The Purchaser Issue 14

FOR EXECUTIVES, BUSINESS LEADERS AND INNOVATORS

Tech-Exec explores the fundamental technologies, trends and leaders affecting business and enterprise, the c-suite and society. It provides insight, analysis and thought-leadership on those technologies driving change, and considers how emerging innovations are influencing the leaders of tomorrow.

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© Stroud and Clarke Ltd 2023. All rights reserved. Whilst every effort is made to ensure that information is correct upon publishing, Stroud and Clarke Ltd is not responsible for any errors or omissions, or for the results obtained from the use of this information. All information in this magazine is provided “as is”, with no guarantee of completeness, accuracy, timeliness or of the results obtained from the use of this information. This magazine may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Like me, you’ve probably become used to talking about disruption, risk, and resilience when it comes to keeping supply chains running. It is, after all, part of the job. But, also like me, you’ll probably read our interview with Kormotech’s Ulyana Fitsa and gain some much needed perspective on what these topics actually mean.

Fitsa and her colleagues at the Ukrainian pet food company have had to adjust to life under conflict following Russia’s invasion of their country on 24 February 2022. And they have done so in a way that is both remarkable and humbling to hear, carrying on production at their facilities in Ukraine and Lithuania, and working closely with local suppliers and civilians while facing disruption and risk that’s unimaginable to most.

“When the war began, we stopped production at all our factories in Ukraine for around five days,” says Fitsa, reflecting on the last year. “There’s no instructions or protocols on how to react or behave in a situation like this, and in such an environment you’ll never necessarily make the right decisions. If I’m being frank, we didn’t know what to do next, we didn’t know what tomorrow would bring, let alone the next three or four hours of our lives.”

After their initial shutdown period, all at Kormotech have fully dedicated themselves to carrying on their work with a shared passion, focus and commitment that the family-run business has nurtured since it was established 20 years ago. Fitsa herself has been with the company from day one.

I’m truly grateful for the time they took to speak with us and proud to be able to tell their story.

We hope you enjoy the issue and find some inspiration in the people we feature.

Stroud & Clarke is a multichannel creative agency that produces exceptional business and lifestyle content for brands, leaders and pioneers.

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Director

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06 | INSIGHT EXEC SUMMARY News, views and insight

12 | INTERVIEW KORMOTECH

On supply chain in wartime, and the importance of resilience and strong teams

28 | PORTFOLIO TECH YOU NEED

Innovations for work, leisure and the environmentally conscious

38 | INNOVATOR AMPLIO

Goodbye complexity. Hello easy and predictable sourcing

40 | INTERVIEW KRAFT HEINZ

On supply chain and logistics transformation, and digital adoption

54 | DISRUPTOR LIVINGPACKETS

Technology, reuse and service: welcome to the triple revolution

56 | INTERVIEW PHILLIP DUNCAN & DEAN BENNETT

On collaboration, evolution and their own procurement transformations

70 | INTERVIEW ROUND TABLE

Strategic procurement, transformation and collaboration

90 | ENTREPRENEUR HUMBLE SUSTAINABILITY

Changing the planet with Josef Werker and Niña Opida

92 | INNOVATION TESLA

What happens to a Tesla battery at the end of its life?

00 | PERSPECTIVE TECH & COLLABORATION

Digital Catapult’s Tim Lawrence on turning obstacles into opportunities

100 | CITY GUIDE 48 HRS: LJUBLJANA

Business and pleasure in the Slovenian capital

108 | CALENDAR EVENTS

The best events for 2023

SUPPLY CHAIN: THE PERPETUAL STORM

New world events are combining to create a perpetual storm of disruption for supply chain leaders, in which their ingenuity, resilience and flexibility will be tested, according to research by Accenture. Modern supply chains are being changed immeasurably by the pace of change across consumer behaviour and markets, it says, requiring greater focus on agile ways of working, resilience and sustainability. To respond to disruption businesses can adopt a holistic and technology-led approach to managing supply chain, while also building a responsive and resilient risk management ops capability. Five immediate priorities to mitigate challenges, Accenture says, are: put people first, leverage data to improve visibility, define segmentation to prioritise demand, build a sales and ops SWAT team, and evaluate supply chain scenarios.

www.accenture.com

ENVIRONMENT IN FOCUS

According to a study from consultancy Efficio, of procurement professionals surveyed just 38% said their scope of responsibilities included ensuring environmental sustainability, compared to 72% who noted traditional processes like cost control and contract execution.

Only 33% of business leaders professed to being ‘very confident’ in hitting their greenhouse gas emissions goals, Efficio recorded.

www.efficioconsulting.com

To advance transformation in the circular economy leaders should focus on three crucial questions:

> What are the most effective and profitable circular models to support growth and sustainability, while navigating global disruption?

> How do you build a network of interconnected supply chains to enable new circular models?

> How can we achieve systems-wide change that dramatically increases the number of interconnected circular supply chains?

The World Economic Forum

HIGH AND MIGHTY

Just 21 months ago Mightyfly, a startup focused on faster and more efficient logistics through autonomous, hybrid eVTOL cargo transport aircraft, received $5.1m seed funding. Nine months ago, it launched its first concept flight. Now, it’s unveiled Cento, the second generation of its eVTOL design, a hybrid aircraft with a cargo capacity of 100 lbs, range of 600 miles and maximum speed of 150mph. Cento’s internal cargo bay can carry 96 small UPS packages, which are loaded autonomously to do away with the need for human ground handlers. MightyFly says the integrated, high-throughput aerial logistics system is perfect for retail, medica, automotive and manufacturing businesses.

www.mightyfly.com

“If there is one lesson we’ve learned from supply chain bottlenecks and logistics over the past few years, it’s that we need flexibility – to be able to adapt to various cargo volumes and expedited timing or urgencies”

–

Manal Habib, CEO and co-founder, MightyFly

SUSTAINABLE VISION

Leading European fashion group Mango has published a full list of its tier 3 factories, related suppliers of fabrics and fittings; it has previously done the same for its tier 1 and tier 2 factories. The move is part of Mango’s ambition to take the lead in fashion traceability and transparency, and is part of its Sustainable Vision 2030 sustainability strategy. The full list was drafted in accordance with the requirements of the Transparency Pledge Standard, an initiative launched by a coalition of nine employment and human rights organisations committed to transparency in clothing and footwear supply chains.

www.mangofashiongroup.com

RESPONSIBLE LEADERSHIP

Sustainability, supply chain crises, diversity and inclusion and more are giving rise to new and evolving styles of leadership that no longer rely just on transformation or enacting change. According to Odgers Berndtson, today’s leaders must still make the right decisions, mitigate disruption and adapt rapidly, but they must also steer the ship with purpose, authenticity and empathy. In practice this means affiliation and altruism, behaving as a guide not a hero, standing with your team and not above it, and a willingness to work just as hard rather than delegating orders.

www.odgersberdtson.com

Maersk and MSC , the world’s two largest ocean shipping lines, announce they will discontinue their 2M alliance, which allows shared cargo capacity in trading lanes, in 2025.

Walmart launches Walmart Business, a dedicated e-commerce site for small and medium business customers designed to simplify businessrelated purchases.

A report from Amazon Business finds that 70% of those it surveyed are not aware of what sociallyresponsible purchasing guidelines exist within their organisation.

The WEF sets out three areas in which technology can strengthen supply chains: using data effectively, using process knowledge-powered AI, and enabling sustainability.

The US Department of Labor issues citations at three Amazon warehouses for failing to keep workers safe.

DUTY, COMMITMENT AND SUPPLY CHAIN

ULYANA FITSA DISCUSSES SUPPLY CHAIN IN WARTIME, THE IMPORTANCE OF FOCUS, RESILIENCE AND TEAM, AND WHY EVERYONE IS PLAYING A CRUCIAL ROLE IN UKRAINE

Disruption, risk, resilience. Work in supply chain and logistics long enough and these most important topics become, dare we say, a little everyday. Then something happens that changes your perspective. Like managing production under the threat of indiscriminate attack. Like urgently working with key suppliers to move vital equipment by road, or having the interview we’d arranged to discuss these events and more being interrupted suddenly and with little warning by a possible air raid.

This is disruption. This is risk. And, most importantly, this is resilience. For over a year – 331 days at time of writing – Ulyana Fitsa and her colleagues at pet food supplier Kormotech have, like all her fellow Ukrainians, had to adjust to life under conflict following Russia’s invasion of the country on 24 February 2022. And they have done so in a way that is both remarkable and humbling to hear, carrying on production at their facilities in Ukraine and Lithuania, and working closely with local suppliers and civilians while facing disruption unimaginable to most. Over the course of two conversations, Fitsa discussed her approach to work and performance during wartime, to her colleagues and company, and to her country. We wanted to tell her story.

“IT’S OUR DUTY TO SUPPORT LOCAL SUPPLIERS AND ALL WORK TOGETHER THROUGH THIS CHALLENGING TIME”

Creating quality products and services of international level

FEEDNOVA is a modern Ukrainian enterprise that produces high-quality fats and high-protein feed additives for farm animals and pets. The new complex includes four separate production lines that process more than 220 tons of raw materials per day. Production capacity of the plant – up to 2000 tons of finished products per month.

The products of processing the raw materials of category 3, which are needed by customers as highly efficient pet food additives, fats for feed and biofuels. The company strictly adheres to the management and control systems of all stages of production under the GMP+ certificate.

“WE DIDN’T KNOW WHAT TO DO NEXT…”

“When the war began, we stopped production at all our factories in Ukraine for around five days,” says Fitsa, reflecting on the last year. “There’s no instructions or protocols on how to react, or behave in a situation like this and in such an environment you’ll never necessarily make the right decisions. If I’m being frank, we didn’t know what to do next, we didn’t know what tomorrow would bring, let alone the next three or four hours of our lives.

“After that initial shutdown period we made the collective decision that we have to work, we have to fully dedicate ourselves and focus together because business is really important to the country – we have to ensure the economy is still making money – and to the people,” she continues. “Kormotech is a family business, I’ve been in that family since the start for 20 years, and our CEO is passionate about all our employees. It was a transformation period for the whole company, not just the supply chain. We divided the

“WHEN THE WAR BEGAN, WE STOPPED PRODUCTION AT ALL OUR FACTORIES IN UKRAINE FOR AROUND FIVE DAYS”

top and middle management across the business into key project groups and removed any hierarchy – whether you’re a CEO, a logistics manager or anything else, you’re now all on the same level working together on key projects and assignments to keep the business running.

“Now, we work as close to normal as we can. When we have air raid sirens, we stop, go to the shelters and wait. When it’s over,

we come back to work,” she explains. “There are challenges to that: we work with raw produce making pet food so, if we’re away for any length of time there is waste or leftover stock that we have to throw away and no longer use. Whatever happens quality remains paramount, as does the safety of our people. All these challenges, operating in such a dynamic and uncertain environment, you don’t get used to them but do become ‘aquainted’ with them.”

“WE’VE CHANGED, OR TRANSFORMED, BUT IT’S NOT A TRANSFORMATION ABOUT MONEY, FIGURES, BUDGETS OR ANYTHING ELSE. IT’S ABOUT EMOTIONS”

Reputation. Respect. Result.

TRADEX AGRI, established in 2010, is a part of the TRADEX AGRI GROUP which manages three modern grain storage facilities with simultaneous storage of 80,000 tons in the Western part of Ukraine, close to Europe borders. The company cultivate grain and oil crops on a land bank of 8,000 hectares. Dairy farms also play a big role in our company, developing this direction we use the latest technologies in this sphere.

The organisation of auto logistics with its fleet of grain trucks is a key factor in the delivery of goods outside of Ukraine.

TRADEX AGRI is a leading provider in the wholesale trade of grain crops and has a mission to develop long-term relationships with its domestic and international partners.

Email: office.tradex.ltd@gmail.com

Website: tradexagri.com.ua

We provide storage of grain and oil crops at our three state-of-the-art facilities. A modern elevator and all our high-tech laboratories are furnished with equipment to ensure the highest grain quality.

Our analytical department conducts a detailed analysis of markets that may have an impact on prices and we provide our customers with the latest data and advice on when is the best time to sell their products.

Transport and forwarding services are provided and managed via our separate railway tracks and a fleet of grain trucks.

“WE’VE ADAPTED AND TRANSFORMED…”

The conflict in Ukraine has taken a terrible and lasting toll on the country and its people. Running a business in such an environment brings a multitude of challenges and complexities, particularly to the supply chain operations that Fitsa oversees as Global Chief Supply Chain Officer. Kormotech manufactures cat and dog food for a global customer base from three plants in Ukraine and Lithuania and two European distribution centers; its products are sold through five brands in 33 countries. In 2021, Kormotech was ranked 51st among the world’s top 101 companies and the seventh fastest-growing pet food company by the Petfood Industry magazine. In 2023, it’s aim is to be ranked among the top 50 global pet food industry leaders worldwide.

“Supply chain is the blood system of the company,” says Fitsa. “Everything is dependent on it in terms of the pace the business can operate at and how successful it can be. There has to be flexibility in the way you operate and your approach to crises. We’ve faced a financial crisis and currency drop in 2008 in Ukraine that was very impactful. In 2014 war began in the east of the country and, in February last year, it became a full-scale war. We’ve also had the ongoing impact of COVID on our supply chains and, since 2008 the business has grown – that continued last year. Amid the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, we reported 12% revenue growth and a 2% increase in capacity in 2022, compared to 2021. In 2023 we plan to reach $150 MIO of turnover.

“During wartime, we’ve adapted and transformed the supply chain,” she continues. “I have procurement, outsourcing and planning departments under me, and operational logistics, which is responsible for warehousing, machinery and transport. Me and the team basically cover all the functions of our facilities, as well as ordering and outsourcing where we need to. The pet food industry is a complex one; the quality and the care we put into our work are key because everyone wants the best for their pets. We have to source the raw ingredients according to the composition of the foods, create recipes based on our own palatability testing and response to sample foods, and manage the distribution of the products.”

Of course, no amount of planning can mitigate circumstances such as those faced by Fitsa, her colleagues at Kormotech and all in Ukraine. As a result of the conflict, she says, the business has lost 30% of its market, and left the Belarusian market, but is rearranging for developing new destinations and partnerships for export; in 2014 when hostilities began the market in the east of the country was disrupted and this happened again in February 2022 with many Ukrainian territories in the east and south blocked. In addition to this, Fitsa and her colleagues face disruption to production, challenges with logistics and transportation, and working with and supporting local partners facing the same problems.

“It’s been incredibly complicated,” she states. “We have partners in 33 countries and, from one day to the next, we lost the connection with them – it’s our bridge and gate for sending goods around the world, to the US, to Asia and other countries. We had to reroute all these logistics operations via our ports, but this was challenging as there were problems at major ports like Constanta and Klaipeda where they didn’t have the capacity to take in goods from Ukraine. It was a very difficult period to work through. Logistics has also seen a loss of drivers as a result of the war. Across Europe, many returned back here, to Ukraine, to protect their families or be close to home and very quickly there was a shortage of drivers across the continent that shut down a lot of transport operations.”

“YOU

BELIEVE TOMORROW WILL BE BETTER…”

More so than business, conflict impacts people and relationships. Kormotech is a proud supporter of local companies and suppliers for its production and, over the last year, has worked closely with a commitment and duty that only a shared sense of greater purpose can bring. “We’ve changed, or transformed, but it’s not a transformation about money, figures, budgets or anything else,” says Fitsa, “it’s about emotions. Even before there was war, I’ve always said that business is the side effect of our relations with others; values are the crucial thing, whether that’s for my team, my company or our partners and suppliers.

“Some were in very dangerous locations,” she continues. “One of our packaging partners in the northeast of the country is around 40 km from the border. Because of their location, they were one of the first to see Russian forces passing their own factory facilities on their CCTV cameras. The night before this had happened, they’d had a new line of equipment delivered to their site that was still outside in the trucks and, as soon as the Russians crossed the border they woke their drivers and had them transport the machinery to our Kormotech facilities in the west of the country, where we sheltered them. I remember telling them ‘I can’t guarantee you their safety, because we don’t know what the future holds, but I’ll do my best to make sure you still have a small part of your business to begin again with if you need’.

“You have to remain focused on your job so much so that you believe tomorrow will be better,” says Fitsa, “but tomorrow also depends on what you do today. All our Ukrainian suppliers that are working face the same problems and disruption as us, and we are collaborating very closely with them to manage stock by storing some at their sites and some at ours, so that if they are attacked we have limited the potential damage.

“At the very beginning of the war, when we were considering the very real situation that all our Ukrainian supplies would disappear, we prepared a list of alternatives in different countries.

ULYANA FITSA

Should we need to, we can source some of our products elsewhere – Romanian corn gluten, for example – but I don’t want to do that,” she adds. “It’s our duty to support local suppliers and all work together through this challenging time. We’ve collectively been together since

war started last year and I can’t abandon those same people that have stuck by us since then. Most of them now have generators as we don’t have electricity, they have Starlinks and protection for their workers, and we will get through this together.”

“WE HAVE PARTNERS IN 33 COUNTRIES AND, FROM ONE DAY TO THE NEXT, WE LOST THE CONNECTION WITH THEM”

“KORMOTECH IS A FAMILY TO ME…”

This spirit, drive and focus is a key aspect of Fitsa’s personal and professional outlook, and one that is replicated across the organisation. Kormotech is a family firm with a strong heritage of vision, ambition and dedication to its people – values that have been shaped over 20 years by Fitsa and her senior colleagues as founding members.

“I often say that pet care and pet food is in my blood,” she smiles. “This year the business has been active for 20 years, and I’ve been here from the very beginning: I was originally working for Enzym, the mother company of Kormotech, when we had the initial idea for a separate pet care brand and the owner of the business, Orest Vovk, invited me to join the project at that point. We started from scratch,

“KORMOTECH IS A FAMILY TO ME AND, IF I LEFT IN A TIME OF NEED, I CAN’T EXPECT OTHERS TO CARRY ON”

down to choosing a location to build our first factory and designing it ourselves.

I’ve worked through the company from office manager, through foreign affairs manager and logistics manager roles, to head of department and now Global Chief Supply Chain Officer. I’ve a team of around 160 and I feel it’s my duty to be here for them and encourage them through these challenges.

“The role of the leader is important, of course, but without a team you won’t get anywhere or have any success,” says Fitsa. “Early on in the war I had the opportunity to leave the country and be safe, but I made the decision that I’m

first in line to our CEO and owner – I’m one of the bricks that has to keep this wall standing, and behind me are 160 people in my team. Kormotech is a family to me and, if I left in a time of need, I can’t expect others to carry on with much faith so I have to be here for my team, my company and our country. We all have huge motivation to carry on. And in doing so, wherever you are whether it’s at work, at home, or just helping others, you are contributing and helping our country when it needs it most.”

PORTFOL iO

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COSMOS LASER 4K

If Bond villains have taught us anything, it’s that everything can be improved with lasers. Take, for example, the revolutionary home theatre experience that Nebula’s Cosmos Laser 4K gives. The compact projector plays on any flat surface with the intensity of 2,400 ISO Lumens – so bright, says Nebula, that you can watch with absolute clarity with the lights on. It can stream more than 400,000 movies and shows across 7,000+ apps, has 10W speakers for immersive sound, and its Intelligent Environment Adaptation analyses each room to create the perfect sized screen.

www.ukseenebula.com

PORTFOL iO

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KARA COFFEE MACHINE

Our interaction with electronic appliances is broken. They stop working, we stick them in landfill, which isn’t sustainable. Kara, a concept by Thomas Mair, is a repairable, recyclable and long-lasting coffee machine that bucks this trend. Its alternative approach to designing and building electronics is based on the entire lifecycle and encourages maintenance and repairability. Repair can be carried out with basic tools and parts can be 3D printed and replaced. Mair has also limited the overal amount of materials used and, where possible, made components from one material to simplify recycling.

www.thomasmair.works

PORTFOL iO

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MAKKA ‘POLESTAR EDITION’

If Cake has its way, the future of everyday commutes and urban adventures is simpler, more sustainable, and based on pure and progressive design. It also looks fantastic. The high-performance e-bike manufacturer’s Makka range represents a nimble, lightweight and quiet solution to city living. This version is built in collaboration with electric performance company Polestar and features two ride modes, a built-in electronic regenerative braking system, a class-leading battery and intelligent battery management system that can be fully charged in three hours, and a host of other accessories.

www.ridecake.com

PORTFOL iO

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WIRELESS CHARGING PLATFORM

Tesla took inspiration from the angular design and metallic styling of its Cybertruck when developing its Wireless Charging Platform –and it shows. The sleek design provides 15W of fast charging power per device for up to three devices simultaneously. It consists of an aluminium housing, premium alacantra surface and a detachable magnetic stand that allows it to be used flat or at an angle, and its FreePower technology charges Qi capable devices like phones or earbuds wherever they’re placed on the surface, doing away with the precise alignment required by some other charging platforms.

www.shop.tesla.com

PORTFOL iO

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50TH ANNIVERSARY CONCEPT PIANO

There are many ways to achieve surround sound. An expensive setup will do the trick. As will careful placement of speakers. Or you could get drones to do the job for you, like Roland has done. Its 50th Anniversary Concept Piano is its vision for the piano of the future. It has built in 360-degree speakers and wireless drone speakers that lift off, hover above the piano and its player and project sound around the room once you begin to play. It’s environmentally friendly too: its Japanese Nara oak wood comes from unused wood or laminated scrap only.

www.roland.com

Sourcing electronic components should be easy and predictable. Should. But, over the last couple of years global pandemics, economic disruption, conflict in Europe and more have had other ideas. The key to mitigating this kind of complexity, which is going nowhere, is predicting and preventing shortages, streamlining procurement, and accessing diverse sources of supply.

Amplio, which was launched in 2021, was built with these goals in mind – CEO and co-founder Trey Closson stating the organisation’s goal is to build greater resilience in the electronics components supply chain. It uses more than 20 live sources of data to monitor and predict component issues before they become a problem and offers access to an ecosystem of more than 500 alternative sources of supply to mitigate potential shortages.

Where that’s not possible, Amplio’s marketplace offers a shared community in which companies can find suppliers or other manufacturers with surplus inventory. It’s not just focused on shortterm fixes, either, Amplio helps remove procurement roadblocks by assessing and streamlining operations like PO and invoice management to position customers better for the future.

www.getamplio.com

“Sourcing electronic components should be easy and predictable”

BECOMING AGILE AT SCALE

Kraft Heinz’s Fazlur Rahman discusses supply chain and logistics transformation, digital adoption and the importance of agility, analysis and planning

Planning is everything. Every supply chain leader knows this. But, since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, that need for planning, for greater visibility and resilience, more data and better analysis of information to inform decision making, and the ability to be an agile function, has taken on an entirely new meaning. Disruption and complexity are now the norm for global supply chains, certainly for the foreseeable future, with organisations that want to stay ahead of their competitors taking significant steps to readdress sourcing strategies and supplier networks, accelerate digitisation and the implementation of advanced planning systems, and transform the ways they collaborate and work.

For world-leading brands like Kraft Heinz, there is no other option. The past two years have exposed the pressure on the company’s end-to-end supply chain networks – as with all businesses – and heightened the need for more connected and collaborative networks between suppliers, buyers, retailers, and other parties along the value chain. At the same time, consumer preference and demand has shifted in line with new ways of living post-pandemic, calling for a more predictive and rapid response strategy.

To mitigate these challenges the company has been on a significant digital transformation journey, based around its unique ‘AGILE@SCALE’ approach and built on agile disciplines and digital solutions across its entire value chain. Nowhere has this been more important than in its supply chain and logistics functions where Global Demand Planning and Digital Planning Transformation Lead Fazlur Rahman and his colleagues have been at the forefront of driving change.

“SINCE CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR AND CUSTOMER REQUIREMENTS HAVE CHANGED SO SIGNIFICANTLY IT’S MORE IMPORTANT THAN EVER TO IMPROVE OUR COLLABORATIVE FORECASTING AND PLANNING PROCESSES”

Fazlur Rahman Global Demand Planning and Digital Planning Transformation Lead

SUPPLY CHAIN EVOLUTION

“If an organisation wants to be ahead of the curve, it must digitally transform its supply chain function,” says Rahman, discussing the need for supply chain and logistics organisations to adopt new technologies as they evolve, and the importance of enabling greater planning and visibility. “For any company to stay profitable it’s no longer a matter of choice. Visibility and availability of information, as well as the ability to integrate it from all of the stakeholders across the entire value chain to drive better decision making are really important, as is a move towards automating some of that decision making.”

Rahman knows the modern supply chain well. He is an experienced and respected professional who has been with Kraft Heinz for eight years, moving through various roles including Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) Planner, work in demand planning, inventory planning and execution, and at the company’s Planning Center of Excellence in the US, where he led the Logistics Capabilities & Analytics team; in his current role he is based at Kraft Heinz’s Global Center of Excellence in Amsterdam. Prior to joining the company he began his supply chain planning journey with an internship at a large packaging firm – a role, he says that ‘got me interested in pursuing the supply chain profession’ – and he also has crossfunctional experience in sales, marketing, IT, procurement, programme management, and business development in industries

“WE HAVE SEEN OTHER ORGANISATIONS WITHIN THE BUSINESS LIKE CATEGORY PLANNING AND THE PROCUREMENT FUNCTIONS EMBARK ON THEIR OWN TRANSFORMATION JOURNEYS, AND I THINK THAT THE SUPPLY CHAIN PLANNING TRANSFORMATION HAS BEEN THE CATALYST FOR SUCH PROGRESS”

including retail, pharmaceuticals, government, banking, education, third party logistics, and consumer goods.

The supply chain and logistics environment has evolved significantly over the course of his career, he explains, but many of the key trends or shifts have been exacerbated by pressures brought on by the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The consumer goods industry has seen consumer behaviour changes over the past decade, including a shift towards more sustainably packaged goods, changing preferences for premium or private label brands, and increasing requirements from customers around

metrics like On Time In Full,” says Rahman. “However, over the past two years, we’ve started recognising more drastic changes in consumer preferences that are primarily being driven by things like mobility choices during and after the pandemic and the recent higher inflation rates. For example, choosing bulk sizes of products over regular sizes, premium or branded products seeing reduced consumption and, for food and beverages, one of the biggest impacts is in quick serve or the food service business, where it is harder to predict consumer footfall and product consumption.

“This continuous change has forced supply chains to adjust their production and distribution plans more frequently, resulting in greater volatility across the value chain,” he continues. “In addition, recent material shortages, vessel and truck shortages, and shortages in labour have further disrupted global supply chains, driving higher costs and lowering customer satisfaction. It’s left an interesting dynamic whereby it’s difficult to quantify whether consumer behaviour and customer preference are driving the evolution of supply chains, or the way that supply chains are changing is causing consumer and customer preferences to shift. In my view, it’s a combination of both because most businesses are no longer truly just demand- or supply-driven. All of these changes are the catalysts for supply chains having to continuously transform and be more agile.”

USING AI TO HELP PREDICT WHAT YOU’LL BE HUNGRY FOR?

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DIGITAL-FIRST TRANSFORMATION

The accelerated pace of change has led to companies like Kraft Heinz adopting digital-first supply chain solutions, building technology-driven ecosystems that benefit the entire value chain based both on internal transformation and development, and collaboration with external technology partners. According to Rahman, the need for embracing digital technologies and focusing on greater demand planning, analysis and S&OP capabilities is essential.

“Since consumer behaviour and customer requirements have changed so significantly – and are continuously evolving – it’s more important than ever to improve our collaborative forecasting and planning processes,” he explains. “There’s a larger gap between an aligned plan and the execution of the plan now, decisions are made on less reliable forecasts, and the demand plan is harder to meet objectively. In addition, traditional planning metrics no longer give the right information on business performance because there are more variables impacting planning errors. This makes execution less efficient.

“As a result, end-to-end visibility of customer expectations and plans through to supplier plans are important,” says Rahman. “In order to achieve this, there is a greater need for collaboration, both on the upstream and downstream processes, which is the role that a mature S&OP plays in the organisation. Within S&OP, demand planning is the critical function that brings the truest sense of how consumer demand translates into customer requirements, so having the capabilities to understand this is crucial.”

One of the areas where the most complexity lies at present is around how customer network changes drive different distribution demand signals. According to Rahman, it’s still relatively easy to predict consumer demand but a large and complex business like Kraft Heinz ships thousands of products to customers. Many of these are experiencing increased costs of warehousing, transportation and even labor at their retail sites and, as a result, are cutting costs and continuously evolving their distribution networks, all of which exacerbates our customer demand planning challenges.

“THE LEVEL OF DETAILED PLANNING REQUIRED IS SOMETHING THAT CANNOT BE HANDLED BY MANUAL PROCESSES, WHICH IS WHERE TECHNOLOGY REALLY COMES INTO PLAY”

“For logistics to run efficiently, the role that customer collaboration can play in improving a distribution demand plan has become really important,” he explains. “And to do so effectively is more complex than just predicting national customer or regional consumer demand. Rather, aggregate demand planning requires much greater analysis, particularly on macro-economic indicators like inflation and the likelihood associated with them, as well as inputs such as price elasticity. The days of one number and one plan are over. We’re now in an environment that requires multiple plans, scenarios and contingencies.”

AGILE AT SCALE

To mitigate these challenges Kraft Heinz has continued to transform its operations. For the supply chain and logistics functions, says Rahman, this has involved becoming increasingly data and metricsdriven, particularly around metrics that are relevant to customer expectations and demands. This customer-focused evolution is particularly important in terms of gaining greater trust and transparency. Specifically for logistics, particular focus has been paid to sourcing customers in the most efficient way so as to make a positive impact on the bottom line across the value chain.

At the same time, alongside digital adoption the organisation has continued to invest in the people, skills and capabilities necessary to effectively drive data analysis and analytics across the logistics function. “Companies are taking longer than expected to embrace the new technologies and techniques that are necessary,” Rahman notes. “There is a skill set gap driving this, but it’s also important to recognise that supply chain professionals have faced significant burnout due to the challenges we’ve faced recently. Combined, it makes the rollout of these new capabilities more difficult, meaning that companies, especially large enterprises like ours, must set the right priorities across the entire pyramid of their organisation, so that investments deliver their full potential value.”

Across these key areas of technology and people, the company has seen considerable change over the last one-to-two years with Rahman and team navigating a digitally-driven demand and planning transformation journey based on several key objectives.

“The key was the transformation of demand planning so that we can better drive decision making in the organisation in the integrated business planning process,” he explains, expanding on the transformation in more detail. “To do this, we had five key objectives: to fulfill customer demand by better on-shelf availability of our products; better market share and increase in total distribution; improved impact on customer P&L and our sales accounts’ P&Ls with better price and promotions; effective demand shaping so that we can operationalise our commercial plans effectively for capacity constraints portfolios; and to effectively use our network to produce and distribute products.

“Considering all of these objectives, the transformation was necessary to make our entire demand planning process integrated end-to-end with all the owners of market demand drivers, and also to make the process efficient and collaborative,” Rahman adds. “Within that, technology has played a vital role and goes hand-inhand with the process and people capabilities transformation. The roll-out of the work is being carried out in phases, as we must continue to run the business in challenging times while also investing in newer technologies. It’s not been an easy journey, but we are seeing the fruits of it coming out of our first major implementations in North America and an expansion to Europe.”

“OVER THE PAST TWO YEARS, WE’VE STARTED RECOGNISING MORE DRASTIC CHANGES IN CONSUMER PREFERENCES”

The adoption of new technologies has already brought significant benefits to operations, says Rahman, highlighting a number of examples: “One of the most practical is the distribution demand signal needed for logistics,” he states. “We have to ship our customers the right product at the right time, in the right quantity and from the right location, and we must have that product available given that our customer order lead times are short – in some cases anywhere from under three days to just a few hours. The most critical process here is to improve on our daily demand forecast at stock-keeping unit warehouse level for the next 21 days, followed by weekly buckets for the next 13 weeks, so we can distribute the products from our tier 1 locations to tier 2 locations without having the needs for expedites, excess inventory or even supply chain losses from products with short ship life.

“It is also significantly important to fulfill customer orders of our products where we are running promotions at the stores, so collaboration with our customer supply chain teams to efficiently deploy the promotional volume based upon the right demand signal is where the integration with the logistics processes is happening. Is it easy? No. But the need to do it is greater than ever, and the level of detailed planning required is something that cannot be handled by manual processes, which is where technology along with management by exception really comes into play.”

COLLABORATION, PLANNING AND THE FUTURE

As with any significant technology transformation, collaboration with key technology and innovation partners has played a crucial role. In this instance, and specifically with regards to work in the supply chain and logistics functions, Kraft Heinz has worked closely with Microsoft and o9 Solutions. With Microsoft the company has developed solutions to enable a more resilient supply chain, including using real-time predictive analytics and machine learning to improve inventory transparency and anticipate consumer and channel demand and drive efficiencies, and creating a supply chain control tower. This will enable real-time visibility into plant operations and automation of the company’s supply chain distribution across its 85 product categories.

In the case of o9 Solutions, its innovative Digital Brain platform enables organisations like Kraft Heinz to achieve better and faster planning and decision making to drive transparency across the supply chain, increase productivity and financial results, and to reduce organisational silos.

Success to date has been significant, with the transformational mindset spreading to other areas of the business as a result.

“For us, S&OP is transforming into IBP overtime,” Rahman notes. “However, I would say it requires larger organisational change and the behavioural aspects of S&OP process roll-outs are typically not

prioritised and that’s the area we are still making progress in. Also, organisations typically take time to adopt a new process and for that, we are seeing challenges, along with the challenging dynamics of the business.

“S&OE, on the other hand, has seen improvements, and that comes from our culture of bias for action which, in my opinion, has helped us be successful in this area,” he adds. “Proper roles and responsibilities and the mindset of making decisions based on whatever information is available have benefitted us. It was good to see improved metrics

“THE DAYS OF ONE NUMBER AND ONE PLAN ARE OVER. WE’RE NOW IN AN ENVIRONMENT THAT REQUIRES MULTIPLE PLANS, SCENARIOS AND CONTINGENCIES”

on both service and cost, and how fast logistics execution teams were able to roll up their sleeves and adapt to the new, faster-paced and more volatile needs for the execution of an alwayschanging plan was incredible.”

“The transformation has expanded to other areas like factory scheduling, supply planning, even the need for a robust control tower for our execution functions and automated decision making,” Rahman affirms. “We have seen other organisations within the business like category planning and the procurement functions embark on their own

transformation journeys, and I think that the supply chain planning transformation has been the catalyst for such progress. The mindset towards unconstrained design thinking to solve business problems, enabled by digital transformation, has been a trigger from us for setting the right culture in the organisation.”

Despite ongoing disruption in the global markets, Rahman notes the progress seen as a result of the transformation work, although much remains to be done, in particular around building and improving capabilities in processes, systems, people and the analytics side of the journey. “The strategy,” he says, “is to be future-ready and beat the competition. Our objective is to be in the top 25 supply chains in the world and to remain ahead of the curve. For that, continuous evolution of logistics and planning is important, as is continuing to improve our responsiveness to the ever-changing needs of our customers. At Kraft Heinz, one of our core values is being consumerobsessed, therefore we must be closer to them, our suppliers and their supply chains in order to continue improving our collaborative planning processes and drive overall efficiency.”

www.kraftheinzcompany.com

LIVINGPACKETS

Lost parcels. Not the just bane of our lives as consumers, but a costly and wasteful outcome for businesses, supply chains and logistics services everywhere. And if you do receive your parcels, you’re often left with excessive packaging waste –some of it non-recyclable – or the tricky issue of returns. Amazing then that the humble cardboard box and the way in which it’s sent has seen little innovation since its introduction.

LivingPackets has decided to ditch them altogether for a far more tech-savvy, interactive and reliable solution: THE BOX. It is, in essence, an intelligent or smart box.

But it’s packed [excuse the pun] with innovation. THE BOX is reusable, 100% recyclable, stronger than its cardboard counterpart, locked and monitored digitally, and includes integrated sensors that show where it is at any time, and in what state it’s in.

Its designers are also eyeing the circular economy through its reusable and modular design. Core elements including electronic tablet and locking systems can be used to make a new BOX from an old or damaged one.

www.livingpackets.com

“WE ARE AT THE BEGINNING OF A TRIPLE REVOLUTION: TECHNOLOGY, REUSE, SERVICE. THAT IS WHY WE HAVE BUILT AN UNPARALLELED VALUE PROPOSITION”

Jérôme Colin, Chief Technical Officer, Head of Innovation and Engineering, LivingPackets

Transformation masterclass

PHILLIP DUNCAN AND DEAN BENNETT DISCUSS PROCUREMENT EVOLUTION, THEIR OWN EXPERIENCES OF LEADING SUCCESSFUL TRANSFORMATION PROGRAMMES AND THE IMPORTANCE OF COLLABORATION

Why procurement transformation? It is, we concede, a basic starter for ten when speaking with two individuals who have spent the proverbial lifetime in the profession. And, who have a track record of instigating and leading successful change programmes at some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical firms. Nonetheless, in the context of a rapidly evolving procurement landscape and increasing global and enterprise-level complexity, it’s an important question. And, as Phillip Duncan and Dean Bennett quickly make apparent, one that’s far more nuanced and complex than you might imagine.

There is no one route to procurement transformation. Nor is there an end. But there are certain fundamentals that can contribute to success, irrespective of specific business case or strategic objective: strong leadership and clarity of vision, an ability to translate that messaging to all stakeholders, adopting new technologies that can give the levels of insight and analysis necessary to thrive and, perhaps most importantly, collaboration and outsourcing to an ecosystem of external partners and best-of-breed experts.

Duncan and Bennett call this ecosystem ‘the village’, and it’s this and the other key themes that we joined them to discuss in the context of the two significant procurement transformations they have led together – Duncan as Chief Procurement Officer and Bennett as his transformation lead within the respective organisations – at pharmaceutical firms Takeda and Novartis.

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PROCUREMENT EVOLUTION

Procurement has changed immeasurably since the first of these transformations began in 2009, an evolution largely characterised by a shift in the function’s role within the business from the ‘traditional’ intermediary scope of work associated with the profession to a more strategic and value/insight-driven proposition.

“The biggest changes I’ve seen in procurement are mirrored by the way society has evolved over the last 20 years,” says Duncan. “In procurement things have become much faster, the demand for immediate results from the business has grown, and the adoption of technology as an enabler to the way we do business and interact with our supply base has evolved significantly. At the same time, you’ve other changes influencing how we work, such as the growing importance of the role of ESG in procurement. The professionalism within the role has increased and we’ve become far more sophisticated, focusing on supplier development and

innovation through a proper connected strategy with the business.”

“I started my career working for a group of leaders from the automotive industry, who brought in what I still see as leading global procurement techniques,” Bennett reflects. “I then worked in other industries, in which the approach was very traditional, before moving into consulting. It was there I realised there was a smarter way to do things in our profession: more around the end-to-end process of procurement, using technology, and utilising the capabilities of outsourced services and various approaches to shape an operating model. The biggest change I’ve seen over that time is the evolution of procurement from a back-office, order placement or price reduction-targeted function to a far more sophisticated, partnership-driven, and collaborative organisation working with the business to get the right outcome for the business, not just the right outcome for procurement.”

“Things have become much faster, the demand for immediate results from the business has grown, and the adoption of technology as an enabler to the way we do business and interact with our supply base has evolved significantly”

PHILLIP DUNCAN

Procurement’s evolution over the past few years is the foundation for transformation of the function and its relationship with the business, says Duncan, the objective being to move the perceptions from an efficient transaction organisation to being an equal and trusted partner that can innovate, provide insight and real-time information to the business, drive strategic decision making, and lead on myriad emerging challenges around risk and resilience, or sustainability.

THE CASE FOR CHANGE

Duncan and Bennett have worked together through major procurement restructures in global businesses managing multi billions of spend and revenues in the tens of billions, achieving higher business engagement and significantly improved performance. Each transformation presented its own challenges and circumstances, but both were underpinned by something that both believe critical: bold ambition and strong leadership.

“Leadership, and clarity of leadership, is key in transformation,” Duncan affirms. “You need to have a clear vision, mission and objectives, and to be able to communicate them in a clear, precise and calm way to your people, as well as to internal and external stakeholders. Your vision and objectives must also be aligned with those of the company and understood by all – every member of the procurement team should fully understand what you’re trying to achieve clearly so they can all sing from the same hymn sheet. You need to be authentic, and have an aura of confidence and decisiveness. Your stakeholders have to know you

understand their challenges and are working together with them as a team to get the best result for the company. I see much of my role as being a diplomat and coach; it’s developing people and relationships.”

“What Phillip did well in both transformations was to create the right environment and culture,” Bennett continues. “I’ve been in environments where the vision starts from the top and filters down – direction and method is almost dictated. Working with Phillip was the opposite: he gave a very clear direction of expectations on the outcome, then trusted his leaders and their teams to deliver. In this kind of environment, leadership also has to be far more active in understanding how work is executed. It’s no

Dean Bennett © Dominic Steinmann

longer enough to issue directives from your office, there’s a greater expectation to guide and coach, and to lean in and solve operational issues alongside the teams if needed. It helps pass on insight, gives a better understanding of how to lead, and earns more respect from the business.”

A successful transformation relies on an ability to turn this vision and ambition into a common objective or business case that all stakeholders can work towards which, in large multinational organisations with decentralised operations like those Duncan and Bennett worked in, can be challenging.

“It starts with a case for change,” Bennett states. “And that has to align with what the business wants. Whether it’s savings, functional cost reduction, access to innovation, or sustainability, procurement’s transformation should enable it. In both our cases, Phillip had successfully aligned that case of change with the CFO and CEO of the organisation’s we worked for, meaning we had the impacted people behind it. At the first company where we worked together, there was a legacy divisional CPO structure and we needed to consider the impact of change on each, then onboard them in a way that was inclusive and transparent; it was essential they had a say in what would change, how and when, so you build collective ownership of the transformation.”

Adds Duncan: “The hardest part is getting, what I call, the ‘permission to buy’. To Dean’s point, it’s about engaging internal stakeholders

“Whether it’s savings, functional cost reduction, access to innovation, or sustainability, procurement’s transformation should enable it”

DEAN BENNETT

and building a team of talented and motivated people who believe both in you, the leader, and your vision for the organisation. At the large Swiss company we worked for, we had an OpEx spend in excess of US$20bn a year. With that scale, it should be relatively straightforward to produce great results, but it won’t happen unless there is partnership and collaboration with your internal customers – you don’t win with mandates.”

“You have to bring the rest of the organisation with you,” Bennett agrees. “Historically, internal strategic influencing and positioning have not been the core skills of procurement practitioners. In leading significant organisational transformation change, you have to be honest with yourself and recognise what skills you have in house and where you need to bring in help to be successful; in both cases we brought in external help.”

“When you’re sourcing a third party, capabilities and competencies are key, but for me it is hugely important that you have that good fit culturally, too”

PHILLIP DUNCAN

THE COLLABORATIVE VILLAGE

Both Duncan and Bennett advocate for the importance of this external help, outsourcing specific skills and capabilities to third parties as a crucial step of delivering transformation. Their partner village concept is an ecosystem of carefully selected best-of-breed partners – in this instance, consultancy firm Deloitte and research, analytics and intelligence firm The Smart Cube, among others.

Bennett explains: “Transformational change can rarely be done fast and well if it is conducted exclusively in house. In both transformations, we brought in consulting help from Deloitte to shape the design, bring fresh insights and help us to rapidly implement change, then we supplemented this with deep experts like The Smart Cube,

to compliment internal roles. We chose not to hire generalists or create functions with generalists, but rather to create functions with specialism. In doing so, you can then segment the role and decide where work is best executed or supported from.

“Take The Smart Cube as an example,” he continues. “We made a conscious decision to not expect our procurement people to do all the analytics, or become market experts on every element of their category. We chose to not only separate that capability into a distinct role, but buy the skill in to compliment the internal business partnering skills, the selling and influencing that we wanted in our procurement people as part of the core structure. It was this change that was key to achieving industry-leading metrics on cost reduction and more.”

Achieving the right balance between appropriate use of internal resources and capabilities and sourcing externally requires an open understanding that, rarely, do businesses have all the skills necessary to undertake such a significant programme of work. There are challenges in bringing in external teams, ensuring they are well integrated and that collaboration is effective across the organisation but, say Duncan and Bennett, it is the only way to ensure the sustainability of the change programme.

“There can be a pessimism from in-house teams when bringing in outside consultants, because they think they’re being told how to do their jobs properly,” Duncan

reflects. “That changed quickly, particularly in the second transformation, where the teams from Deloitte and The Smart Cube purposefully sat among us and embedded fully into what we were doing; they quickly became trusted colleagues and friends. When you’re sourcing a third party, capabilities and competencies are key, but for me it is hugely important that you have that good fit culturally, too. We always conduct a very rigorous bidding process, as you would expect from a procurement organisation, but I always look for that ‘fit’: which people will be working on our account and do they display the sense of passion and shared purpose that we have? It’s easy to buy expertise on organisational design, for example. Everybody can read a book, but somebody who understands, who’s been there themselves, and is prepared to roll up their sleeves and become part of the team, is hugely important.”

“We needed to partner with organisations who could understand both procurement and our culture,” Bennett continues, discussing the collaboration in more detail. “Internal recruitment teams naturally understand the culture, but rarely can understand the function specifics, and we needed to rapidly enable the team to be successful with the right skills and tools. Deloitte offered a great cultural fit – they came in to listen, understand and then work with us based on their experience to deliver the very best solution for our environment, and that was very different and tailored for each of the transformations.

“With The Smart Cube, the fact that we were able to go out and work with a third party and rapidly bring in this knowledge was a game changer,” he adds. “Market research and analytics can be a time consuming side job for procurement people. We approached it differently between the two transformations. In the former we had dedicated individuals per category. That was relatively expensive compared to the second project, where we had a pool of resources supporting all categories so we could dive in and out rather than paying for a permanent service. The benefits of the first project was that those dedicated resources became members of the team, they were embedded into the full picture rather than just the data analytics side. In the second, we did that virtually, brought them into teleconferences and made them part of the strategy development.”

Phillip Duncan

Leading aerospace and defence company gains complete visibility into supplier risks with The Smart Cube

During COVID-19, risks in the aerospace and defence sector sky-rocketed. Against a backdrop of an already volatile industry with unique characteristics, a top 10 aerospace and defence company needed a clear, up-to-date view of its suppliers in order to react quickly to emerging threats and mitigate their impacts.

Challenge

For the company, the process of finding a new supplier can take up to three years, due to the regulatory approvals and checks involved –making losing suppliers costly and disruptive. Previously, the company conducted annual risk assessments for a few hundred suppliers identified as ‘critical’. That approach was great at providing a retroactive view of risk, but with conditions shifting every day, it simply wasn’t fit for purpose once the pandemic hit.

Solution

Today, The Smart Cube’s Supplier Risk Intelligence solution helps the company proactively identify, monitor and mitigate supplier risk.

By onboarding ‘critical’ suppliers to the Smart Risk platform, the company can now examine ongoing risks in great depth, covering 49 core risk metrics to provide a complete, up-to-date view of risks associated with individual suppliers. Automatic email alerts covering lead risk indicators keep the team ahead of risks as they materialise.

The solution leverages The Smart Cube’s AI+HI approach. The AI layer extracts, filters and analyses a high volume of unstructured data to provide actionable insights using advanced algorithms and machine learning models. The HI layer comes from The Smart Cube’s experienced analysts who review the AI output to ensure users get only relevant information without noise.

Results

2,500 +

100 suppliers covered in less than a month

moderate to high-risk alerts per week

Through this solution, the company quickly scaled its risk monitoring operations to cover more than 2,500 suppliers in less than a month.

With an average of 100 moderate to highrisk alerts per week, it can now proactively mitigate new risks across its expansive supplier base.

By working closely with The Smart Cube, the company’s procurement team can also explore specific risks with customised intelligence that provides deeper insights into a situation.

To understand how The Smart Cube can help you in your procurement transformation journey and strike the right balance between AI and HI in your organisation, visit www.thesmartcube.com.

MEASURING SUCCESS

While fundamentals like effective leadership, clarity of vision and a good network of capable partners can underpin a change programme, Duncan and Bennett’s experience demonstrates that each organisation, business case and environment brings unique challenges and context. “In transformation one, we didn’t undertake a big change in terms of people, but more around the way the structure was designed to engage the organisation,” Bennett reflects. “That worked in some areas, but not in others and led to some lessons for the second transformation around making sure we set people up properly for success, building confidence and understanding how to own the outcome of the work. When we did that properly the second time around, where there was a need to drive rapid delivery of savings, we saw higher quality and greater speed of impact and energised teams.

“In transformation two, we designed a similar, but different model for the environment at the Japanese pharma company,” adds Bennett, expanding on the two different transformation approaches. “At the early stages we conducted a talent assessment of the existing team and realised we didn’t have time for them to grow into the roles and hit the business impact commitments we had made. We were bold, looked to hire in the necessary resources early and didn’t restrict ourselves to people in the industry but, instead, looked for specific capabilities rather than the fact they’d worked in pharma for 10 or 15 years. It was a significant hiring round

“We spent a lot of time engaging the procurement organisation, listening to their experiences and feedback and suggestions, celebrating success and making sure that we were giving them the tools and support that they needed to make it happen”

DEAN BENNETT

we brought on 30 leaders over the course of 18 months – and we used a recruitment startup business that, again, had the right cultural fit and were vested in making the transformation a success. On reflection, a big part of why it worked was because the team weren’t deep pharma people, but a collective of individuals with superb complimentary experiences that gelled through the journey of transformation.”

“That’s right,” agrees Duncan. “In transformation one, the teams we inherited were of high quality in terms of procurement expertise and procurement as a function was well established, although decentralised. The issue was that often it was disconnected from the business. In the second transformation, that wasn’t the case, and that’s not a reflection on the team we inherited, it’s just the fact that procurement was not understood by the business. The need to focus on

different types of output, taking the resources we had, was probably a learning that we could have made from the first time around.”

Success of any transformation can be measured against several metrics. There are, says Duncan, those ‘hard’ metrics related to the business’ objectives: does the transformation deliver the savings promised, does it deliver against the organisational design set out initially, or on headcount targets? But, he explains, procurement also had other qualitative measures against which it tracked the success of the transformation.

“We were passionate about internal customer satisfaction,” Bennett expands. “We purposely went out and sought regular input from across the organisation and were brave enough to adjust accordingly. We didn’t put the model out there and say ‘it is what it is and if you don’t like it, you have to adapt to it, business’. We tweaked as we went along – we wanted to move fast so we had to accept that we would iterate and adjust the model as we rolled it out, and I think it won us good recognition as we went forward. The other key consideration was about the procurement team. You have to recognise it’s the team delivering the change, and if the team isn’t behind that then you’ve got real problems. We spent a lot of time engaging the procurement organisation, listening to their experiences and feedback and suggestions, celebrating success and making sure that we were giving them the tools and support that they needed to make it happen.”

CONTINUED EVOLUTION

The world, and the profession continues to change. Ongoing disruption and fallout from pandemics, conflict and global shortages put the case for evolution and transformation high on the enterprise agenda. But, says Duncan, it has also reinforced the importance of a broad skill set for the modern procurement professional. “It’s demonstrated that some of the more basic steps of the procurement process remain so important,” he notes. “Security and quality of supply, the importance of environmental initiatives and ESG – for which procurement is probably the only

“It’s about engaging internal stakeholders and building a team of talented and motivated people who believe both in you, the leader, and your vision for the organisation”

PHILLIP DUNCAN

organisation that has the physical reach and capability to run a consistent, methodical programme to ensure both good practice and due diligence when sourcing goods and services – have come back to the fore. Low-cost sourcing has created a lot of value over the years, but perhaps we took our collective eyes off the more basic, fundamental aspects of procurement.”

couple of years. As a result, procurement needs to move to a hybrid model of capability in the market, rather than just capability in the centre. That’s a massive change because, historically, strong procurement capability typically started in Europe and the US. Now we’re having to build and develop in markets where it isn’t that typical to have the capability like China, Japan, Latin America and Africa. The profession of procurement hasn’t necessarily existed for a long time in those markets, so there is a real need to invest and build capability around the world and to recognise that procurement is a dispersed, not central function, as opposed to a global function dispersed in terms of where the bodies are.

Bennett continues: “We’ve been through decentralisation, then a wave of centralisation and I think we’re now in a hybrid environment, a lot of which has been determined by what we’ve seen over the last

“The change in the industry landscape across the world is defining what procurement needs to be in the future. What does that mean differently? ESG, as we talked of, is definitely rising up the agenda and it’s not purely about cost, but rather, much more about the environment and social aspects of procurement,” continues Bennett. “The war for talent is a big influencer and the ability to build that capability globally rather than in various centres, is something that procurement needs to take seriously. Using technology to either automate traditional processes like procure to pay, for example, and for rapid data analytics, will be a game changer too. If you get the right talent in the right framework informed by the right data, working to the right metrics, ESG and cost as an example, then you’ve got a winning formula.”

Procurement transformation: in conversation

PHILLIP DUNCAN, DEAN BENNETT, GAUTAM SINGH AND JAMES GREGSON GATHER TO DISCUSS THE EVOLUTION OF PROCUREMENT’S ROLE, BECOMING A STRATEGIC BUSINESS PARTNER, AND USING BEST-OF-BREED EXTERNAL PARTNERS TO ENABLE SUCCESSFUL TRANSFORMATION

“To do transformation well, fast and in a sustainable way is only possible by collaborating across a range of best-of-breed experts and creating a transformation village of expertise.” This village, in which procurement teams partner with external experts and collaborators to collectively drive the complex and challenging procurement transformations we’re seeing in global organisations, is crucial to success, say Phillip Duncan and Dean Bennett. We spoke with both in an in-depth interview in which we discussed how and why procurement is evolving, why that evolution is requiring transformation and how, with the help of key partners, they have navigated a series of successful transformation projects at globally renowned businesses.

Here, we carry on the conversation and ‘enter’ the village. In both the transformations we discussed, James Gregson and Deloitte, and Gautam Singh and The Smart Cube, played a key role. Their collaboration was close, and the expertise and innovation they brought to the table was an essential part of the overall success. Together with Phillip and Dean, they join us to discuss that work, as well as topics including procurement’s evolution, collaboration and partnerships, the rise of sustainability, and how to approach transformation.

Procurement is changing rapidly against a backdrop of significant disruption and evolving demands from the business. What are the key trends influencing change and why do they necessitate the kinds of transformation projects we’re seeing, and which you’ve all collaborated on?

James: We all get very excited about this, but it’s important to recognise that some things never change: the complexity of serving broad and diverse organisations and driving value at both a strategic and operational level doesn’t go away. It’s still the core bones of the procurement challenge, and many of the complexities we collectively address in our roles as advisors, leaders or transformation specialists, still revolve around those challenges.

However, over the last five or six years, there’s been a consistent broadening of the scope. The basics still need to be done, and done very well, but there are also other considerations around driving innovation in the business, improving collaboration with emerging suppliers, leading on sustainability, or improving resilience in the supply chain.

It’s fascinating to see the profession evolving into the valued partner we’ve always known it should be, but it does raise questions around the skills we have within our organisations, how we structure procurement to have the necessary proximity to the business to address these challenges, what tools to use, and how to work with key partners to bring the necessary levels of insight and value.

The way we articulate that value in procurement, and how the business values the function, is also changing. It’s less around process and governance and more around outcomes and insight.

Phillip: Internally within procurement, we all used to say ‘we can do so much more, we can bring innovation and insights’, but we were never truly tested or asked by the business. It just became theoretical and, actually, we were disconnected. But over the last decade, particularly in pharma, there’s been an increasing demand from the business side.

It really came to the fore in my last role, with the shortages and issues caused by the COVID pandemic and conflict in Ukraine. Cost is a given, as are cost savings, and we still had to deliver them, but there was a much greater requirement for information and real-time knowledge. I’ve seen that evolution and pull from the business grow really quite rapidly over the past 10 years.

Gautam: I’d add another perspective. At the time I was a management consultant 25-30 years ago, procurement was an intermediary function. It provided a cost-effective, efficient means to meet demand from direct manufacturing in terms of products that needed to be made, to find suppliers and contract them cost effectively, and to help people within the organisation buy airline tickets or stationery.

Today, the whole concept of the intermediary is being disrupted and removed. You can buy directly online – you don’t need bricks and mortar stores anymore. Wherever that intermediary still exists it’s being disrupted by technology and modern ways of working.

If you consider procurement from that perspective, part of the evolution is to rethink our role in the business. Are we an intermediary function? Definitely not. The expectation, therefore, is to define this new role in the modern context that we operate in, and move away from and justify why we’re no longer an intermediary, but rather, a strategic function that goes up the value chain, addresses innovation, resilience, sustainability and more.

We can remove and enable those intermediary processes, facilitating them using technologies like self-serve portals, and move out of the way. The shift in procurement’s role in my view is about being more strategic where necessary, and an enabler for the things that aren’t strategic.

Dean: When I took my CIPS qualification 30 years ago it was focused on negotiation skills, contracting, supply market analysis, legal knowledge, and that was about it. Today’s procurement is still that, but also so much more. You have to be an economist, to understand risk and supply chain diagnostics, and what’s impacting global markets.

When you think about talent coming into the space now, we’re expecting so much more

from people to be effective in the role. The key question is how we train and build that capability from the get-go so that people can be effective. That’s what we have to do, and it’s not the core procurement skills you want anymore. It’s a much more rounded business capability in order to be effective.

to influence, and having a more open mind. Of course you have to have the basic skills, but I’d rather hire smart people from different areas and functions of the business who have an open mind and can collaborate; you can always train any gaps in technical skills relatively quickly.

James: That’s so true. When we ‘grew up’ in procurement, either as consultants or practitioners, the focus was on learning what a strong, strategic sourcing process looked like – it was highly valued by stakeholders and procurement leaders. To your point, Dean, that’s what we went and looked for in terms of people’s experience and it was the priority for investment from a training perspective: how do you understand the market, how do you understand requirements for the business, how do you build a good RFP process.

Now, a lot of that legacy is being left behind and replaced with insight, your ability to operate in a highly digitised environment, how you can manipulate and use data to create business cases and cases for change – it’s a very different skill set. But I do worry that, because of that, some of those core skills are left behind and not prioritised in the same way. Somehow, as we look forward, we need to blend those ‘other’ or ‘new’ skills with the core foundations of procurement that we all know.

Phillip: You’re absolutely right. When we all collaborated on the transformation at the Japanese pharma organisation, our focus was more on partnering skills, the ability

Can you explain how you set the case for change and ensure it’s bought into by the business, and tell us more about how to approach an effective procurement transformation, including bringing in the necessary best-of-breed capabilities and collaborating effectively?

James: Transformation comes from a mindset, ambition and energy level that exists because you can visualise the outcome. But it’s difficult and you need the guts to go for it and, having worked with so many different procurement organisations, that level of appetite, vision and need to drive change should never be underestimated.

Phillip, Dean, and others at that time, very much created that need and vision. The role of consultancies like ours was helping to realise how to turn that vision and ambition into a language system that everybody can understand and get behind, and creating messaging to convince a broad group of stakeholders on how they view procurement, as well as the priorities and challenges of the business.

Another consideration, especially for the organisations we worked together in, was how to create commonality of language

and intent throughout the procurement function. If you work in a multinational environment and an organisation as complex as those that we did, you find a federated or decentralised model. As a result, people’s definition of what good looked like was very different, as was the language they used to describe what they did.

The foundation for that transformation was turning intent into a case for change that everyone supports, ensuring we understood not just our view of what we think needs to change, but everyone’s opinion of the priorities, and creating some independent perspective and sanitation of the case for change. You build a common language system, strip it back to some basics that people can understand and buy into, then create a clear blueprint for what good looks like.

Once we had that understanding, the focus shifted to what the change process looked like and how to deliver against it, including considerations around how fast to move, how to prioritise things in the right way, and the mistakes we were prepared to make. Our role really came to bear in translating ambition into something practical that could be delivered against, plus some extra horsepower in certain areas to make sure it was going to happen at the right pace.

conceptual case for change is simple: at the time the business wanted to save more money and be more efficient. I didn’t have the skills to put that into action; Dean had the skills but not the bandwidth, so having experts collaborate and help with the change was essential. The real differentiator, though, is that we’re talking about experts who’ll roll their sleeves up, be a part of the organisation and work hard to make it happen.

Dean: Some organisations think transformation’s easy: ‘I want to go from A to B and I’ve got clever people in my organisation, so we’ll free up some of their time’. Or, more realistically, ‘we won’t free up their time. We’ll layer it on top of their time and it will happen’. That approach means it’s normally suboptimal, takes a long time and leaves people disengaged with the process.

Phillip: This is why Deloitte and The Smart Cube were amazing. Our client base was potentially seven different big business units in up to 50 countries. Then you have that duplicated within procurement. The

When you’re courageous enough to go after the backing of the organisation, which Phillip was, and make a case for bringing in external expertise to benefit the work you get a far better outcome because you’re adding capability, capacity, and horsepower. In my experience, you can try and build that capability or assume you have it, but it’s rarely the case. In working with James/Deloitte and Gautam/The Smart Cube, we purposely chose to get the best building blocks to compliment what we already had in both organisations with the objective of a better outcome faster and, more importantly, a happier audience.

“In working with James and Deloitte, and Gautam and The Smart Cube, we purposely chose the best building blocks to compliment what we already had in both organisations”

DEAN BENNETT

Gautam: The hardest part is building a case for change and getting internal buy-in from leadership, which Phillip, Dean and James did a tremendous job of in the first transformation. When we got into execution, the ace that Phillip played was to ensure that accountability remained with his procurement team, even when working with external partners.

At the early stages of execution I was invited to a meeting of all the category heads from the global organisation. It was the start of the transformation and I distinctly remember him telling them: ‘You guys are accountable for what you need to do, but I demand and expect rigour in the process, because rigour in the strategic sourcing and category management is what delivers the results in the end. And in order to make sure that you have the capacity and capability to meet that expectation from my side, I’m going to give you some support. The Smart Cube will be funded by me and will help you with whatever you need from procurement intelligence, category intelligence, subject matter expertise. But it’s not forced. If you can do it without them, go ahead and do it. If you need some support from them, it’s there for you to use and it’s paid for centrally, but you are accountable for the rigour that I expect in your execution plan’.

It was a fantastic approach because category managers have the potential to feel proud of their capabilities and therefore to not want to use services like ours. The way Phillip presented it as an option, leaving accountability with them, I think, was the

catalyst – we were flooded with requests for our services and, as we delivered greater insight and value, that continued.

Accountability needs to remain within the organisation, the procurement function and its leadership, but it’s essential to work with a network of partners who bring good practice, capability and expertise.

Dean: To build on that Gautam, what I thought was remarkable was the way that, collectively, we all created the culture and environment of one team. And I remember your team visiting us and there was a great cohesiveness about the capabilities you were bringing to make it an overall success. It was a great and wise investment of funding to do that.

With Deloitte, more in the second initiative than the first, we made sure their team sat and worked with procurement day to day. It wasn’t as though we had a separate project office. They were ingrained in the activity and it changed the dynamic enormously to integrate the partner organisation with the way we were working. That was one of the biggest successes for both of those transformations.

James: I think it’s key to the sustainability of the change. The important thing with that accountability and sense of doing it together is that it’s something that can be sustained going forward. We talk about knowledge transfer in a consulting engagement all the time. That way of working, when you’re actually bringing teams together, embedding them as one, gives the organisation a real sense to learn together, to experience success and

failure together, to understand not just the theory of what we’re trying to achieve, but what it’s going to take to make it happen, and then how it can be extended, led and owned in a durable way going forward. It was absolutely critical to the success of the change.

What about the importance of culture and setting the right environment for change?

Gautam, James, how important is it when bringing in external resources that they’re an integral part of the transformation team?

Gautam: Not all transformations are the same. The first that we all collaborated on was about taking the organisation from good to great, and we worked directly with the category teams – each category team had its own The Smart Cube resources, which was the right answer for that project.

In the second situation, the context was quite different. It’s important as a partner to understand your client and the environment so you provide a fit-for-purpose solution rather than one-size-fits-all, which is never the right solution in a transformation journey. We were working under Deloitte, so we were part of James’ team. If we were directly working with the teams, they were at a different level of maturity to be able to get the full value from us. It needed Deloitte to be leading and therefore getting the most of our abilities, which was different to the first project.

James: There needs to be an openness to change, and a culture whereby, holistically across the organisation, there’s a need to move forward. In both organisations and transformations we’re referring to, there was that, for different reasons and from different relative positions of strength. There was an ambition, a need for innovation and a need to move things forward, but the cultures were very different in those two organisations. It’s too simplistic to say that culture is critical to a successful transformation because it tends to be very specific for each business and for each transformation.

In the first there was a greater level of maturity, sophistication and complexity that meant that we had to spend more time intellectually getting people into the right place and unified around how to go from good to great. The second transformation was more about education and actually, from a cultural perspective, a confidence and comfort with being more led. Culture is important, but it should come from an ambition standpoint. There’s always different cultural challenges and that is one of the areas where a firm like Deloitte helps.

Our role is to show we understand the organisation we’re working in, we have insights around the stakeholders that procurement’s engaging with, that those stakeholders are comfortable working with a firm like Deloitte and trust in what we can do, and that we understand some of the specific personalities so that we can help the problem solving with the leadership group in procurement to think

“Of course you need the basic procurement skills, but for a transformation I’d rather hire smart people who have an open mind and ability to collaborate effectively”

PHILLIP DUNCAN

about best paths, best trajectories, best cases for change, best ways in which we show evidence of progress. It’s in that translation that the value comes from what we can do to help.

Phillip: The point around the maturity of the organisation you inherit is so important. In the first transformation, broadly speaking, the biggest cultural challenges were more within the procurement community, the 1,100 people we had in 50 odd countries, and that was probably the greater focus at the expense of our external customers. With the second one, it was the complete opposite. We had a very low skill base, and that was nobody’s fault, it was just the way it was. And therefore they were very easily led.

The challenge more within the second transformation was the different needs or culture, call it what you will, from our internal clients. Our brief was from the CFO, and was very narrow and more traditional: ‘save me more money for less. We’ll let you invest in the short term, but over the longer term also reduce your G&A’. Being your boss and being the CFO, you can’t ignore that. However, the real drivers of value for the company were about looking for different things around innovation, security, and insight. That was the bigger and more exciting challenge, but also the harder challenge for us in the second transformation compared to the first because of the relative state of procurement at the time.

Dean: Whilst both projects were about saving money, by the time we’d evolved the second one other considerations like ESG and CSR were a much more dominant part of the agenda. We designed the organisation with a bigger capability there and gave it a seat at the top table as part of Philip’s leadership team. We hired some really strong people to lead in that area, and they were both a valuable part of the conversation and what we were offering as a procurement function.

ESG and sustainability are of increasing importance, and we’re seeing procurement take the lead more and more. How should those in the profession approach sustainability specifically, but also an ever-widening remit of responsibility including other things like risk, resilience, supply shortages and so on?

James: Specifically on the challenge of sustainability, we know that Scope 3 emissions is the hardest path of the decarbonisation journey. It’s now landing in the lap of CPOs to own and run that challenge because, ultimately, it’s the only seat in the house that can see across all aspects of the supply chain and the different supply arrangements that are there. I’ve observed many CPOs being very excited about that at first, until they realised the extent of the challenge and I think very few, if any, organisations are equipped for what it’s really going to take going forward.

There’s complexity around trying to understand the data sets that are involved, and which don’t really fully exist yet but are proxies created by revenues and other things that the

people look at; difficulty understanding the major challenges that need to be addressed to make a difference; then also challenges around leading that in the organisation and engaging with stakeholders who are still dealing with the foundations of delivering products to customers at a decent price point and more. It’s a huge change we’re talking about.

I think it’s simple to start with understanding what Scope 3 emissions look like, building up a sense of what the data profile looks like, and then bringing policy driven change into the organisation. That enables you to begin creating new standards and putting the onus onto suppliers in terms of expectations for change.

I often use the analogy of do you want to be the umpire, the coach or the player? Sitting in an ivory tower as an umpire assessing policy, that’s fine, but you’re not going to get any medals for it and it’s not going to drive much change. Coaching in terms of actually getting down and close with suppliers and advising and leading them through a process is good, and you need to pick your battles. But sometimes you’re just going to have to get on the pitch and actually go and drive change with your suppliers.

Gautam, I’m very minded back to the automotive days, when we used to see things like sub-tier sourcing programmes and categories and sourcing teams working with their supplier’s suppliers to drive change in the supply chain. I can’t see how we’re going to achieve all of our ambitions in Scope 3 without taking a similar sort of approach. You

have to equip your teams with the skills, confidence and direction to go and get on the pitch and change things.

It’s not a point of competition. It’s a point of collaboration. It’s important we bring some of those ecosystems together to go and do it. For everything I’ve just described, before getting into data and various other things, you could create an entirely new function of a similar size to procurement just to go and do that properly. The question of how is the big one, because does this mean that every category manager going forward has to have the right skill set? Or does it mean that you have to have an old-fashioned supply development team that’s separate from the category teams that have this skill set and can work across different supply chains and supply bases to make it happen?

That’s the challenge most CPOs now have when they’re considering the scale of the problem and the skills gaps in their teams. It’s not straightforward and I don’t think we even know what all those answers look like yet.

Dean: The default answer is often ‘procurement needs to solve it’. Procurement now has the ownership of trying to understand it. Then to your point, James, understand the size of the problem and the fact there is no data out there, and then miraculously solve something you don’t understand because the company’s committed to certain metrics. I’m not saying procurement shouldn’t do it, I just think we’ve got to make sure it’s equipped to do so, whether it’s an adjunct

function or it’s a capability we build, there’s role clarity. But there’s definitely a massive evolution set for those in the profession.

James: It’s a good progressive shift in the right direction, and at Deloitte we talk about the four phases of the CPO. We talk about the role as a strategist and a transformer, but also in terms of an operator and a steward. There are certain responsibilities as a CPO that you have from a stewardship perspective to ensure that the organisation is protected and these risks are addressed. All this is doing is showing the importance of all these different sorts of objectives and the context for it, and it needs to be something that procurement embraces and defines its success around. We have to move away from purchase price variance and cost reduction at some point. As Phillip said, we’ve always talked about what we can do in this space. This is a perfect case in point.

Phillip: This is one of the biggest changes. Twenty years ago, I couldn’t even spell environmental – it wasn’t a concern in procurement. When I joined the Swiss pharma company, I was given a small team and told ‘you’re now responsible for this’, but it wasn’t on the leadership team. It was very immature. Leading through to the second transformation, we put a bespoke team together of around a dozen people, which is still probably too small and already there was a resource issue, which ultimately needed to be fixed by a combination of policy and automation.

James: More broadly, the topic and importance of risk has grown, certainly with what we’ve all seen in terms of the impact of COVID, Ukraine and other topics. Even before that, I think it had started. There was a dialling up of procurement’s ownership of, and ability to affect and manage, risk and resilience within the supply chain. And I mean that holistically, rather than just the supply chain from a goods perspective. I think that’s increasing, and actually some of the classic category strategy skills that we’ve seen in the past, and being able to do things like should-cost modelling are being tilted more in this direction. It’s where the business actually values some of the analytic capability from procurement more – it’s less around how you decompose and drive costs down, and more around how you decompose and understand how you restructure and manage supply chain resilience and risk.

Ultimately, all of these different topics have always existed. The thing that changes the most is where the organisation is placing value, where it prioritises time being spent, and what it values from procurement more? That’s shifting from cost to risk in its broader sense.

All of these are areas that external partners and collaborators can make a difference in. Gautam, what’s your take on this, particularly around the importance of intelligence, smart technology and the greater use of insight and data such as that offered by The Smart Cube?

Gautam: I’d expand what James said in terms of looking further down the supply chain to looking further up and into the demand side as well. To what extent should we, and are we, being influenced by the end customer and influencing everything from product design to the message out in the market, as a procurement organisation? It’s in our remit to do both: be influenced by the end customer and influence a company’s response to that end customer’s needs.

Sustainability and all of these new areas of focus, including resilience and nearshoring, and not buying from China, are important levers to influence the end customer and actually make it a virtue rather than just purely looking at it from a cost saving perspective. That’s moving up the chain as much as moving down the supply chain.

Over the last 10 years in particular, as a company, we’ve evolved far more to change our intelligence provision from pure subject matter experts, category experts, shouldcost modelling experts and more, to what we call AI plus HI. That translates into enabling or strengthening our human intelligence with underlying assets that are analytically driven, tech enabled and broadly called AI. In today’s environment, procurement has an

opportunity to leverage technology in a much bigger way than it did 20 years ago, and analytically enrich things. The outcome from that should be that the procurement organisation is far more credible with internal stakeholders up and down the value chain from marketing, sales and product development, down to the suppliers and their suppliers, because it’s powered with the insights that technology and data analytics can give.

We’re using AI plus HI as a means to really turbocharge how we bring value to the table. That includes taking one step further to make insight available as far as possible, in real time and on a self-serve basis. We build platforms like Amplifi PRO, which allows our procurement peers to get hold of information and insight when and where they need it, as opposed to having to ask and wait three weeks for insight to come back to them. And then this is all down to technology and analytics and the exponential availability of data, both qualitative and quantitative.

I’d add that, as a procurement function, we cannot just wait to be asked to go and do one thing or the other. We have to influence, and we have the opportunity to influence. If we understand our supply base and the innovations they can bring we can influence product development, sales, and marketing. In fact, it should influence company strategy from a procurement perspective. That’s the scale of the opportunity we have.

“Part of procurement’s evolution is to define its new role in the modern context. That’s about being more strategic where necessary, and an enabler for things that aren’t strategic”

GAUTAM SINGH

Considering all these various changes collectively, then, what does the future procurement function need to look like in order to mitigate complexity and bring the level of added value to the business that we’re discussing?

Gautam: I go back to my point about procurement and needing to understand and be clear on where it will be relevant, then focusing in that space. As everybody’s discussed, there is more and more being asked of procurement, yet we cannot do everything. We have to decide where we make the biggest difference, and that needs to be our prime focus. For me that means you break it up, you look at all we used to do and all we’ve been asked to do, and you double down on the areas that will make the biggest difference.

In my opinion, the biggest difference we can make is in moving up the value chain within the organisation. And that is to influence company strategy, product development, innovation,sustainability, CSR, and more. In order to do that, you have to choose which categories you can make the biggest difference in, and which categories are runof-the-mill and, frankly, you can outsource or automate in terms of how people use them. We don’t have to be involved in everything we used to be in the past.

want to do it but it buys you the right and is part of that stewardship role that you have in the organisation. That said, I think Gautam is absolutely right that there are many choices that have to be made about where procurement plays a key role.

I started my career in the airline industry and I remember when 9/11 happened. Although I wasn’t in the industry, a lot of my friends still were and I had many conversations about procurement stepping back, in one case from over 60% of what it would be doing in a normal day to day to address what needed to be done at the time. Surprisingly to us, the world didn’t stop turning when that happened, and that’s the key point: will it make any difference at all if procurement spends time on it or not?

An anecdote I’d share to validate that point is that another CPO I worked with used to annually ask internal customers to comment on what they valued from procurement and what they wanted the function to be doing, and there were some really surprising results in terms of things that procurement put huge value on that the business just didn’t care if it did or not. You need to be honest and open enough to challenge yourself all the time as to whether your choices are the right ones.

James: Gautam, I think that’s spot on. The key word you used in all of that was choice, and a lot of it is. A lot is a choice we don’t have as well, of course. There’s a certain baseline that has to be done, and you may not

We’ve used the term of procurement ‘getting out of the way’. At times there are lots of opportunities for procurement to do that: invest well enough in good process, in good technology, in good data and insights, and

the business can get on with a lot of the basics of supplier engagement and decision making, even negotiation at times, within the right control frameworks.

All of these things need to be done because ultimately you could triple the size of procurement trying to cover them, and that’s just not a realistic scenario in most corporate environments these days. You are going to have to think about how you cut your cloth accordingly and how you prioritise where you are going to spend your time. And I’m increasingly seeing a similar shift away from even basic sourcing and negotiations. Outsource or give it to the business to do it with the tools that they want, and try and increasingly focus on where the value can be created in the organisation.

Dean: This has been a great conversation, and quite an awakening for me. While you were talking, I Googled the definition of procurement, because it struck me that the whole positioning is irrelevant now. It’s not procurement anymore. It’s a business role. If you look at the seven step process and at the definition of procurement, that’s such a fraction of what the role is today. You think about risk, resilience, sustainability, the environment – that’s the job now and it makes me look forward to the transformations of the future and what they include.

you consider value or level of spend, the majority of that spend does come down to a very few categories and a very few suppliers, and how you define that I think is still key. Related to that, the other point is that you cannot ignore savings targets, it will come back. It might be cyclical, but at the end of the day, cost in maybe non-pharma companies makes up at least 50% of the total cost base of the company – maybe more in some cases. If there is a margin issue, they will always look to procurement. And if procurement doesn’t exist or doesn’t do that in the old sense of the word, there’ll be another transformation. Guess what? Someone will come up with the idea of centralising what we’re buying and try and value that way. What I’m trying to say is that I think our role has expanded massively and brilliantly because it just makes it so important, so exciting.

Phillip: I agree and I think that the priority piece is right. Certainly the classic 80/20 applies, which I’ve been guilty of not being precise on in the past. But in terms of how

But we have finite resources, so it’s back to the automation piece, bringing in partners, using self-service technologies, because now we don’t want to be placing orders or running travel agencies – the worst job in the world, I think, in corporate life. We want to be focused on where the true spend or value lies. And develop a great process as well, because we cannot onboard 50,000 suppliers every year, although some pharma companies do. We need a good process for that. We need the checks and balances in place. And I think because procurement tends to equate to suppliers, we hope we are the only function that has the global reach, so I think we are the right place to manage it as well.

“Transformation comes from a mindset, ambition and energy level that exists because you can visualise the outcome. But it’s difficult, and you need the guts to go for it”

JAMES GREGSON

James: Really, we’re talking about challenging some of the traditional ways in which you manage and structure a procurement function. I would be a little bit provocative here for a second, but it’s based on two recent journeys that we’ve been on. We’ve deliberately pulled category management out of the procurement structure. Category management, as we all know, has always been a procurement term that no one outside of procurement understood. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to convince the business of the importance of category strategy management and execution, and I don’t think I’ve succeeded – I also don’t think I’m alone in that.

I just don’t think that the business values that process, nor will it ever. What it values is insight and the outcomes from it. And so to this provocation around things like direct access, I think what we are seeing is a shift in how procurement is being structured, increasingly looking at GPS shared services and outsourcing answers for the more transactional aspects. We’ve all seen that for many years and it’s only likely to increase. There’s a shift towards a business partnering-oriented structure close to the organisation, with really senior, strong advisory and insight capabilities being delivered right into the core business processes, and challenging thinking, budget creation and product development at its very heart.

I also predict an increase in some of the newer skills we’ve started to call out here around risks, insights, sustainability, and so on, being more the specialist skills that operate in centres of excellence or through different mechanisms in support of those other teams. At the same time, the category management model is becoming virtualized and a data-driven exercise that runs throughout that, rather than a structure in itself. That’s probably one of the biggest changes that we are starting to see happening to the operating model in procurement.

It’s an exciting time ahead, and there’s plenty of work to be done. You’re all very experienced in this, and clearly passionate about the subject but, to end, what advice would you give others already in procurement or looking to take the leap?

Dean: What struck me through this discussion and through the two transformation experiences we’ve referenced is being clear on the outcomes of the organisation you work for. We talked about culture and environment and the goals of the business, but as we’ve talked through this conversation, we’ve also talked about the expectations of what we call procurement.

Firstly, I believe that’s about being able to bring the art of the possible to the conversation with executives around what you’re transforming to and making sure that it’s aligned. But secondly, then to the point on priorities and use the technology, being clear on the outcomes of your transformation

and how you’ll get there. Will we outsource or will we use technology? Will we focus procurement more on risk, resilience and sustainability and less on the process? And what can be an outsourced service? That to me is the big takeaway on how I’ll consider the way I shape future transformations.

James: Personally, I think transformation is a constant. I don’t think it’s episodic. Some people look at it that way but I think what we’ve described around what’s changed in the last 10 or 12 years, that’s not actually that long in the scheme of things. When we think about how much has changed in that time, it’s enormous. Technology has changed vastly, as has the use of data and analytics, and the understanding and impact on these broader topics.

As far as I’m concerned, it just reinforces that transformation is continuous. You can get injections of support from partners around that, but I think the best CPOs are the ones that understand that constant evolution and have the energy and appetite to be continuously assessing how things can be improved, and the role and impact procurement can have. When I consider the people I’ve worked with over the years, there are some that are just much better at understanding that –they’re the more progressive CPOs who have the energy for it – and there are those that are just trying to play more of that umpire or coach role. There’s a lot of lessons that can be taken out of this discussion that are universally applicable to all procurement leaders in terms of how they think about the challenges ahead.

Phillip: In practical, pragmatic terms, I know every two to three years it seems these days you’ll have a change of CPO and/or a change of CFO, and invariably that drives transformation. There’s a human element in this. Senior leaders want to do something differently. However, in the overall scheme of things, with technology, with our collective intellects growing, we all ultimately travel in the same direction. Sometimes it moves around a little but the transformation is a constant, if nothing else, because people change at the senior level.

Gautam: I would actually offer the words ‘catalyst’ or ‘lever’ for procurement to use. With the world we currently live in, and building on the network of partnerships or village themes that Phillip and Dean have discussed in their interview, there are many different niche providers out there that are tech enabled, digital, analytical, and that can be very easily adopted and connected through APIs.

It means you can literally find the best of breed and connect them together. There is a real opportunity in building on this concept of partnerships and creating a village to be able to pick the very best, from little startups through to those well-established or very big tech firms or procurement tech firms, and bring value to the table. Your armoury, your toolkit is much bigger and versatile than it was when we were growing up.

Contributors:

Phillip is a vastly experienced procurement professional and leader, who has spent most of his career in the profession. He has held several senior procurement positions, including as Chief Procurement Officer at two major global pharmaceutical companies where, working closely with Dean, James and Gautam, he led procurement transformations. He is an advocate for the power of clear and transparent leadership, and setting and delivering a core vision, mission and objectives, and is passionate about people, building strong procurement teams and the power of effective collaboration.

Dean has more than 30 years’ experience of global transformational leadership at both a functional (procurement, supply chain and finance) and enterprise level across a braod scope of industries and cultures. Dean started his career in high-tech procurement as a buyer, working his way to leadership roles before moving to consulting, in which he spent 10 years working on strategic sourcing, transformations, target operating models and technology implementations. He worked with Phillip as transformation lead on the two major pharma transformations that are the subject of this discussion.

Gautam is an experienced business leader and entrepreneur in the analytics and data industry, and currently CEO of The Smart Cube, which delivers procurement intelligence, data and analytics to some of the world’s largest organisations. An engineer by background, Gautam founded The Smart Cube in 2003, following 10 years working for top-tier management consulting firms, including for AT Kearney in the US and Europe where he led, managed, and worked in and on several major procurement transformation projects for Fortune 500 organisations.

James is Managing Partner for UK Life Sciences & Healthcare at Deloitte. He has worked in and around

procurement for close to 30 years, starting his career in the airline industry before moving into consulting, in which he has worked across procurement and supply chain including with major technology companies, outsourcing markets, leading and collaborating on procurement transformations and, more latterly, in healthcare and life sciences. Alongside his current role, James is also the global leader for Deloitte for the pharmaceutical industry in the ESG and sustainability spaces.

JOSEF WERKER & NIÑA OPIDA

HUMBLE SUSTAINABILITY

Niña Opida began her foray into circular living when, surrounded by her mother’s friends, she saw how quickly children use and grow out of their clothes. She also saw that, if not stored well or passed on, the majority of items were thrown into landfill.

The desire to do something about this, while also looking beyond just children’s clothes, was the inspiration she and Josef Werker – who shares her lifelong passion for sustainability – needed to start Humble. The business, which launched in 2020 was built on

the idea of developing the circular economy, initially helping people clear unwanted items from their house which it either upcycled or sold in its online Thrift store.

Later, Humble shifted its focus to e-commerce businesses – excess inventory and returned items often being disposed of. Today it processes items like clothing, consumer electronics and household appliances, passing them on to B2B recyclers and resellers or reselling them through Thrift.

humblesustainability.com

“ The centre of our dream is to make sustainable living the new normal”

Josef Werker, co-founder and CEO, Humble

CLOSING THE LOOP

GIGAFACTORY RECYCLING, MATERIALS REGENERATION AND WORKING DIRECTLY WITH LOCAL SUPPLIERS. INSIDE TESLA’S BATTERY SUPPLY CHAIN

‘What happens to Tesla battery packs once they reach the end of their life?’. A good question, given the complexity of EV batteries, challenges around their recycling and reuse, and the fact that the company’s mission – to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy – meets head-on the fact that global battery cell production will continue to rely heavily on primary, mined materials to meet the growing demand for its cars.

Cost and complexity of modern EV batteries makes recycling and reuse a difficult task. Tesla designs its to outlast the vehicle: in Europe the average car lasts around 150,000 miles while, according to Elon Musk, his company’s batteries last for 300,000 to 500,000 miles [the company says it’s aiming for a million-mile battery in the future].

Nonetheless, Tesla takes the impact of its battery supply chain and its impact on the environment seriously. At its factories, the company is implementing a closedloop recycling system that will ensure 100% of Tesla batteries received are recycled, and up to 92% of their raw materials are reused.

A key step in this initiative was the successful installation in 2020 of the first phase of a cell recycling facility at its Gigafactory Nevada, for in-house processing of battery manufacturing scrap and end-oflife batteries. Prior to this, the business had worked with thirdparty battery recyclers but, it says, on-site recycling allows it to unlock battery recycling at scale, to improve R&D and innovation, close the loop on materials

generation, and for raw material transfer directly to its nickel and cobalt suppliers.

Responsible operation on the part of suppliers is essential, and Tesla remains committed to ensuring the highest standards across its entire supply chain. In the broadest sense, this encompasses proactively identifying and addressing supply chain risk and the setting of an extensive supplier code of conduct, and

“ON-SITE RECYCLING ALLOWS TESLA TO UNLOCK BATTERY RECYCLING AT SCALE, TO IMPROVE R&D AND INNOVATION, AND CLOSE THE LOOP ON MATERIALS GENERATION”

100%

Refiners and minders in Tesla’s cobalt, nickel and lithium supply chains it directly sourced from, or which have committed to third-party sustainability audits

83% of all refiners and miners sites in Tesla’s cobalt, nickel and lithium supply chains that have undergone, or committed to, third-party sustainability audits.

human rights and responsible materials policies. It also uses data collated from the supply chain to influence its direct sourcing programme.

Specifically for batteries, Tesla has a dedicated responsible sourcing process for three priority materials: cobalt, nickel and lithium. These core materials represent around a third of the total cost of a battery cell, and are crucial in extending range and safety performance. They’re also mined materials, produced in areas that often face environmental and socio-economic challenges.

To mitigate this, Tesla is a member of the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance, which it uses to ensure responsible sourcing and

supplier standards. It also directly sources materials, placing an emphasis on engaging directly in local context rather than dealing with suppliers through third parties or mid-teir companies. In a similar vein, the company contributes to the local communities, experts and organisations in the areas affected by operations.

While relatively new, Tesla’s battery responsible sourcing programme has achieved several successes including developing a system that identifies environment and social risks in its battery supply chain. What happens in the life of a Tesla battery? A lot.

www.tesla.com

“AT ITS FACTORIES, THE COMPANY IS IMPLEMENTING A CLOSED-LOOP RECYCLING SYSTEM THAT WILL ENSURE 100% OF TESLA BATTERIES RECEIVED ARE RECYCLED, AND UP TO 92% OF THEIR RAW MATERIALS ARE REUSED”

TECH, COLLABORATION AND OPPORTUNITY

DIGITAL CATAPULT’S TIM LAWRENCE ON HOW EMERGING TECHNOLOGY AND REGIONAL COLLABORATION IN THE UK IS TURNING SUPPLY CHAIN OBSTACLES INTO OPPORTUNITIES

The events of the last two years have had an unprecedented impact on supply chains around the world. The disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic was the first of several events to strain global supply chains. Although lockdowns initially impeded demand, businesses struggled to account for a rapid rebound in demand as the global economy opened up again.

Businesses, particularly in the automotive space, struggled to meet demand with the supply of certain products, with semiconductors being one of the most notable products that failed to meet demand, leading to several businesses losing out on significant revenue. The war in Ukraine presented further challenges for global supply chains, particularly on the energy front, with energy prices increasing in parity with growing environmental interest and concerns around unsustainable supply chains.

These events have taught us that increasing the agility and resilience of a supply chain is key to navigating uncertainty and preparing for the unknown. Regional collaboration underpinned by innovative and emerging technologies is allowing businesses of all sizes to do this, and to prepare for the next big event when it comes, in the hope that supply chain obstacles could one day present opportunities.

THE CHALLENGE OF SOURCING REGIONAL PARTNERS

The pandemic prompted many businesses to pivot on their procurement strategies, as companies across multiple sectors recognised the value of working with local partners that could reliably deliver. Making supply chains more resilient by reducing business dependence on foreign suppliers helps them adapt better to changes in laws, sanctions, and trade route issues, like the Suez Canal blockage in 2021. In spite of the willingness to work with regional partners however, sourcing reliable suppliers hasn’t come without its challenges for procurement professionals.

For large enterprises that are looking for manufacturers or local suppliers to fulfil orders, many don’t know where to start. Finding reliable suppliers can be a timeconsuming process, and many smaller and more valuable suppliers often miss out on opportunities, be it due to a lack of relationships with larger businesses or minimal industry awareness. We are finding, however, that emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are presenting a solution.

A new supplier directory is currently in development, with a view to helping businesses find the right supplier by leveraging AI and web scraping to find relevant businesses and contacts. In addition to helping businesses find each other, the directory will be equipped to find relevant, qualitative content that is not easily discoverable

via the web. This will allow businesses across the country to identify suitable suppliers, embrace regional collaboration and increase the adaptability and flexibility of their supply chains.

Furthermore, we are starting to see the benefits of reshoring locally, and the positive impact this is having on developing human capital, upskilling communities and ‘levelling up’. Britain is currently the ninth largest manufacturing country in the world, producing around £183bn of products and employing over 2.5 million people. We expect reshoring practices to grow in Britain in parity with the increasing complexity and unreliability of the global supply chain.

Reshoring locally can yield great opportunities for businesses too. Bus manufacturer Alexander Dennis (ADL) is a great example of UK reshoring. In January 2021, the company announced that it was bringing manufacturing back to the UK. The chassis for both single and double-decker electric buses were previously manufactured in Hungary and China before being shipped to the UK for assembly, but now they have been reshored to the UK, supporting local supply chains and regional economies.

STRENGTH IN NUMBERS

When businesses come together, they have the potential to achieve great things. Regional collaboration, as demonstrated by specialist clusters like the Midlands Aerospace Alliance and the North East of England Process Industry Cluster, offers the opportunity for businesses to combine their resources, talent, and expertise. This results in industry-wide recognition and the strengthening of supply chain resilience and adaptability. At Digital Catapult, we’re seeing how new technology is making regional collaboration easier everyday.

This not only benefits the businesses involved, but also contributes to the wider recognition of innovative solutions. The Digital Supply Chain Hub (DSCH) is taking this to the next level by providing regional supply chain test beds. DSCH, in its role as a facilitator of regional collaboration and technology advancement, directly benefits regional clusters by providing a platform for the development and testing of technology solutions. The Hub helps these regional clusters demonstrate their capabilities and strengths to a wider audience, and the use of real supply chain data in the development

“INCREASING THE AGILITY AND RESILIENCE OF A SUPPLY CHAIN IS KEY TO NAVIGATING UNCERTAINTY AND PREPARING FOR THE UNKNOWN”

of technology solutions makes these solutions more relevant and effective for the businesses in these clusters.

As regional collaboration through clusters across the country is supported by new technologies, this level of cooperation is presenting new opportunities and options for larger enterprises that are looking to localise their supplier base and make their supply chain more resilient.

GROWTH IN EMERGING SUPPLY CHAINS

Initiatives like DSCH are facilitating regional collaboration by bringing together a diverse group of stakeholders to address the key challenges in the industry. By working in collaboration, manufacturers, regional industry bodies, academics, and technology solution providers are able to develop a comprehensive approach to improving supply chain risk and resilience, sustainability, and visibility. This, in turn, is supporting the growth of emerging supply chains such as hydrogen, wind and new nuclear, allowing them to adapt to changing business demands and expectations.

One of the ways this collaboration is facilitating regional cooperation is through the use of technology to provide improved visibility and transparency across the supply chain. This allows companies to better manage risks, track the flow of goods, and make informed decisions about the sustainability of their

operations. The use of technology to develop more sustainable supply chains is also promoting regional collaboration, as companies work together to minimise their impact on the environment. Technology is fostering regional cooperation and finding innovative solutions to the challenges facing emerging supply chains.

ENSURING INTEGRATION PREPAREDNESS

It is essential for businesses to embrace digitalisation and innovation to remain competitive. The increasing demand for faster, more resilient, and more sustainable supply chains requires companies to invest in digital technologies and build the capabilities needed to deliver these solutions. Strengthening the UK manufacturing supply base and capabilities will play a critical role in meeting this challenge, especially in helping small-to-medium sized enterprises

“REGIONAL COLLABORATION OFFERS THE OPPORTUNITY FOR BUSINESSES TO COMBINE THEIR RESOURCES, TALENT, AND EXPERTISE”

(SMEs) to provide the capabilities and digital integration required to deliver future supply chains. In this regard, regional collaboration between businesses and suppliers is crucial in order to make supply chains more resilient.

For example, in the aerospace industry, major companies such as Rolls-Royce and BAE Systems are encouraging their suppliers to build their digital readiness and have systems that enable data sharing with customers. However, some SMEs still rely on outdated systems such as Excel, which cannot integrate and share data across the supply chain. By fostering regional collaboration and supporting SMEs in building their digital capabilities, the UK can establish itself as a leader in the development of resilient and innovative supply chains.

It’s hard to remember the disruption that has ensued in recent times and the impact that it has had on supply chains around the world. Yet, regional collaboration facilitated by new and emerging technologies is proving to have a solution that is making businesses more adaptable, resilient and agile in the face of the unknown. In having greater diversity of suppliers, I have no doubt that businesses across the board will be turning supply chain obstacles into opportunities due to added adaptability and resilience.

Tim Lawrence

Tim is a highly regarded supply chain expert with 30 years’ experience in the industry. He is Director of Digital Supply Chain at Digital Catapult, where he leads the Made Smarter Innovation Digital Supply Chain Hub, a £25m programme aimed at accelerating digital innovations in UK supply chains. Tim has a proven track record of delivering results, having transformed supply chains for major companies in the automotive, aerospace, industrial, off-site construction, consumer goods, and leisure sectors. He is a sought-after consultant and speaker on supply chain topics, known for his expertise in strategy and network optimisation, digital supply chain, sustainability, operations, and lean manufacturing.

www.digicatapult.org.uk

L J U B L J A N

Ljubljana is undoubtedly an eco-conscious city. The centre is pedestrianised and cycle friendly, with residents and tourists taking advantage of its free bike-share scheme on more than 200 kilometres of quiet cycle paths. It has glorious green spaces, encourages its hotels and restaurants to source locally, and has the highest rate of household waste separation in the EU. Its sustainable development strategy has won award upon award and it regularly tops independent polls as the most sustainable city in Slovenia, Europe and the whole world. So, with all these green credentials in place, just one question remains –is Ljubljana a fun place to visit?

UNIVERSITY OF LJUBLJANA

LJUBLJANA

BUSINESS

The University of Ljubljana believes in bringing its students’ ideas to life and has created the internationally recognised Ljubljana University Incubator (LUI) to support startups. It offers business premises, mentoring, access to financial resources and currently sponsors 18 companies and six entrepreneurial groups in the city.

Designed by architects Kragelj, MP Hub. is a relaxed coworking space that prides itself on its community atmosphere.

The modern and well equipped offices are in a quiet neighbourhood with easy access to amenities and green spaces.

Established in 1995, Technology Park Ljubljana (TP LJ) is an innovation hub that provides a supportive business environment for the development of high-tech entrepreneurship. With the mission ‘building innovation bridges’, it brings together over 300 companies and over 1,400 employees.

MP HUB.

TECHNOLOGY PARK LJUBLJANA (TP LJ)

STAY

Would you like to spend the night behind bars? That’s the proposition from hostel Celica. Located in a building that served as a military prison for over 100 years, it has now been transformed by artists into a modern and lively destination where paintings adorn the ‘cell walls’.

The Grand Hotel Union guarantees a night of lavish luxury. The Art Nouveau building with iron roof structure designed by Josip Vancaš was built in

1903 and is considered a technological achievement in itself. It is now the most prestigious hotel in Ljubljana and a popular celebrity hangout.

Sometimes a look beyond the façade reveals a hidden gem. Set in the heart of the cobbled old town on the banks of the river, Vander Urbani Resort ’s four old town houses have been converted to a stylish hotel with meeting rooms for business and a rooftop infinity pool for pleasure. Wake up in Vanderland.

CELICA

VANDER URBANI RESORT

LJUBLJANA, THE PROUD HOLDER OF THE TITLE EUROPEAN GREEN CAPITAL 2016, IS A WORLD-LEADING DESTINATION IN THE FIELD OF SUSTAINABLE TOURISM

VISITLJUBLJANA.COM

LJUBLJANA

EAT / DRINK

Translated as ‘the open kitchen’, Odprta Kuhna is a colourful food market held every Friday in Pogacarjev square. Established in 2013, it’s a foodie’s paradise that showcases authentic dishes from all over the country.

Billed as ‘high cuisine above the city’ Restavracija Strelec is positioned in the tower of Ljubljana Castle and boasts incredible panoramic views of the city. Chef Igor Jagodic serves up a range of quality seasonal and micro-seasonal dishes using locally sourced ingredients.

Located in the historic part of the city, next to a row of old chestnut trees, Restavracija Manna ’s focus is on organic healthy food but in contrast has a list that offers 300 wines and a range of more than 20 different cigars.

ODPRTA KUHNA

MANNA

STRELEC

URBAN ELECTRIC TRAIN

LEISURE

Explore the city with a circular ride on the environmentally friendly Urban Electric Train that navigates the city streets connecting Ljubljana Castle, Botanical Gardens and the Museum of Modern Art, as well as many other popular tourist attractions.

HOUSE OF ILLUSIONS

Albert Einstein stated ‘reality is merely an illusion’ and a visit to House of Illusions on Congress Square certainly provides a welcome break from reality.

Its mind-bending exhibits include a gravity defying upside-down room and vertigo-inducing vortex tunnel. And when that all gets too much, you can relax with meditation on a bed of nails!

The abandoned army barracks of Metelkova Mesto was saved from destruction in the 90’s by underground artists and reimagined as an alternative cultural centre that is now one of the most recognisable attractions in the city.

METELKOVA MESTO

GLOBAL EVENTS CALENDER

AMERICAS PROCUREMENT CONGRESS 2023

21–22 MAR 2023 | Miami USA

The region’s most impressive leaders are handpicked to share success stories and exclusive behind-the-scenes insights from their organisation.

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NATIONAL PROCUREMENT SUMMIT 2023

20 APR 2023 | Milton Keynes, UK

A gathering of over 1,000 procurement directors, sourcing directors, senior management and supply chain directors.

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GARTNER SUPPLY CHAIN SYMPOSIUM/XPO

08–10 MAY 2023 | Florida, USA

The 2023 conference will explore big ideas and deliver actionable insights to help supply chain leaders.

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WORLD PROCUREMENT CONGRESS 2023

23–25 MAY 2023 | London, UK

The world’s premier, most senior procurement event. A place to connect leaders, solve challenges and bring ideas that change the world, together.

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PROCURECON IT SOURCING

26-27 JUNE 2023 | Boston, USA

The only peer-led, senior-level procurement event solely dedicated to the unique challenges of the IT sourcing community.

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DPW AMSTERDAM

11-12 OCTOBER 2023 | Amsterdam, NLD

Where the world’s biggest brands in procurement showcase cutting-edge innovations that will pave the way for the future of procurement.

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