Press Release - ProcureCon Indirect 2013

PRESS RELEASE

Date of Issue: 8th January 2013

For Immediate Release

Revamped agenda unveiled for ProcureCon Indirect 2013 meeting

ProcureCon Indirect, Europe’s premier indirect procurement conference, returns to London on 16th – 18th April, promising three days of networking, benchmarking and debate among 300+ of Europe’s leading indirect procurement leaders.

Building on the success of last year’s indirect sourcing meeting, the ProcureCon Indirect team have put together an entirely revamped agenda, focusing only on the critical issues affecting CPOs and senior indirect procurement professionals.

Confirmed Procurement Speakers include:

• Gabháin Neary, Supplier Sourcing Leader EMEA and LATAM, Google
• Marcel van Berkel, Head of Consultancy, Shell
• Jonathan Sutherland, Head of Procurement, RBS
• Dietmar Harteveld, Director Indirect Material North West Europe, Siemens
• Fabien Krawczyk, Purchasing Director, Le Group La Poste
• Jean-Luc Charlier, Global Commodity Cluster Leader, Philips Group Purchasing
• Chris Bullock, Procurement Director, Unilever
• Gareth Hughes, Head of Procurement, Legal & General
• Jim Hemmington, Head of Procurement, BBC
• Eric Danjoux-Dichamp, VP Global Indirect Purchasing, Firminich
• Nick Jenkinson, Head of Procurement, Daily Mail & General Trust
• Andrew Smith, Head of Indirect, Royal Mail
• Matthias Manegold, Director, Global Strategic Procurement, Barcardi
• Jerome Dutrey, Group Purchasing Director, Indirect, BDR Thermea
• Mark Hickman, European Indirect Commodity Management Lead, Alcoa
• Frederique Rammeloo, Procurement Director, ASOS
• Francesco Donatelli, Chief Procurement Officer, UniCredit
• Mikkel Larsen, Procurement, Rolls Royce
• Jamie Foster, Procurement Director, Hitachi Rail
• Paul Alexander, Director, Indirect, BP

And many more – see www.procurecon-indirect for the full list

Each speaker has been specially chosen to speak on a topic relevant to the indirect sourcing projects they’re currently working on. Gabháin Neary, Supplier Sourcing Leader EMEA and LATAM at Google described his current challenges in a recent interview with ProcureCon:

What is your role within the Google procurement team?
My specific role is to manage the team in EMEA and LATAM, which is a total team of
6 Googlers (myself included) managing a spend portfolio of around $3billion USD out
of $10billion USD globally. We spend billions of dollars with suppliers every year on
hardware, software, professional services, build and manage facilities around the world,
use various technology services, marketing services and provide benefits for our staff.
Our Supplier Sourcing team ensures we have strong and creative relationships with
internal stakeholders and the right suppliers, so that Google can get the best value and
continue to invest in its great new products and customer relationships.

In what ways do you feel the indirect procurement function is evolving?
In our case it is really more about business partnering and understanding the business
first and bringing a procurement acumen second. If we don’t know what we are buying
and why its important to the business its hard to add a lot of value. For a company
like Google that means we have to balance the mega project spend with the quirky
one offs that can turn into the next mega project. We also operate in a non mandated
environment so we need to be out there in the business and actively selling our role and
then allocating projects to the team as necessary.

What is the biggest challenge you’re facing at the moment?
Getting our resourcing model on the Supplier Sourcing team to scale as Google
continues to grow - we are already heavily outsourced on our operations front, like
invoice payment and expense reporting.

What is the ideal solution to that challenge?
The ongoing solution is to cleverly partner with the business and understand how we are
going to achieve our combined targets, for the business that is usually a quick to market
solution but for us it is getting the right supply agreements in place to support us today
and longer term as well when necessary.

What do you hope to learn/achieve at Procurecon Indirect 2013?
Meet some great like minded people and hear what challenges people are facing and
what their innovative plans are to over come these over the next couple years.


Please visit www.procurecon-indirect to view the 2013 agenda, as well as extended interviews with the keynote speakers.




Notes to editors

1. For more information about ProcureCon Indirect 2013 and to request the conference brochure, please email procurecon@wbr.co.uk
2. All media partnership enquiries and requests for press passes should be directed to Simon Anderson, Marketing Director for the ProcureCon portfolio: simon.anderson@wbr.co.uk
3. ProcureCon Indirect 2013 is part of the ProcureCon portfolio, which has been producing high calibre events for Europe’s procurement leaders since 1997.
4. ProcureCon is part of Worldwide Business Research, one of the world’s leading sources of strategic business intelligence and part of the PLS group. For more information about Worldwide Business Research, visit www.wbresearch.com

Enhancing and Redefining the Role of Indirect Procurement Research Findings and Results

The principal goals of the research were to identify:

•    Organisations’ attitudes, specifically amongst finance and procurement professionals, towards the indirect procurement function
•  The current role that indirect procurement plays and the desired future role of the indirect procurement function
•  Business perceptions of the value currently being delivered from this aspect of procurement
• The benefits senior stakeholders are seeking from the indirect procurement function
•    Insights into the ways in which indirect procurement needs to develop within the organisation
•    The current and planned usage of the procurement outsourcing strategy

The research was conducted through interviews with 120 Senior Executives in Continental Europe, UK and the US, with half coming from Procurement and the other half from Finance. The sectors in which these executives came from:

•  Financial Services
•  Retail
•  Consumer Products
•  Manufacturing

Exclusive White Paper - Advanced Sourcing: Achieving the Next Level of Savings and Efficiency in Your Supply Chain

As companies continually strive to deliver ever-increasing value to shareholders, they will 
search out and implement new strategies, practices and tools across their organizations. In the supply chain and sourcing domains, companies are changing the way they source, produce and distribute goods or services to their customers, in search of reduced costs and greater efficiency.

Many companies have transitioned to a more centralized approach, moving from location-based to global, corporate-wide planning and execution. Cost reductions come from consolidation of sourcing events and leveraged spend, as well as the rationalization of a global supply base. 

Others have embraced their supply base in search of new efficiencies and product innovation to drive continuous cost savings. However, as the scale of the sourcing event increases in size or complexity, so too does the challenge of managing such an event. More suppliers are invited to participate, submitting a greater number of proposals that must be considered. Larger, more complex supply networks are produced, creating inefficiencies in the distribution of goods, longer lead times, and additional logistical costs and risks. And sourcing events that span a broader group of stakeholders generate additional internal competition for influence over award decisions.

MANAGING COMPLEX SOURCING EVENTS

In recent years, as companies have adopted more advanced sourcing strategies, the most 
innovative have also adopted advanced sourcing technologies. While still relatively   
misunderstood among supply professionals, optimization-enabled sourcing solutions provide 
capabilities to handle today’s real-world “complexities” found in an increasing number of global
sourcing events, which may include any or all of the following characteristics:

• the need to manage larger-scale, global sourcing events
• the need to collect diverse supplier proposals
• the need to collect and model more complex business rules and variety of stakeholder preferences
• and/or the analytical horsepower to enable business users to evaluate tens of thousands of options in mere seconds to find the optimal solutions.

This white paper will help clarify the value of optimization-enabled advanced sourcing solutions
by providing a high-level overview of the functional differences between various global sourcing
technologies, the characteristics of an advanced sourcing technology platform, and the benefits
afforded by such technologies. It will also explain how advanced sourcing technologies can
establish the framework by which companies like yours can change their sourcing strategies
and practices.

Interested to read more? Download the free PDF here!

PROCUREMENT FUNCTION LEADING THE FINANCIAL SERVICES IN 3RD PARTY VENDOR RISK

The economic downturn has seen many companies struggle, with many of those sadly closing doors. Others are feeling the pinch which causes them to take unnecessary risks, bend or even break regulations.

While this probably doesn’t include you, how certain can you be that your 3rd party vendors do not fall into this category? It is this question that is resulting in the back-office world of procurement coming closer to the front, leading the way to ensure that your company gets the best possible deal from the safest possible vendor, without falling foul of Mr. Regulator.

ProcureCon Financial Services met up with Alan McQuade, EMEA Supply Chain Management Executive at Bank of America Merrill Lynch to take a look at the ways they tackle this complex, but essential issue…

What measures are in place to gain vendor oversight across lines of businesses and regions?

At Bank of America Merrill Lynch, a range of activity has been taking place – mainly in reaction to an OCC MRA (Matter Requiring Attention) – in regards to categorising the Bank’s 3rd parties by risk type, ensuring more visible governance and escalation routines are in place, regionally and globally, in respect to vendor risk and establishing new roles across the lines of business to ensure a greater level of oversight and control is in place around vendors.

How are you using this to ensure new (and existing!) regulatory requirements are implemented and upheld?

Taking into account the above, more rigour on identification of outsourced vendors and communication of outsourcing projects, by country, with the country-specific regulator in question being mobilised to reduce the confusion and differences in definition surrounding outsourced vendors and processes.Increased formality and routine between the Supply Chain group, the business areas and the Compliance Partners, in particular, are in place to capture evolving Regulatory requirements.

Do you feel the economic downturn has been one of the reasons for the rise in strategic importance of the CPO?

I think expense management has become more important, year on year, since the 2008 crash and the TARP activity that followed.Combined with operational and vendor risk, in particular, being prioritised across the Banking sector, Sourcing and Vendor Management is now a more relevant topic across all lines of business within the Bank.

To get you copy of the full Q&A pleas visit www,procurecon-finance.com

ACT AS A PERSON AND NOT AS A FUNCTION

The procurement function is changing. Speak to almost any CPO in ‘big industry’ and they will gladly extoll the virtues of taking the role beyond simple price negotiation to making it a critical and integral part of their whole business.

But how does this approach work when you are not producing physical products? When what your company does is not made from what you are procuring, can you really still have that wider business impact?

Dr. Heinz Schaeffer, Chief Procurement Officer NORCEE (Northern, Central and Eastern Europe) for AXA believes it can and explains how in this Q&A for Indirect Procurement Leaders News.

What are your top 4 spend categories this year, and do you expect this to change in the near future?

In terms of volume: Professional Services, Consulting, Real Estate, Marketing

The change in importance depends on the achieved coverage/influence, risk assessment/reduction, supplier/market development, and overall business strategy; so far the major focus of the future will be on Professional Services and Consulting.

How have you seen the procurement function change over the last few years, and where do you think it is going?

Over the years the Procurement function has developed from "pure purchasing function" to a function with its own policy, processes and a strategic importance for a company and it has started to deliver added value for a company. The added value is created e.g. through delivering better conditions, improved quality, more innovation, budgeting support etc. and by meeting better internal customer needs. Finally Procurement has become more aligned with the business and started to integrate suppliers as partners in the solution finding process and delivery.

Due to the increased importance of procurement, the need for a reliable and consistent talent recruitment and management has become more present, next to the fact that Procurement should be seen as a regular Business function such as IT, HR or Marketing.

Financial regulation beyond traders – How is procurement affected?

Regulation has a significant impact on all business sectors, but the financial services industry is one in particular where organisations need to be constantly aware of incoming rules. This is obvious when looking at trading, accounts and the like, but this filters down to all areas of the industry, including procurement.

Legal obligations can vary over different locations, meaning that companies must always be alert to any alterations, as they often mean that firms need to adapt or even overhaul some of their methods, whether that be their trading strategy, or their supply chain.

It is not easy for companies to quickly adjust to changes in regulation and it represents a large challenge for many organisations because rules are launched every few months and come with an associated time limit. The problem for the procurement teams is that in many cases systems will need upgrading and replacing in order to comply with the latest regulations, creating a massively complex, ever-evolving technology hub, which will always present significant challenges to the procurement function.

The significance of regulation has been particularly echoed by Alan McQuade, Europe, the Middle East and Africa supply chain management executive at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Mr McQuade has outlined that vendor oversight is being focused on more than it has in previous years.

He explained: “This is leading to a range of internal programmes and related change activity to ensure the regions and businesses have clearly evidenced controls, routines, oversight and understanding of their vendor and outsourced activity.”

Mr McQuade also pinpointed regulatory focus around 3rd party activity as one of the key difficulties in the market, as it means Merill Lynch has to discover new and innovative ways to decrease the cost base of its 3rd party while guaranteeing a strong control environment throughout all regions.

Regulation’s impact varies across the globe, with different laws being enforced for specific areas, a fact which has been highlighted by Niclas Badelius, purchasing manager at the leading Swedish bank Swedbank. Mr Badelius highlighted IT and cash handling as the organisation’s two main categories of expenditure, and noted that there are numerous stages to software procurement, which he listed as implementation, project management and documentation.

To read this report in full please visit www.procurecon-finance.com 

ProcureCon Financial Services’ speakers give insight into the projects they’re working on, as well as the challenges facing them in 2012

Ahead of the inaugural ProcureCon Financial Services meeting, which takes place on 26^th & 27^th September in London, several of the event’s keynote procurement speakers share some of the projects they’re currently working on, as well as the challenges facing them in 2012:

Duncan Brock, Chairman, CIPS

What do you foresee as being the key challenges for procurement professionals working in the financial services sector for the next 12 months?

• All FS companies are being challenged to reduce their cost base, and so there will continue to be a high focus on the need to deliver cost reductions. In some companies the targets being set are at a higher level than they’ve had to deliver in the past.
• Supplier management gets discussed in many FS companies but more needs to be done to really embed it as a way of working to maximise the value delivered by the major suppliers – particularly where there are outsourced services
• Engaging internally with stakeholders, particularly where there is a large central procurement team, is a key to success in FS. Stakeholders are becoming more demanding and procurement leaders need to continue to improve their stakeholder management and engagement skills.

How do you think the procurement profession will have to change within the next 12 months?

• See my last point above – improved stakeholder management and engagement
• Risk management and sustainability are on the strategic agendas of businesses – procurement needs to demonstrate that it is embracing these challenges as well as continuing to deliver the required cost reductions.