Reimagining Procurement as the Hidden Treasure for Business Growth

In this episode, Daniel is joined by Natalia Pilipchak, Transformation and Excellence Director at Mobile Tele Systems, to discuss the evolution of procurement from a support role to a leading role in facilitating customer-facing teams to be more agile, efficient, and effective. 

Natalia has sixteen years of leadership exposure to procurement and sourcing across global enterprises like Philips, Unilever, and Microsoft. She shares her insights on why procurement is a hidden gem for business growth. When enabled with technology, skills, and a mindset shift, procurement analytics becomes an enabler for customer-facing verticals to amplify growth.

Key Highlights:

• 11:16 - 16:46 - The Four Pillars of Reimagining Procurement - Natalia claims that procurement needs to be reimagined around four fundamental pillars. Technology is the first pillar companies need to invest in. Afterwards, the function needs to be enabled with analytic talent to leverage insights from the technology. The third pillar is the freedom to experiment, and the last pillar is a shift in the C-Suite mindset from seeing procurement as a support function to a leading business process.
• 17:42 - 20:01 - What Makes Procurement Excellence a Hidden Treasure for Business Growth? -  Excellence means doing common things in uncommon ways. Once we enable procurement via the four innovation pillars and start playing with analytics, we get granular insights that make procurement functions more efficient across areas like source-to-pay, risk management, and contract management.
• 20:29 - 25:28 - The Role of Data Analysts in Procurement - Procurement is a central function at most businesses; it generates big data and coordinates with diverse functions ranging from finance and legal to sales and marketing. The ability to analyse the data of these interactions provides insights and a holistic view of the company's operations. When coupled with process mining, these insights help improve the company's overall efficiency and growth.  
• 25:58 - 29:58 - Best Practices for Procurement Professionals - Start by giving structure to your knowledge base and focus on expanding the base to acquire new skills. Procurement professionals should actively look for job rotation opportunities to gain exposure to how different verticals work and their wants and needs. They also need to influence HR to provide training in analytics and sales skills. Senior management in procurement should play the role of scrum master to coach and mentor different procurement teams. 
  
  

Quotes:

• “My role is that of a connector of people, processes, numbers, and technologies.”
• “Procurement excellence is about meeting stakeholder's requirements and a combination of techniques, methodologies, and disciplines.”
• “Excellence is when you do common things in uncommon ways.”