There is a digital solution for most of the challenges that procurement leaders face.
Or at least that’s what we are told, often by those owning, marketing, or selling said digital solutions. The market is crowded, the noise is deafening, and the messaging is often indistinct. You could be forgiven for wanting to bury your head in the sand, Ostrich style, waiting for this trend to blow past and another to appear.
Except that contrary to popular belief, ostriches don’t bury their heads in the sand, and neither should you. As Adam Brown says, “There hasn’t been anything revolutionary for years and years, but without a doubt, we are on the cusp of a revolution.” It’s some statement, one not dissimilar to those we see and hear around us daily and dismiss as hype. But this time, it’s different because, well, because it’s Adam Brown, celebrated digital leader and currently heading up the Procurement technology platform at Maersk.
“There’s been no fundamental step-change or seismic shift in how we deal with and do things. But the cusp that we’re on is, as you said, being driven by AI, or more specifically, in my view, the copilot”.
Following Adams’ logic, the copilot not only “does some of the work” but also brings some of the knowledge required to do so.
On the question of whether we are witnessing an evolution or revolution in the tech space, fellow digital expert Nick Wright – heading up bp’s Procurement Digital Garage – offers the idea of a perception gap in technology: “Often, with these new technologies like AI, people are looking for that Big Bang, that overnight change: “I’m going to do this, and everything will be different”. Well, it doesn’t really work like that very often. You might have to take 99 tiny steps that no one will notice, but looking back after step 100 could look like a revolution.”
It’s about time we heard from the experts about digital—people in the thick of it who have set up, are setting up, or are currently running digital programs. Our third contributor, alongside Adam and Nick, is James Belshaw, currently leading procurement performance at Primark. James’s view of where we are in the market today is that we are entering new territory. “I think there are lots of examples of people using best-of-breed tech, but I don’t think there are a lot of people who have really demonstrated how they can get best-of-breed tech to work together in an ecosystem effectively. As an industry, we are looking to pioneers and leaders to test that out.”
As pioneers themselves, James, Nick, and Adam shared their experiences and observations from the front line, blazing a trail for the rest of us to follow. The Future of Procurement: Digital Skills paper focuses on the key questions asked to our group concerning digital skills – you can read the interviews in full and dive into their individual organizational contexts here.
Let’s see what else they had to say:
[SG] “Let’s start by looking at the market: which emerging technology currently excites you the most?”
[James Belshaw] “It’s a really exciting time for emerging tech and those of us that work in the space, and as much as I am excited right now by Intake and Orchestration as a category, I am going to focus on data.
We are surrounded by data, but much of it is unstructured, so we can’t/don’t understand or use it. But tech is emerging to help us do just that. We can get our hands and eyes on a pool of data that we have never had before and that will undoubtedly contain rich insights, not least into how we behave. This is an area that I find particularly interesting because the more we understand human behavior, the closer we can get to predictive and prescriptive procurement. This is going to enable procurement to operate with much greater levels of customer and supplier centricity and, in some cases, flip our value proposition and how we operate.”
[Nick Wright] “I’d really like to be different and buck the trend on this one, but I will have to say AI. It’s a big bet for us in terms of how it can help us to do things quicker, better, smarter.
[When prompted on how much one can really buck the trend in a corporate environment, Nick expands on the point] “We are employed to make change happen. Some people just get it; they want in, and that gives you the wind in your sails and huge energy. Others may look at us, for instance, as more maverick and may be more resistant to that change. But that’s natural; when trying to be innovative or disruptive, you will inevitably be marmite, loved, or hated with perhaps very little in between. You have to accept and work with that balance.”
[SG] “This research has looked specifically into digital skills. You are all excelling in leading your businesses’ digital (procurement) programs, so what about your roles? What skills make you successful, and what might a CPO look for when looking for someone to lead their digital program?”
[Adam Brown] “Oh God. Self-reflection has always been a highly difficult one for me. For starters: communication. I’m not a salesperson driving revenue or a procurement person putting money on the bottom line. I cost the company money, and everything I do has to make a procurement faster, better, or cheaper to run. Communication of those initiatives is critical to making them stick.Tied into that is the ability to understand technology, what’s real, and what can really make a material difference in the company’s context. So, digital literacy is absolutely critical. But, warning here: If you are a good communicator and passionate about technology, you run the risk of overselling, so a dose of pragmatism or the ability to stop and take a reality check is important.
Finally, as a transformation professional, I will say change management skills. It’s one thing to communicate the benefits, but you must also be able to foresee, envisage or plan out that change management program to land at a level where it’s going to deliver the benefits you promised”.
[James Belshaw] “I will say Change Management experience straight out of the blocks. Any business transformation initiative needs effective change management to be adopted and deliver the benefits foreseen. We kind of take it for granted; it’s not as celebrated as front-end ideation or innovation, for example, but change management is a fundamental skill. Getting change right keeps me awake at night.
Then there is having a curious mindset, both in terms of always wanting to improve and also adopting a test-and-learn, agile-style approach to transformation, asking questions about what really makes the difference. I think this is important because we’ve got many options that can ramp up the complexity of how we operate, which consequently needs to work and feel better and simpler to the customer.
I think project management, more specifically agile, will be an important skill for people in my position.”
[Nick Wright] “One of the first interview questions I ask is, “How are you going to cope with being told no an awful lot in this role?”. You have to navigate around those “no’s” and those barriers, and in order to do that, you have to be resilient. When I think about other skills, aside from having a strong technical understanding of what you are talking about, we are really looking at people skills like empathy and communication.
Being able to read a room is as important as understanding Python codes or the underlying architecture of XYZ because people are the change. We test, experiment, and look at new ways of doing things, but ultimately, if you don’t have people on your side, you might have the best tool in the world, but it’s not going to do what it should be doing for you.
You have to be able to read a room, you have to be empathetic, and you have to be able to deliver a message with impact.”
[SG] “As you have implemented more tech over the years, has the skills profile of the people you look to hire into procurement changed?”
[Nick Wright] “We have identified within bp that we need some future skills to complement where we’re going as a procurement organization that includes some digital skills and digital change/digital adoption. So, I think the way we dealt with that is to boil it down into eight future skills that we see as important for procurement professionals in bp.
We then do two things. First, we cross-check against these skills to ensure we’re hiring future-proofed people. Second, we spend more time working with our existing teams to help them achieve their goals.”
[James Belshaw] ”I think the people who will be the digital leads of the future will balance procurement and digital because you cannot get the best of the technology without being an expert in procurement. But you need to think about procurement differently. I align with the statement that someone using AI will outpace and outperform someone who isn’t, but also that human plus AI will outperform AI when it comes to anything which requires challenge and context.”
We are going to be surrounded by technology—more technology than we’ve ever had before—and more of it will be niche, designed to serve us in specific ways that we haven’t seen before in procurement. So, this opens possibilities—lots of possibilities. When presented with new possibilities that challenge convention, adaptability, critical thinking, and strategic thinking become core skills for the next-generation procurement team.
Let me give an example. Many procurement teams are stretched. This resource constraint prompts certain behaviours, relationships, and trading patterns. Now imagine that tech gives us back some time. You can use this time to do more—the traditional business case—but you can also use this new time and new data to do things differently.
We want people who have the appetite to challenge convention, adapt as they learn, and plot a new pathway. We need people to question everything and ask themselves what needs to be true to achieve different outcomes. I think that is a material mindset shift for many procurement teams, one that digital leads need to enable.
Finally, I don’t believe we are dumbing down procurement here, and a deep understanding of procurement processes and technical skills will continue to be advantageous. When driving any change, you have to understand why you are doing it, so opportunities, pain points, and the measures by which you will judge success are aligned with that why.”
[Adam Brown] “There will be a shift. It’ll be a change. It’s like any revolution that we’ve seen: industrial revolutions, technology revolutions, and information age revolutions. This is now the next step, and like before, it will enable the human mind to be applied to a different problem set or different problem area. There’s going to be something new to do. If you were going to draw the ideal procurement person, you might say a half lawyer, half negotiator, half accountant, half engineer, etc. You probably wouldn’t say Master of Excel or PowerPoint Ninja.”
[SG] “Many companies are nowhere near as advanced as you and haven’t had a digital garage at their disposal. Let’s say they are going to embark on a digital program now, from greenfield; what building blocks would you advise them to put in place?”
[Nick Wright] “I’d say three things. First, just make sure you’ve got the backing of who you need to back it, whether it be a senior leadership, your CPO, or your CIO. You’ve got to have the right support top down because sometimes you need that mandate, and you need them to advocate for you to make things easier.
The second is to start with problems. When you see all these vendor maps, it’s tempting to pick a solution and go find the problem. Don’t do that. Think about what you are trying to solve. I ask my team not to bother looking at the market until they have a tightly defined requirement or problem.
The third, particularly in our spaces and within the garages, is that you’ve got to have an end goal. Because with these garages, you know, it’s great testing stuff. We’ve got a good track record of doing things quickly. We are very good at moving at pace. But we can’t just be running pilots for the sake of running pilots, right? We’ve got to have an end goal and a strategy in mind. How does everything fit together? You know, how’s everything going to complement each other? Because otherwise, without that end goal in mind, and it may change and evolve over time, you don’t really know where you’re heading. You’re just doing random things.”
[Adam Brown] “Data, you must get your data in place. Every decision you take or metric you’re going to measure your success on is better with meaningful data. Otherwise, it’s conjecture. Any decision you make in life based on anecdote or conjecture has an enhanced probability of failure. If you don’t understand your data, you don’t fully understand how the business is operating. You could say, OK, I’m not going to particularly worry about getting my data clean and fresh because we can deploy some level of artificial intelligence to clean it up. But you are kind of hiding a mess under the carpet. You might have AI on top, but it’s still messy underneath.
Secondly, I’d be looking at getting risk under control because that’s what procurement is fundamentally there to do: manage that interaction between cost and risk. Once you have your spend under control and you’ve got the “oh ****, something’s gone wrong” under control, you can relax, knowing that everything else that you do will now be incrementally better.
You can start building and building upon this with whatever sourcing tools are relevant to whatever workflows and orchestrations are needed. But whatever you choose to build, and whatever guard rails you want, the cornerstone is making that honest decision right up front of what is procurement actually needed for?”
[James Belshaw] “If you are really looking to challenge convention when building a digital roadmap, then I would advise thinking about tech rather than just ProcureTech. Inspiration can come from how we deploy tech in other business areas where the challenges may be very similar when you strip it back. Take Project Management functions, for example. Some of these teams are really pushing the boundaries of data and have nailed the agile approach, doing lots of testing and learning even when delivering large programs. I think that seeing this firsthand can bring some inspiration for how to switch things up in Procurement.”
[SG] “And if you were to give some advice to someone who’s just stepped into the role as a digital procurement leader, or in fact, to your younger self stepping into the role, what would the key points be?”
[Adam Brown] “Usability is key. Technology is useless if nobody uses it. A digital ghost town is the worst place to be. So, to make your life easy for change management, focus on usable solutions. And by that, I mean consumer-grade user interface. This is the lesson we learned from Steve Jobs and Apple: Who is the customer? How are they using it? What are their needs? Hyperfocus on usability and how people are actually going to use it is super, super critical. So, it would be the absolute #1.
The second is just to be curious. Be very curious. Keep challenging yourself to learn and know more, but critically try to understand how things really work and why things don’t. There’s so much technology that achieves the same outcome in different ways that you need to understand. Does the way that it achieves it, work for you? Good tech is a wasted investment if it doesn’t make sense to you and your business. There are lots of good ideas; don’t stop at the first one you see.”
[James Belshaw] “I would say not to be afraid of stepping out of a typical, linear career path. A varied career brings a mix of different perspectives on how problems can be solved and a deeper appreciation of how decisions can impact and are impacted by other business areas. It will help you develop an effective mix of skills, taking something from each role – whether it’s deep process expertise, an understanding of data and architects in terms of thinking, or developing a focus on the outcomes and the vision that needs to be delivered. It’s your collective experience that will put you in good stead.
Then I would say to engage with the market. It’s something I enjoy the most; the suppliers in this space are bringing a new level of energy and focus on procurement that I haven’t seen in a long time. Meeting new providers regularly, even setting yourself a target of meeting with so many a month, gives you the best insight into what people are doing and the solutions available. It expands your thinking.”
[Nick Wright] “I would say, Nick, don’t do too much. Don’t do too much to start with. When I got the role, it was completely new, and we just wanted to get some fast runs on the board. So, we did a lot. But even if your team can deliver the change, there’s only so much the organisation can absorb at once. So, I think it’s important not to do too much at once. Figure out what you need to do, prioritise what’s most important, do it well, and then move on.
It’s really basic, but you know, I ask my team all the time to be clear on where bp is going and the priorities for your area and then how that feeds into your strategy and priorities.”
We told you they’re experts, didn’t we? Although Nick, James, and Adam each face their own digital transformation challenges due to the differing natures of their organizations, what is stark, is the commonality in the underlying approach and skills required to make it work.
The need to combine procurement technical skills with a genuine digital curiosity, and underpin it with effective change management – some key characteristics we can expect to see in the digital procurement leaders of the future.
READ MORE ABOUT THE DIGITAL OPPORTUNITIES AND SKILLS REQUIRED TO DRIVE PROCUReMENT FORWARD
