Transforming and digitising procurement DIGITAL REPORT 2022
IN ASSOCIATION WITH:
TRANSFORMING AND DIGITISING PROCUREMENT 2
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Michael Burt, CPO at Equiniti, discusses his role in spearheading the company’s procurement transformation and the challenges to overcome along the way
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ichael Burt, CPO, Equiniti started his career as a engineer designing missile systems at BAE Systems in 2002. “I was seconded into procurement to help on a major cost reduction programme at BAE Systems.” In 2007, Burt joined Capgemini as a Senior Consultant, specialising in procurement transformation. Since then, he has held a number of senior procurement positions including Head of Supply Chain Management for The Metropolitan Police Service and Chief Procurement Officer for Colt Technology Services, a global network and voice services company. In his current role at Equiniti, Burt is responsible for the global procurement and supply chain management for the group as well as all properties and facilities. Who is Equiniti? Founded in 2007, Equiniti provides three core services; “Firstly, we offer share registration services, which are focused towards supporting public companies with all the activities that go with being listed in the public market. There are many services that we offer, but the major ones are helping to manage a company’s share register, dividend payments and employee share plans. We also help organisations list through supporting Initial Public Offering (IPO’s). We serve over 70% of organisations
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Michael Burt, CPO, at Equiniti
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“ OUR WORK IS MISSIONCRITICAL FOR AN ORGANISATION, SO WE CANNOT AFFORD TO MAKE MISTAKES, THEREFORE WE ARE METICULOUS IN WHAT WE DO” MICHAEL BURT, CPO, EQUINITI
listed on the FTSE 100 and 15% of those on the NYSE. “We also provide specialist technologyled solutions to regulated businesses, such as complaint remediation, Know Your Customer (KYC) and loan administration. Finally, we have a division that focuses on pension administration, which delivers software, payment and complex administration solutions,” says Burt. “Our work is mission-critical for an organisation, so we cannot afford to make mistakes, therefore we are meticulous in what we do. We are a unique organisation in the services and technology that we provide and there is a very high chance that you are one of the 36m people who benefit from our services.” Spearheading Equiniti’s procurement transformation When Burt joined Equiniti, there had been several short term leadership changes within the department that had caused a significant impact on staff morale and performance. “There was limited strategy, lack of 6
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processes, and insufficient management information creating the perfect storm. You often hear people refer to Procurement Greenfield sites, well this was definitely a Procurement Brownfield site, with a lot of clean up required, all doable, but it required careful management and a lot of hard work. The function had great potential for what it could achieve and this was one of the reasons why I took the job.”
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MICHAEL BURT TITLE: CPO INDUSTRY: FINANCIAL SERVICES
But where to start? People. Burt knew that in order to be successful and make the job easier, he needed to get the people element of the business right. “The first challenge was to get the team to trust me and to get them working together. It was way too soon to discuss any kind of vision, besides they had likely heard it all before from my predecessors. In these situations, actions
EXECUTIVE BIO
LOCATION: UNITED KINGDOM Michael Burt, CPO, Equiniti started his career as a systems engineer designing missile systems at BAE Systems in 2002. “I was seconded into procurement to help on a major cost reduction programme at BAE Systems.” In 2007, Burt joined Capgemini as a Senior Consultant, specialising in procurement transformation.Since then, he has held a number of senior procurement positions including Head of Supply Chain Management for The Metropolitan Police Service and Chief Procurement Officer for Colt Technology Services, a global network and voice services company. In his current role at Equiniti, Burt is responsible for the global procurement and supply chain management for the group as well as all properties and facilities.
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Medius and its partnership with Equiniti Shannon Kreps of Medius discusses how Equiniti is harnessing Medius supplier management solutions Shannon Kreps, Vice President Product Marketing and Marcom at Medius started her career in the purchasing department over 25 years ago as a buyer. The spend management process is one that Kreps is very familiar with. At Medius Kreps’ job is to serve as a conduit between the company’s research and development team, as well as its Salesforce, and its customers.
“At Medius we like to say that we simply help our customers find the right suppliers to buy and pay for what they need with full control over cost and compliance. We really are a spend management suite. It is our role to make sure that our customers are able to purchase items that they need, pay for them with confidence, and do everything across the whole source of the pay platform,” says Kreps.
How Equiniti is harnessing Medius’s supplier management solutions “Equiniti is a great example of a company that’s using supplier management to the fullest. They actually begin at the start of the process with a feature in Medius that we have called demand capture. it allows anyone in the organisation to request a new supplier to come on board. When that happens, it’s routed throughout the organisation. They have some pretty stringent requirements on what they need to ask regarding new suppliers coming on board, and it really varies depending on the type of supplier that they use. So Equiniti has supplier questionnaires that are completed internally to make sure that the right information is being captured as well as externally for their suppliers to make sure that they’re providing the right requirements that they need.
“Equiniti then uses a robust approval process, so that once a supplier has answered a set of questions that is routed to the appropriate person they’ll review that information before moving onto the next stage of the process. Equiniti really uses this process to make sure that its suppliers are properly vetted and managed. They also use supplier management for the ongoing maintenance of their suppliers. It’s not useful for organisations to spend all of that time setting up your supplier to begin with only to then let it fall. It is important to conduct ongoing management.”
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Equiniti: Transforming and digitising procurement
talk much louder than words, so I decided to focus the team on one very key objective, where everyone could come together to deliver. It needed to be something in the short term which would make them feel instantly good when they achieved their objective.” With this in mind, Burt focused the team’s efforts on achieving a set savings target for the year-end, ensuring their remuneration was linked to it. “There was one goal for the remaining 5 months and I deprioritised all others. I wanted laser focus and I wanted to see how the team would come together. It was amazing to see people’s motivation and confidence grow week on week, as we edged closer to the target. We ended up smashing the target and people were buzzing, it was great to see smiles back on people’s faces. At that point, the team began to trust me and so 10
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“ BUSINESSES CANNOT AFFORD TO BE ON THE BACK FOOT ON ESG AND PROCUREMENT IS PERFECTLY PLACED TO HELP WITH THE CHALLENGE” MICHAEL BURT, CPO, EQUINITI
it was then time to start to introduce them to my vision.” Since joining, the procurement department has evolved significantly, by building a strong culture of delivery in the team, Burt emphasises that this has earned the team the respect and trust of the business, allowing the team to regain control. “We have gone through 3 phases of maturity in the past 4 years,” says Burt. “The first was about establishing our purpose, our team and our operating model. Defining what activities we perform centrally and those that are decentralised. It’s important to set expectations with your stakeholders around what you are here to do. The second phase was about systemising, offshoring and optimising. We built a shared service centre in Chennai which performs all our
procurement & property operations, leaving our category leads to focus on strategic procurement and value generation. “Our third phase has been about integrating deeper relationships with our critical suppliers and our stakeholders, with a focus on unlocking hidden value. We don’t measure ourselves purely on savings generated.” Centralising and digitalising timesensitive operational work As part of the company’s wider transformation strategy, Burt and his team have been working to centralise and digitise time-sensitive operational work. “The first stage was to define each and every process procurement and property should perform. We took a very lean approach to this and ensured we only focused on those activities that were equiniti.com
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WHY BIG IS BEST FOR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IN THE EXPONENTIAL AGE Bottom line: The corporate world is ramping up its digital transformation plans and looking for the quickest route to market. But there is no room to get this wrong. Managing risk is everything and the financial services sector has the most to lose. Why? According to Arash Ghazanfari, Dell Technologies’ CTO in the UK, “The pandemic has moved us all, irreversibly, into an Exponential Age.” But financial services firms cannot embark on this transition on their own. Despite building resilience in the aftermath of the financial crash of 2008, great swathes of the financial sector are still burdened with technical debt. There are organisations with critical business capabilities that are dependant on legacy hardware and software, in some cases more than half a century old. Some of these critical systems can’t be replaced overnight. Such modernisation efforts can be expensive, time consuming and fraught with risk. This is where Dell Technologies and its lifelong partner Computacenter come in. Ghazanfari says “The partnership with Computacenter has always been vital but in the current pandemic environment this connection is more important than ever.” He adds “Nobody is immune to the supply chain challenges the industry is facing. Whilst Dell Technologies has remained resilient, we recognise the importance of strategic partners such as Computacenter to scale
our capabilities and assist our customers in accelerating their digital transformation efforts. Our customers are rationalising their vendor and partner relationships to simplify and de-risk their procurement strategies. They look to partners like Dell Technologies and Computacenter to accelerate their business transformation.” Mark Griffin, Client Director at Computacenter agrees. ‘It is the skills and expertise we have in our core business. That’s designing the right infrastructure for each of our clients and being able to leverage that expertise at massive scale. “If you pivot that approach across to our relationship with Dell Technologies, many large enterprises need to accelerate their digital transformation in the tens of thousands of users and often in multiple geographical locations. You can only do that with a focused ecosystem of core vendors such as Dell Technologies and service and solution providers such as Computacenter who can deploy that, at scale, globally.” “You can’t do this without depth, experience and massive scale and that explains why government departments and the largest corporates across UK industry, such as Equiniti in the financial services sector, are drawn to Computacenter and Dell Technologies” says Griffin.
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absolutely necessary and that created value. We then centralised these processes into the team and assigned a nominated process owner with a clearly defined service level agreement (SLA). “It was important that we could measure the time and quality of each process. Depending on the complexity of the process and the capability required to run it determined whether we offshored it to our shared service centre or kept it onshore. We formed internal contracts between the teams for each process and set review sessions to hold each party to account. It’s very much like our own outsourcing agreement, it keeps all parties accountable for performance,” explains Burt. Achieving this, Burt and his team moved on to selecting the right technology to become truly digital. “For P2P we use Workday, for contract management we selected HighQ and for supplier onboarding and supplier management we decided upon Medius. It was important that we matched our department’s process maturity to the functionality of the platforms. There is no point in owning a Ferrari if all you want to do is drive to the shops,” adds Burt. “It was during the implementation where we maximised the automation opportunities, our ethos is always to have as little manual intervention as possible. In practice this means enabling smart forms to guide users, setting workflow rules to only flag exceptions for approval and also using scheduling and reminders to ensure activities are being completed. We also use statistical analysis to help identify where we should set our optimum manual procurement intervention points.” Equiniti is also looking at evaluation platforms that harness emerging technologies such as Blockchain and AI, “but I 14
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EQUINITI AND ITS SUPPLIER ECOSYSTEM “It has been one area where we have had to focus a lot of time and effort on. Before forming any partnerships it’s important to understand each other's roles, responsibilities and expectations. We have done this by creating a procurement network which we use not only to educate the business of their role in the different procurement processes but also to seek feedback on what is working and what is not, making adjustments where necessary. Partnerships are built through strong working relationships to common goals. We listen to our stakeholders goals, translate them to procurement objectives and then ensure they are cascaded to the relevant suppliers. “Our supplier ecosystems have been built to enable two-way feedback, focusing not just on their performance as a supplier but on our performance as a customer. We need to listen carefully to what they say and try to be as easy to work with as possible. “Sometimes it can be difficult to get their honest feedback, after all, who wants to tell the customer their behaviours are counterintuitive, but it’s important that all issues in the relationship are tabled and discussed. Our ultimate goal is to become the customer of choice and this is the biggest benefit of investing so much time in developing the relationship. We think of the supplier account managers as an extension to our team, they are the people who will advocate for us in their own organisation, solve problems and help to fight for scarce resources” Michael Burt, CPO, Equiniti.
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“ THE FIRST CHALLENGE WAS TO GET THE TEAM TO TRUST ME AND TO GET THEM WORKING TOGETHER” MICHAEL BURT, CPO, EQUINITI
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Year Founded
5,288
Number of Employees
£472m Revenue
think they have a little way to go before we can adopt them,” says Burt. “I can definitely see their application in the evolution of procurement, perhaps in 2-3 years time. The benefits of Blockchain on verifying supplier information would be of huge benefit. It amazes me how much time is spent verifying supplier data.” Over the next 12 to 18 months, Equiniti will be moving into the next phase of maturity for its supplier management programme, which will look to improve the resilience of the company’s supply chain. “We will be looking at performing audits of our key suppliers to understand in greater detail our second and third-tier suppliers and how they are being managed,” says Burt. “The next big question I will be asking the function is how we can best support our business to be an even more responsible business. We will be looking to set specific ESG targets for our suppliers as well as making sure we incorporate ESG into our procurement evaluation criteria. In the very near term, I can see carbon reduction targets being equally weighted in importance as cost reduction targets. Businesses cannot afford to be on the back foot on ESG and Procurement is perfectly placed to help with the challenge,” concludes Burt.
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