Procurement & Supply Chain | National Grid Ventures

teams which is all about understanding the category, the asset base and deploying a series of supply or demand levers in order to drive value and efficiency from the cost base whilst continuing to delight our stakeholders with the level of support we provide them with. Either type of role offers great experiences and challenges in equal measure.

Procurement is certainly evolving industry wide. How do you see procurement developing within your organisation? What do you believe you are doing well at and where do you feel there is scope for improvement?

Procurement within National Grid has certainly come a long way in my eight years here! On my arrival I felt we excelled in tactical sourcing or spot market tendering – albeit on a very large scale dealing with some huge projects, to now where we are a much more strategic function, deploying category management principles with really strong relationships within the business and a CPO with fantastic credibility and support around the organisation. Due to our experience in large scale construction procurement that means we have some incredible talent and expertise in this space, meaning it can be difficult to keep hold of our talent when many organisations are looking for similar capabilities. Our investment in people is also something that has continued to impress me, I’m currently sponsoring all of our people and capability initiatives within procurement at present and its fantastic to see the joint aspiration for everyone to continue to learn, develop and build their skills and experiences to become more rounded both from a professional and personal perspective.

Our category management capability is an evolving story and we are challenging our category leads to have a more mature, robust understanding of their categories. However we’re pleased with the progress we’ve made in this space and its certainly giving our function and people further kudos and credibility the more we hone our craft and demonstrate the value we bring to the business.

There are areas of improvement we have identified within the department and have a keen focus on bringing these in-line with best-in-class procurement functions.

Being at the heart of energy infrastructure in the UK our supply chain resilience has certainly fallen into the spotlight over recent years and we are seeing more questions and reassurances being requested from our Executive Team and also external stakeholders such as BEIS and OFGEM to ensure we keep the lights on. Within procurement we’ve invested in some automated systems to help us identify key risks, specifically on supplier health, however there is still more work we can do on automating our supply chain mapping activities, identifying risks and proactively tracking this, rather than it be a responsive activity to an external event like Covid, Brexit or the situation in Russia.

It is fair to say we are still on a journey when it comes to digitisation, we’ve made some great progress in moving to a digitised contract repository and report system, and have recently implemented a tool to provide us with a greater level of analysis and insight on our cost data, but I believe there is still opportunity to explore digitising our processes further on areas such as tactical sourcing to allow our teams to spend more time on category management and strategic activity.

Finally, the last area I’ll mention is the hot topic for most organisations – ESG. We’ve got some fantastic experts in National Grid who really understand in great depth what we need to do in order to meet all our aspirations in regards to being a responsible business, and one of the benefits of working at National Grid (and a key attraction for our graduate schemes) is employees can see the tangible link to sustainability and social good – particularly with us being a huge enabler the Governments UK Net Zero targets by bringing renewable energy onto the grid.

As a regulated utility we already have requirements for our supply chain such as implementation of the modern slavery act, real living wage etc but we are now at the phase of embedding sustainability into our category management thinking and becoming a key performance indicator for a successful procurement function, whether that be measuring improvement via our Carbon Interface tool, understanding Scope 1,2,3 emissions or understanding community impact through our activities as a business. We see sustainability as a key business outcome comparable to cost efficiency or supply chain risk and that will only become more embedded in the way we operate over time.