we hear from Karl Walton, Senior IT Procurement Manager at The AA, and Tom Mills, who’s setting up an exciting new procurement function at Bibby Financial Services.
We deep dive into introducing self service procurement into a function, how jargon-free training can help educate the whole business into seeing procurement’s potential, and the key pillars of a procurement framework.
This episode of Talent Talks covers:
- How to embed effective business partnering in a procurement function
- Proving your worth without overpromising or under-delivering
- Defining, measuring and delivering value in procurement
- Training stakeholders to be advocates for procurement
- Raising the profile of the profession both internally and externally
This episode of Talent Talks is sponsored by 4C Associates – a leading European procurement and supply chain consultancy, who work collaboratively with forward-thinking clients to deliver real business value across a wide range of transformation and cost optimisation service offerings. Visit https://www.4cassociates.com/ for more information.
Links & references
- Karl Walton, Senior IT Procurement Manager at The AA
https://www.linkedin.com/in/karl-walton-27a2772a/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-aa/
- Tom Mills, Head of Procurement at Bibby Financial Services
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-mills-20a56726/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/bibbyfinancialservices/
Episode highlights
“I’ve always said that procurement’s role is not to become the SME in a specific area. It’s to work effectively in partnership with the SMEs.” – 4:25 – Tom Mills
“There’s a point sometimes whereby we can be seen as a service function, and you’re so focused on that stakeholder engagement that there’s a danger procurement can become almost like an admin hub for things like contract reviews, or almost a tick box.” – 8:55 – Tom Mills
“If you’re a Greenfield procurement department and you’re just establishing and rolling out procurement properly to that business, you’ve only got so much capacity in your team. So what you don’t want to be doing is promising the moon and then delivering nothing.” – 9:50 – Karl Walton
“Sometimes there’s an expectation that everything’s got to be put through an RFP or a tender. There’s many other ways. Tools and templates are good, but actually, when you’re looking at new spend opportunities, there’s lots of other ways that procurement can add value.” – 16:40 – Tom Mills
“Training is embedding procurement’s culture into the business, so that everybody has a base level of expertise in procurement, right? Because then they understand what the processes are, what the tools are, the do’s and don’ts. It takes an awful lot of pressure off of your procurement team.” – 19:55 – Karl Walton
“What is procurement to an organization? Always always come back to that, because if it is just churning out contracts, you’re better off just getting perhaps a third party to come in and deliver that, or setting up a really junior team.” – 24:20 – Karl Walton
“Think of examples that are meaningful to people in their real life, and then make them realise the importance of spending the money appropriately and treating the money as though it’s our own, that really helps it to resonate.” – 30:25 – Tom Mills
“Thinking about this profile and this value-add, procurement absolutely has to be seen as a knowledge base, particularly from a market perspective.
So if you’ve got no tooling to support you, you are literally left with stakeholders, suppliers, and Google. Where else do you go at that point?” – 40:05 – Karl Walton
“Having a true understanding of your data is how you make your decisions, then that comes back to the point on communication; communicating what something means for the business, and what we could deliver with x resource?” – 43:20 – Tom Mills
