Ep. 14 - Orchestrate or Stagnate: Rethinking Procurement for Business Impact - with Alexander Pilsl

How do you turn a clunky ERP-based procurement process into a driver of >10% savings?

In this episode, host Richard McIntosh speaks with Alexander Pilsl, Director Procurement at TeamViewer, about how modern procurement orchestration can directly drive measurable business value. Alexander shares how his team replaced a legacy ERP-based process with a flexible orchestration layer—unlocking transparency, early engagement, and savings by involving procurement early.

With a focus on stakeholder-led tech selection, agile iteration, and user adoption, Alexander outlines the factors that helped TeamViewer move fast. He also discusses how the team managed organisational change, streamlined approval paths, and began shifting focus toward AI, spend management, and business-aligned communication.


You'll learn:

1. How orchestration technology helped TeamViewer embed procurement earlier and drive measurable impact
2. How engaging stakeholders in the RFP process boosted tool adoption and ownership
3. How over-involving people in workflows created bottlenecks—and what fixed it
4. How TeamViewer used process data to move from P2P to proactive spend management
5. Why ditching procurement-speak helps CPOs influence business decisions

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Get in touch with Alexander Pilsl on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexanderpilsl/


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About the host Richard McIntosh:
Richard McIntosh, Partner at H&Z Management Consulting, has spent over 23 years helping procurement leaders succeed. Richard is an avid rugby fan, and a children's rugby coach, with a passion for helping children to become their best selves through sports. He spends his time outside of work with his wife and children.

Get in touch with Richard McIntosh on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mcintosh-richard/

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

What all of that meant, and the orchestration tool wasn't the only investment we made. It was the cornerstone, but we've invested a bunch of other things as well. Specialized SaaS solutions and some other elements around that strategy, including people and upskilling. And so a lot of investments were made. I mentioned earlier that our CFO was smart enough two years ago to recognize he needs to invest in procurement. Well he's done that. But as CFOs are, what do you expect on investment? You expect a return. Yep. The conversation we're having now. What's a return on investment and why is it not just that 4% you just talked about, an EBIT increase? There's gotta be more than that.

SPEAKER_00 0:42

Welcome to the Procurement Initiative Leaders Podcast, the ultimate resource for top-level procurement professionals looking to stay ahead of the curve and drive meaningful change within their organizations. I'm your host, Richard McIntosh, partner at HZ, Europe's leading procurement consultancy. Join me as I sit down with Global Leaders in Procurement to uncover the latest trends, strategies and insights that are shaping the future of procurement. We tackle crucial topics like leadership, technology, value creation, cost management, supply chain resilience, and many more. Ready to up your game as a leader in procurement? Let's jump into this episode of the Procurement Initiative Leaders Podcast with me, Richard McIntosh. Welcome to the show, Alex. Um today um I have Alex Pilsel with me, uh, who's the Chief Procurement Officer for TeamViewer. Um Alex, welcome to our show. Thank you, Richard. Good being here. Thank you. Um and Alex, um, yeah, uh TeamViewer. It's it's a name we know um and probably have heard of, maybe in our in our technical world. But um, yeah, can you um give us an introduction, tell us about TeamViewer, what the company does, where does it operate?

SPEAKER_01 1:50

Sure thing, sure thing. And I'm sure that not just the technical world has heard of TeamViewer ever since we've been sponsoring both Manchester United and the Mercedes AMG Formula One team. Any other brands out there? Um what many people don't know is there's maybe two or three things. First, Teamviewer is a German-based company. Many people sort of put it in the US or other uh English-speaking countries, I guess, but it's German speaking. Uh, we're a German-based company. It's been like 20 years ago. Can you believe that? 20 years. Uh we have our anniversary is here, that's why I know it. Which is again one of those things you don't think about. It sounds more like, hey, tech startup. Absolutely. Yeah. It's not. It's it's a mature player. We've been around for 20 years. We're operating in 26 different countries, if I'm not mistaken. Don't quote me on a 26, maybe it's 20 something. Um, 1600 employees, uh, actually, much more now that we just acquired another large company with 300 employees based in the UK called One E, um, sort of complementing our existing portfolio. And that gets me to the third thing that many people don't know. Most, if you ask them about TeamWare and what they actually do, they're gonna tell you that's that client on my computer that I can connect to other people's computers too. That's that's one thing a lot of people remember. Um, and then we still do that, and we we're we excel at that. We're pretty pretty damn perfect on that. But we've used the technology essentially to expand that platform. So you can't just connect from computer to computer. You can connect computer to phone, phone to coffee machine, coffee machine to industrial equipment on the shop floor. And all of these devices together, sort of with smart and intelligent workflows built around them. That's what TeamViewer is, a remote connectivity platform. It's more than just screen sharing.

SPEAKER_00 3:42

Great, excellent. Thank thank you. Um and Alex, you your role at the company, what and what does that encompass?

SPEAKER_01 3:48

Yeah, so I I've been a CPO here for about a year and a half now. Um November of 2023. So yeah, it's been a year and a half. Time flies. Um, came in here after nine years at Accenture, where I've been in multiple roles from consulting to Accenture internal procurement. So even a consulting company needs stuff for themselves. Yeah. Very, very exciting journey there. Seeing lots of corporate giants and giants transform their procurement teams, and now sort of on a mission to do the same thing here at TeamViewer. You know, you you kind of you try to tell a lot of clients what to do and what state of the art looks like. Yeah. You never really get to do it yourself and implement it. So that's been that's been the journey here at Team Viewer for the last year and a half. Right.

SPEAKER_00 4:34

Yeah, brilliant, brilliant. Um, great. And and Alex, we've we've been talking before the before the pod around the the technology journey at Team Viewer. Um and and and that's that's really interesting. Um, yeah, can you give us uh uh uh tell us about the journey and and also I mean what what did it look like when when you started a year and a half ago?

SPEAKER_01 4:55

Well it looked good, obviously, and I'm not allowed to say anything different uh than that. But there's always a but. Obviously, there is uh there's room to optimize pretty much any setup. What comes naturally though to a tech company like us, or actually uh more specific, a software company, we tend to think about problems in ways that we can solve with software. Much more naturally than let's say industrial equipment manufacturer would. Right. So that's sort of how we think about how we can solve things. And that sort of standard and state of the art that we recognize is out there in the market wasn't a reality at TeamViewer. When I came in, the procurement process was built essentially within an ERP system. We're using Microsoft Dynamics as our ERP. If you wanted to buy something as a user, well, actually, first you couldn't because we had a key user concept. There's only a few people in the organization that can buy things. Okay. Went to one of those and they went hours and hours of training on how to do that actually in a system. They did go into an ERP system, but a bit clunky, don't quote me on that. Not the nicest and user-friendliest process. Went in there, created their request, and we somehow turned a PR into a PO, usually after the invoice was already here. Um and and that was that. So not really, I don't think it's it's what we wanted to have ourselves here as the process. It's not state of the art, and the expectation here is everything we do should be state of the art. So a smart, very smart CFO a couple years ago recognized, oh well, we've got to invest in that area. Yeah. And that's where the story started.

SPEAKER_00 6:38

Great, great. And I guess that comes from you know, you're working in a world which is attuned to the to the user interface and making making life easy for for your users. Um I guess that's the thinking that's come into to this.

SPEAKER_01 6:55

I I think for for better or worse, right? I mean, there's a lot of positive sides to that. Things like our our employee population is is very easy to sort of get onto a new system. They're used to this. Every problem that we have, we almost solve it with uh another SaaS piece of software. And they're very used to that. So change management becomes very easy and it's sort of a natural thing, and rolling out a new tool is something that happens twice a day. There is no no huge effort behind that. Yeah. But on the flip side, if something doesn't work as expected, that noise level is going to be super high. Yes. Because the expectation is a modern, a sleek, a simple, easy to use uh process. Yeah. Yeah. And then we're starting from an ERP system.

SPEAKER_00 7:47

Yes, yeah, yeah. So where did you take that? So you went from, I guess, difficult to use, uh specialist user required, uh manual people feeding into that. So that was the starting point. And then how have you used technology to change to change that?

SPEAKER_01 8:03

I think the first question we asked is what kind of technology do we need to do that? I mean, as someone who's been in procurement for a decade and you've been in this space for much longer, you know the type of solutions that are out there. And I'd I'd argue that many of them, and I'm not gonna name names, but many of them are probably not gonna feel much different from working in an ERP system.

SPEAKER_00 8:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:26

Complex learning curve, gotta sort of get people on board of that. And implementing them would mean two things. It would mean throw existing things out, implement an end-to-end procurement suite, you're and you're not a greenfield, this is the first time I'm doing a procurement environment, you're gonna have to throw things out. Yes. So there's a process in that. And if you're gonna implement things like SAP Ariba or Coupa or Evalua, typically there's a huge project around that that requires implementation partners of various sorts. I mean, SAP is famous for that. And absolutely. And you go ahead and do that. Yeah. And you find yourself a year later, and you maybe have a basic but a good process that actually works. And then you ask the question, is this now more user-friendly than it would used to be? And the answer is probably not gonna be that uh that positive. So we said we're not gonna do any of that. So we're gonna we're gonna work with something modern, something sleek, and that gets you to that whole procurement startup ecosystem and assessing what is out there on the market. What could we be using and what are the latest trends? What's possible? Um, which got us to orchestration, I think, as one of those hot topics and buzzwords of the last few years in the procurement tech space.

SPEAKER_00 9:49

Yeah, great, great. And that um listeners might not be too familiar with that term. They might be experts or new to that, but yeah, can you explain orchestration and and kind of what that means in the context of of your process?

SPEAKER_01 10:04

Well, I think in a in a nutshell, what people are familiar with most of the time are the terms uh best of breed versus end-to-end suite. And that for me is is is a very helpful way to look at orchestration. You're only gonna need an orchestration software, so a layer that orchestrates all the different pieces and steps of your process across multiple tools and systems and departments. You're only gonna need that if you're not operating in a single end-to-end system. Yeah. So orchestration is is relevant the moment you're working with best of breed solutions, in my mind. You have a best of breed sourcing tool, right? You have a best of breed accounts payables, this is how I pay my invoice, whatever it is. And you want to connect all of these together, that's where orchestration becomes powerful. Most of these orchestration tools, though, they also define themselves as sort of an intake and triaging mechanism. So each user has one place to go, they go there, they describe in whichever shape or form what they want to buy. This can be via a Microsoft Teams message, this can be an email, this can be a dedicated website, an app, whatever it is. You just describe what you want to buy, and the tool is intelligent enough to identify what that means process-wise. So this is the path you should be taking. Yeah, these are the steps, and these are the involved people. So that that's how orchestration works.

SPEAKER_00 11:28

Great, great, good, good ex good explanation. So that's that, yeah, helping helping end users. Where I guess before they probably had to find somebody in the organization and ask them. Um, and maybe they knew what to use, which right, right.

SPEAKER_01 11:43

Or you sort of have the the one size fits all solution. You still have that one place to go, right? You have a procurement need, you know you need to open up the tool X, right? Whichever one it is. Then you're gonna put your purchase request in there. Yeah. And that's gonna ask you for the same 20 fields every time you do it. What's your cost center? Who's your manager? What are the line items? How much does it cost? Always the very same things. The reality is though, it it makes a difference what you buy. Yes. Right? I I want to buy a pencil versus I want to buy a laptop versus I want to contract with the marketing agency for a couple million. All different scenarios. You can't answer them with the same form. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 12:32

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this this enables the user to be navigated through all of those options and all of those channels to the to the right place.

SPEAKER_01 12:41

Yeah, that that's at least the idea. I think we we were relatively early jumping on that. Uh I mean orchestration has been a buzzword now for the last I'd say two or three years, is my gut feeling that the market is really buzzing. Yes. We hear that more and more, and there's more and more players uh emerging. Uh, some of these maybe four four years old, but yeah, that's sort of the the range. As a somewhat established company with thousands of employees and with a large presence globally, jumping on something like that is a risk.

SPEAKER_00 13:18

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 13:19

So it's not the safe bet. Yeah. So we're relatively early in that in that maturity journey. So we didn't really fully understand at the time, I think, what it means. The one thing we did know is we're willing to take the risk and find out.

SPEAKER_00 13:33

Okay. And and how how did that play out? Because that you you knew right, it's a it's a very dynamic marketplace, lots of moving parts, and of course the the the players and the tools aren't really fully formed, are they? They're developing with with clients. Um how how how did it work out?

SPEAKER_01 13:52

Well, I think uh again, back to how it started, we we knew we wanted something that is engaging for the user. Yeah. Right? That that was the fundamental cornerstone of what we were trying to do because the rest wasn't necessarily that big a problem. When I started, we had a PO compliance quote of 95-96%. Never seen something like that off the charts. Amazing. Yeah. I mean the process as it was sort of did the trick in delivering that number, and that number was high. Yes. But everybody hated it. Everybody hated it. Yeah. And and the reality is because they hated it, they they only did it when they absolutely had to. When they had to, yeah. The very last step, or when there is no other way around than doing that process now and engaging with procurement. And as procurement professionals, we all know that's the moment you've already lost. Absolutely. It's about early involvement. The sooner the better. Be at that table the moment the conversation starts about, hey, I maybe want to buy something. I'm not entirely sure yet, but I might want to buy something. Yeah. That's where you need to be. And so it was all about that engagement and user um user adoption of a new process. Yeah. Yeah. So our process was simple. It starts with the user selecting their tool, not us. Oh, not us procurement. So what we did is we essentially invited a large stakeholder group from in around the organization, 50, 60 people from around TeamViewer, and told them, guys, we we've looked at the market. We have a short list of about what was it, six uh different companies that sort of seem innovative in the way they design procurement processes on a platform logic. Yep. I want you to look at all of these in detail, and afterwards, just tell me which one you like best. Great. And that was the entire approach. That what that's what we did. So they sat there some demo sessions, two or three demo sessions by uh by a startup that pitched. So these were hours and hours and hours that they invested. Yep. Afterwards, they just said, hey guys, let's take your vote. Simple vote, no scoring, no complicated. There's a waiting and a scoring, and it's just which one did you like best? Yeah, yeah. And that that's how we ended up with our current solution. Fantastic.

SPEAKER_00 16:05

So full full stakeholder involvement from right from the beginning of the process. Did other they didn't say to you, hey, it's a procurement tool. You uh you you tell me, Alex.

SPEAKER_01 16:15

Um interestingly not. No, that's it's actually a great point. I mean, you could expect that, right? Uh, but it seems like our uh our employee population is very opinionated about a lot of processes in in all the right ways. I'm not I mean that in any negative way. It was super helpful. Yeah. And for me, it's the silver bullet now because every time someone is not happy with the procurement process, I can always tell them that's your decision. That wasn't you picked that too. Yeah. So uh that works pretty pretty well for us right now.

SPEAKER_00 16:45

Great, great. Okay, so that that that's brilliant. So they're all positive, they feel that they've been part of the the the selection and the and the and the process. And then yeah, how how did implementation go?

SPEAKER_01 16:57

Um better than expected? Not as well as promised, I think is is probably the answer there, but I've yeah, I've just see an implementation project that finishes on time, on budget, and as expected and promised. I don't think these exist. Our provider, and by the way, we're working with Omnia, a UK-based uh uh startup company, scale-up company, um, they told us 12 weeks. So for your size, for your type of organization, 12 weeks. And no external support needed, they do it all themselves. That was the that was the premise. Yep. Sounds interesting, right? I've never seen anything like it. Um I understand that most of these companies work the same way. So uh super interesting to see that. Took us 14 weeks, so I'm still sour about those two weeks.

SPEAKER_00 17:46

It's no pretty quick.

SPEAKER_01 17:48

Yeah, yeah. It is, but the reality is you gotta see that for what it is. It is not a you're running an end-to-end procurement suite.

SPEAKER_00 17:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:58

What you're doing is you in 14 weeks you implement a bare bones process, very bone viable product. This is something I can go live with. Yeah, yeah. That's what we did. And then the iteration cycles start. Okay, yeah. And that's I think very positive because again, back to the point of getting the end user on board. Yep. We could take feedback in the moment we started, right? Feedback came in a day after we went we got we went live. Yeah. And two days later we had it implemented. So it's sort of you're relatively quick in in updating all of that and adjusting to your user base, yeah. But you're obviously also going to make mistakes. I mean, one of the biggest mistakes we made was uh the very same thing. We involved too many people. Okay. Yeah. We wanted to please everybody, and we're under the assumption, well, if everybody is involved in the process, then everybody is happy and then we're good, and engagement goes up and everybody likes the process. That was the end goal. The thing is, if everybody is involved in the process, the process takes forever. Yes, yeah. And and all of a sudden we had requests that took three, four week cycle time. Yeah. Because everybody had a say in with the next step. Yeah. And so we had to sort of roll that back now over the last half year or so and sort of identify when should people be involved. And is that maybe not what they think it is? Yes. And you're back to where the systems bring something entirely new, at least I haven't seen that before. Well, it that's not true, actually. I have seen that before with dedicated process mining solutions. Things like Silonis. Yeah. That that takes your entire process apart and tells you exactly the step takes that long. Here's your bottleneck. The orchestration solutions sort of do the same thing, but isolated to procurement. The procurement process, they tell me exactly. So there's various steps in your process, and this process step takes this long, and this takes that long, and that person always takes nine days to click the button. Yeah. But you can be very targeted in optimizing it. Yes. And that's sort of the stage that we went through over the last six months now. Okay. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 20:10

So just that, yeah, getting that the the the stakeholder input and then working through these cycles of of of it of iteration. And and are they were you were you customizing the the tool in that in that process? Has it gone from a sort of a a standard to a a team viewer dedicated process in that in that period?

SPEAKER_01 20:30

It's a great question. I think that that's sort of another one of those defining features for orchestration solutions. Usually there is no standard. Yeah. Yeah. It's not like there's an out-of-the-box, this is the standard process, implemented, run with it, and you sort of tweak uh your process a little bit. Yeah. It starts with a blank sheet. Yeah. Like literally, you get a you get a canvas and you start putting boxes on the canvas. This is process step here and there, and you draw a line between. So from here it needs to go to there. And that's how you build your entire process. And not every one of those boxes has to be within the tool itself. You can punch out to other tools and then come back. I'll give you a simple example. Key process step in every new contract, obviously, legal review. Yep. Our legal department works in JIRA. That's their tool of choice. And it has been that way for years. So no point in sort of forcing them to don't try and change it. Yeah. You'll have to work somewhere else in something different. So what we do is simple. We're in our procurement tool, we're in Omnia. And Omnia at some point comes to the point that says, okay, now legal reviews are required. Automatically creates a ticket in JIRA, legal reviews it there, clicks approve in Jira, and the Omnia process automatically continues from there. Right. And that you can you can tweak and tailor the way you want. And that's sort of where integrations come in. So the more tools you have to integrate, optimization. Obviously, the more valuable an orchestration solution is going to be for you. Yeah, yeah. Great.

SPEAKER_00 22:06

Great. And then all that said and done, you're seeing the benefits? What are they what do they look like?

SPEAKER_01 22:14

I I think we see tremendous benefits. And it starts again with uh much earlier involvement and engagement and pretending process. That's really the one I can also put numbers behind. Yeah, yeah. We've done some analysis on uh essentially all completed projects that ran through any of our systems and processes, and we looked at when did we get involved? Yep. Which step of the process? Was it only once we already had the invoice in our hands, or was it a step before when the contract was signed, or a step before when actually an RFP took place, or a step before when the business thought about buying something and sort of walk your way back there? And because we now knew that exactly when we got involved, because the system captures it, yeah, we could also tell exactly. So when we get involved for the negotiation of the contract, well, that's an average 4% savings.

SPEAKER_00 23:09

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 23:10

Yes. When we get involved after the invoice is there, guess what? No savings. Yeah. But when we get involved early, turns out 9.6% average savings. Yeah. And now you're in a very informed conversation with your CFO. Because now you can tell them, well, Michael, I've I've had a look at the data, and it turns out when we're involved early, 9.6% savings. When we're involved late, 4% if you're lucky. Yes. So your size of the price is that 5% gap between those two numbers. Michael, I can also tell you looking at the data, when we get involved early, that request typically takes four days longer. So let's have a conversation. Four days, five percent extra savings. Yes. Yeah. What are the circumstances you want to go down that path? Or when is there is are there different circumstances when time is more important to you? Yeah. And then we started setting up the system in that way when time was more important based on value of the request, based on category of the request, country of the request, whatever else it is. We went down a super fast path. Yep. And when money was more important, the system is set up in a way that procurement involvement is forced much more.

SPEAKER_00 24:33

Fantastic. And you can actually quantify that with the the volume of transactions flowing through that process and going in those different directions. Yeah, exactly. That was great. And what what did Alex, what did that then mean for your procurement function? Did you have to adjust for you know being if they're involved earlier, they're having to spend more time? Uh so did you have to make a an adjustment in the actual people and an organization? Yeah, massively, massively.

SPEAKER_01 25:01

I mean, before that, essentially we had a we had a procure-to-pay organization.

SPEAKER_00 25:06

Yes. Monthly speaking. Yeah. High compliance because they're raising purchase orders. Pushing requests through the system.

SPEAKER_01 25:14

Yeah. And it worked well. Um, and that's the part of the organization that actually didn't change much at all. Yeah. Because that's the part of the organization I measure on efficiency. And they are highly efficient. Time is their metric, and they are fast in how they do things. Good. All the rest of the organization needed change because I didn't have category management, let alone a business partner of any, you know, not really. Um didn't even have a team thinking about processes or any sort of excellence topics around that. So nowadays we're structured in three pillars from uh business partnering engagement, category management to process excellence and running those tools and processes and continuously adjusting them based on the learnings that we take, looking at the numbers, and a procure-to-pay team that sort of executes them against specific orders. Um these are not the same people that we started with, which I think is also natural because it's a different kind of talent you require for these different skill sets. Some of us were, or some of uh the team were actually very happy about that. They were looking forward to opportunities to grow. And it's it's for them, it's it's a tremendous opportunity to become a category manager from based on uh on where they started from. Others left us and others sort of were happy with what they do today, and they continue to do that well. And that's more than okay. That's that's brilliant.

SPEAKER_00 26:43

Great, great. And and that is, you know, it's it's amazing. It's uh you know that that's the transformation of a a procurement organization, just but but actually technology as the catalyst to make that that happen. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:56

Yeah. I think the one thing that that we really had to learn, it was a super rapid transformation. I mean, we're talking about 18 months, less than 18 months. That that is a lot of change and a very high pace of you're you're changing all of that. Yeah. And if we weren't the type of organization that we are, what I mentioned earlier, there's a very receptive audience, employee base that works with you. There's lots of people who are actually willing to go that journey with you. I I don't think that works in every organization, not at that pace. Yeah, yeah. And that's nothing to do with how yeah well you work as a team to do that. It's simply culture and how organizations work.

SPEAKER_00 27:44

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I guess that's the yeah, the nature of nature of your your organization in positively uh positive there. And and I guess what from that you what are the lessons that you've learned that you could then pass on to uh someone listening to this and going, this sounds great.

SPEAKER_01 28:01

Um, fair point. I I guess be aware of the type of organization you're in for exactly that reason and and structure it that way. Um secondly, really lean into that. You can work in iterative steps and it doesn't have to be all at once, and sort of also understand all at once, and everybody involved can be uh can be it can backfire essentially. Yeah, I think too many people in there. Another big learning. Third one, that that was a big one for me as somebody who is not very I'm not a techie, right? I I understand what a tool does, I don't understand how the tool works behind. Yeah. And if you if you work with orchestration, as I said earlier, one of the key pieces is you integrate existing solutions. Like we have Jira integrated for our legal case, we have SAP Success Factors integrated for external contractors, we have fresh service in there, and lots of other solutions and tools in that process that we integrate it with. And that's a technical integration that needs to happen. Some of these have modern APIs and it's relatively easy to connect. Yep. Some of them don't. Okay. Some of these are on-prem legacy solutions that have been around for 15 years, not that easy to connect to. Even if the the sender, the new fancy, shiny procurement SaaS solution is able to send the data, the receiving end still needs to be able to actually digest it and work with it. Yeah. So that was a bit difficult. And the other thing I underestimated than that is the moment your solutions are customized, integration also becomes harder.

SPEAKER_00 29:47

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 29:47

Our ERP system has lots of customized fields and things in there that are not out of the box the Microsoft standard.

SPEAKER_00 29:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:56

Okay. Because that is the case, each of these fields is a separate uh effort in implementing.

SPEAKER_00 30:03

And I guess you didn't see that at the beginning. That's probably once you get into the nuts and bolts here, you you see that one.

SPEAKER_01 30:08

Yeah. I think probably if if I would have been in a company for longer, might have seen that coming. Yeah. For me, I sort of I had still learned about the old system and the tools and how everything works while at the same time we were already rolling out a new tool and system. Uh I should have probably taken a little more time in the beginning to understand the the as is better. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 30:32

And and what do the what do the end users think? You know, they're what you know, they're they're not seeing the be inside process or the or the transformation that's you've undertaken with the team. Yeah. Wha what do they what do they see and feel?

SPEAKER_01 30:44

Well, what they feel is is I hope very positive. What the numbers tell us is it it is really positive. Uh, if you take a look at our annual report for for 2024, you're gonna notice a 4% increase in eBITDA. Great. Yep. Which essentially means we were able to uh identify a lot of savings. And the reason being that we were involved earlier. It's it's exactly that storyline of we we got involved earlier, we were able to turn that involvement into positive commercial action to reduce the overall cost base. And I know we've just spent the last 10 years in procurement pretending savings is not the most important thing we're here for. And I think one of one of your previous uh podcast episodes, so you call it a hygiene factor. Yeah. And that's that's still the case. It is hygiene. It is it is the minimum that is expected of you. But moving into the times that we're in now, I think it's the front runner again. Everybody's talking savings these days, again, be it to protect yourself against tariffs or be it to sort of uh uh fuel for growth is is one of those slogans as well. You need to cut back somewhere to find that money to invest elsewhere. I I think we're back to that. Yeah unfortunately to some degree, because the last few years talking about sustainability, talking about innovation were super important and critical to us as a society. But right now it seems that cost is the main driver.

SPEAKER_00 32:11

Cost is is the number one focus again. Abs absolutely. We're we're we're seeing that in in in all directions in all in all sectors. Um and it you know it brings us back to that that absolute direct link between what if the procurement influence and the impact on savings transferring directly to the organization's PL. You know, it it's an absolute direct link. And and and yeah, really interesting that that you've made that link with the with with the orchestration piece. That's great. That's great. Um and Alex, what what's next in focus? So having done done that piece, um, are you are you fully complete there or or does it iterate further? What what's what happens next?

SPEAKER_01 32:53

It it it iterates further and it will continue to do so for years, I'm sure. Because companies change. Um, and at least all the companies I've been in um over my career, they they change fast. And if you look outside the window, you see how the world evolves and it's fast. And we I think we talked about this uh uh a little earlier. I mean, the this morning you wake up and you you have tariffs uh of 15%, the next morning you wake up and it's 25%, and things are just fluent. Yes. And that's that's fine, but that also means we have to adjust at a much higher frequency. You can't expect that you put out a procurement process and that's going to be the process for the next five years. I think those cycles are there. So for us, I think that meant particularly really making sure that we have a a part of the organization that continuously looks at that. And it's not a project team for the new procurement tool rollout. It is a an established pillar in the organization that continuously monitors and works on our processes. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 33:55

And that becomes that's business as usual now.

SPEAKER_01 33:58

Right.

SPEAKER_00 33:58

That that change, that that technology enhancement.

SPEAKER_01 34:01

And and it works well, and that's good. But the other thing is now what all of that meant, and and the orchestration tool wasn't the only investment we made. It was it was the cornerstone, but we've invested in a bunch of other things as well. Specialized SaaS solutions and and some other elements around that strategy, including people and upskilling. And so a lot of investments were made. I mentioned earlier that our CFO was smart enough two years ago to recognize he needs to invest in procurement. Right. Well, he's done that. But as CFOs are, what do you expect on investment? You expect the return. Yep, absolutely. The conversation we're having now. What's my return on investment? And why is it not just that 4% you just talked about, an e-bit increase? There's got to be more than that.

SPEAKER_00 34:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 34:47

Yeah. That's the conversation, which means for us, we're focusing less on the process now, less on the these are the steps that you go through, these are the people you need to involve. We're focusing more on the actually managing our spend. Yes. And by that I don't mean negotiating things or running an RFP. I really mean a proper spend management. How should we spend money? Where should it go? Yep. And that is a that is an entirely different journey.

SPEAKER_00 35:16

Yeah, absolutely. That's great. But you know, that the work that you've done has then enabled that strategic view on spend. You're not back in the raising purchase orders area. You're now in right up front influencing the spend. Right, right.

SPEAKER_01 35:33

At least that's the idea. The question is, how do you deliver that without further resource investments? Yeah. I think the only the only answer there, or what one of the only answers I can think of, is you become more efficient in sort of delivering more with what you have. And that gets us to the other hot topic of the day, AI in all its shapes and forms and glory, or not so much glory. And again, we're a software company, I know what I'm talking about.

SPEAKER_00 36:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:02

Have yet to see a software that is sold today that doesn't have an AI label on it, something in lines of powered by AI or whatever else it is. Uh I think that's that's the other big uh opportunity for us now, leveraging that technology to essentially maximize the returns without asking for additional investment.

SPEAKER_00 36:23

Yes. Okay, great. Great. So having got that that foundation now now leveraging it more with an A with AI to do more.

SPEAKER_01 36:33

And I think it's a prerequisite almost. If you think about how AI works, AI works with data. Yeah. And training on data. And most organizations I know, they're very hesitant to share their own company data with any third party. So your IT security is gonna go nuts if you ask to upload all your data to ChatGPT. It's not gonna, they're not gonna go for that. They always want it isolated, contained. This is just our data. So if you want to use AI just on your data, your data has to be even better. Yeah. Because now it's it's sort of it has to work with what's there. Yes. Arguably, compared to the past, it doesn't have to be as structured, right? AI is good at unstructured data and sort of finding the structure behind it. But at least it has to be there. It has to be captured. Yes. You have to have the data points captured along the way of the process so the AI can actually work with it. And and back to what we just talked about. We've implemented an orchestration layer that connects all these various systems, and with that connects all the data in in one place. Now think about putting an AI on top of that. Yep. And that's sort of where where I think it actually works. If you would have done that without there's no way that AI would be able to make any sense of what you throw at it in my license.

SPEAKER_00 37:58

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 37:59

Well you don't have the isolated rules.

SPEAKER_00 38:01

Yeah, yeah. Great, great. Oh, that's great. So that's that's the forward, the forward uh phase next. AI think it has to be. Yeah. Great, great. Um Alex, that that was great, extremely insightful and and and very uh practical for for listeners. Because you know, it's something that you know procurement. Um we haven't really seen it. We've you know that area of uh of the process, the intake and orchestration, it's not really had the focus, but actually, you know what we've talked about today is is at the the you know huge benefit of putting the right structure, the right processes in place to then be able to make a very significant PL impact. Um that's great. Um we always uh wrap up with a bit of uh guidance from our from our CPO perspective. Um so yeah, um going back bigger picture. What's what's the one thing that procurement people should focus on um on more, particularly now in this current current world?

SPEAKER_01 39:06

Learn a different language in the sense that move away from from procurement speak. Yep. Just I I still see that so often, and it's the opposite of what we all want. Because all of us we've been talking about for for a decade that we want to become business partners, that we want to be close to the business, that we want to measure our sort of our outcomes based on what benefits the business. You shouldn't be after savings, you should be after EBIT, right? Whichever other analogy it is that you want to use. Yet we continue using a ton of acronyms that nobody outside of procurement ever heard of. We continue to speak that language with a business that doesn't understand and doesn't follow. And you can have the fanciest process in the world and all shiny and all engaging. But if if the language in that process is still not something that uh an average employee of a company can understand, then you're lost. Yes. So learn the language of the business and don't hide behind procurement speak. That that is my my biggest um my biggest undertaking, I think, working with procurement teams.

SPEAKER_00 40:14

Brilliant. Um, and then what advice would you give uh a someone someone new entering procurement, young professional coming into our profession?

SPEAKER_01 40:24

See you see as much as you can. I mean, procurement is broad. That's one of the things I love about the function. It's no day is the same in the sense that you do a lot of different things. It's not just negotiating, it's not just putting contracts in place, it's not just talking to a supplier, it's risk management, it's just inability, it's it's processes in all their shapes and forms, it's data analytics, it's there's so many different areas of procurement that you can't tap into. When you start off, when you start that career in procurement, because for some reason you decided to do that, and I hope that many people do, many more than today, where the typical answer is still, oh, I somehow ended up in procurement. It's not like a choice to be in procurement. When you do that, when you make that choice, try to see as much of procurement as you can and figure out which which role is the one for you because there's many of them.

SPEAKER_00 41:15

Great, great. Brilliant. Um, good advice. Thank you, Alex. Um, that that was great. Um just to finish up, where where can listeners get get in touch with you?

SPEAKER_01 41:25

Well, uh obviously the the usual sources, LinkedIn, whatever, just feel free to reach out to contact me. Um let's have a conversation. That's typically what I mean. I'm not here just for your interest, I'm here for my own interest as well. The more people I can connect to, the more people that can connect with me, the more engaging these conversations will be. And I do hope that there's others out there that have a lot of learnings to share. And I hope that maybe one or two people benefited from the learnings and mistakes that we made here. But that that's really what it is about. Let's let's foster that procurement network, that procurement family and community.

SPEAKER_00 42:00

Great, great. Alex, that's that's that's what we're doing. And I really appreciate that. Thank you. That's brilliant. Thank you for having me. Thank you for joining us on the Procurement Initiative Leaders podcast. I really hope you enjoyed it. Looking for more procurement insights, tips, and developments from leading procurement professionals? Join our procurement initiative community on LinkedIn. Just open LinkedIn and search for the Procurement Initiative. And be sure to hit that subscribe button to never miss another episode.