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Ian Thompson

TITLE: PROCUREMENT CATEGORY

MANAGER | VP |

NORTHERN EUROPE

COMPANY: IVALUA

LOCATION: LONDON, ENGLAND, UK chain, Thompson says: “What you measure and how you select is the first thing.”

Ian is a high-integrity technology sales leader who builds long-term, mutually beneficial relationships with both customers, prospects, and team members. He has broad experience in procurement and supply chain technologies.

A company can, he says, do more than just provide a catalogue of products, so it’s important to begin by considering its capabilities. “During the pandemic for example, there was a company that was providing point-of-sale equipment for a supermarket. Because the supermarket understood that the company was not just providing a catalogue of services –and because they knew that the company had GPS software, vehicles, and so on –they actually brought them in to augment their delivery.

“So understanding what a company can do, its capabilities, and the outcomes that you can bring about through creative innovation will allow you to get a much better performance from the suppliers that you have.”

Thompson then points to assessing risk and resilience. He says that trying to understand the individual supplier and how it's set up to disaster recovery, and the way it manages risk, will be an important factor in dealing with future supply chain disruptions.

“But, in all likelihood, the best way of managing disruption risk is to have a larger quantity of suppliers in your network. So, even though you may buy all of your products or commodity apps from a certain supplier – because, let’s say that's sufficient, administratively easy, or gives you leverage on your spend, in terms of driving prices – it's also much more risky than buying the same quantity spread between ten different suppliers.”

Managing suppliers, managing friends Thompson highlights that S2P software and technology means that a lot of the traditional downside of dealing with a host of suppliers have largely gone away because of digitisation.

“Fifteen years ago, you would've struggled to manage a hundred friends, but now you’re able to do so because of technology. In many ways, supplier management is a similar affair.”

Although it may seem an odd thing for him to say the above as a procurement professional, Thompson points out that he actually doesn’t like the term ‘supplier’. “The reason,” he says, “is that 'supplier' is actually a way of describing a company – and a company is like a node in the network, which is the economy.

“Take myself, for example: I’m a colleague and a friend, I'm a father and a husband – and I embody all of these different characteristics. But, behind them all, there's actually a person.”

“Companies are considered to be composed of customers, innovators, competitors, agents pushing out content and so on, and they've got all of these different characteristics. And of course, it just so happens that when you're a procurement professional, you interact with the supply side of things.

“When it comes to suppliers, I need to squeeze them. I need to get them all to comply with X, Y, Z. What you really need to ask is, ‘how can they help me to innovate?’, ‘what do they know that I don't know?’, ‘what information can they share with me about the reality of our supply chain?’.”

Here, Thompson hits upon the fact that the way in which we approach something changes the very thing we find, and it closely ties into his philosophical, yet concretely humanistic approach to supplier relationships.

The role of technology in humanising procurement

Thompson says that all of this can't be done without technology, because without it, all of your efforts, and all of “the burn” on your organisation will just be about managing the fact that suppliers exist.

“But,” he says, “you can let technology take care of that side of things, and then you can begin to see your suppliers as an entity; and your connection to them as more than just a commodity-type relationship.”

He says that it’s important to understand your suppliers and to be able to see what they do, and that this has the power to transform ‘supplier’ relationships, into human relationships that will yield significant outcomes.

S2P’s relationship to ESGs

Ivalua is doing a lot in the S2P space within supplier relationship management (SRM) at the moment, as well as in sourcing and their environmental impact centre. A lot of Ivalua’s efforts are about providing understanding to Scope 3.

“The environmental impact centre means that you are actually part of a network that is trying to understand the full implications of carbon emissions across the entire value chain – and this is actually quite profound. For example, where an organisation sources its product from