My guest on today’s show is Mark Webb. Mark is the Managing Director of UK based procurement consultancy firm, Future Purchasing.

Following experience as a practitioner and then in consulting with PwC and QP Group, Mark co-founded Future Purchasing, and they have grown from strength to strength since their inception back in 2002.

Future Purchasing undertakes what I think is the leading piece of industry research on the subject of Category Management.

They just put the final touches on their 2017 Global Category Management Leadership Report, a research collaboration with Henley Business School.

What I wanted to do in my conversation with Mark is to pick apart some of the key findings, and understand what differentiates the leaders from followers in terms of their approach to category management, and the subsequent results that they enjoy.

Areas we cover include:

• Why Category Management should be a business process, not a procurement process.
• The background behind the development of the Category Management Leadership Report.
• What differentiates a leader from a follower.
• A summary of the key recommendations from the report, highlighting areas with procurement control, and those that require stakeholder engagement.

For more information, visit: http://artofprocurement.com/fpsurvey

Today’s guest on the Art of Procurement is Mark Trowbridge, the co-founder and Principal for Strategic Procurement Solutions, and the former Director of Sourcing and Contracts at Bank of America.

Mark is a published author, and a regular presenter at procurement and supply chain conferences. In fact, it was at the recent ISM Indirect conference in December that Mark and I met. As I got to know Mark I knew that I needed to invite him onto the show, and fortunately he accepted my invite without reservation.

The main topic of today’s conversation is the notion of procurement superheroes – what are their characteristics, how can procurement leaders best deploy, and retain them. 

However, as you will hear in the interview, we discuss much more than that!

Areas we cover include:

• Why procurement is making a shift back to full value procurement
• Why CPO’s are being replaced by business leaders, and what procurement leaders can do to stop the trend.
• Why e-auctions and competitive bidding events do not always lead you to the lowest cost, and what you can do instead.
• The 6 key attributes of procurement superheroes, and how they are changing as the procurement value proposition evolves.
• How can a procurement leader build an environment to help all employees act at a superhero level.
• Mark explains the concept of taking intelligence risks that has had a big impact on his thinking.
• What are the right ways and wrong ways to position savings reporting?

Mark’s two resolutions for procurement in 2017.

For more information, visit: http://artofprocurement.com/sps

Welcome to 2017!  In this first show of the year, I share details of Art of Procurement's publishing schedule in 2017, invite applications to a new AOP Circle of Experts, and share thoughts on facilitating innovation following a recent visit to a startup accelerator program.

For more information, visit: http://artofprocurement.com/ep116