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All Points Fibre's Courtney Rowlands Reveals the Wild West of Procurement
From her take on transactional procurement and why digital transformations fail, to sustainability in modern procurement, Head of Category Procurement Courtney Rowlands shares some refreshingly honest insights on what it takes to thrive in the industry.
Courtney is a strategic procurement leader known for managing annual spends of up to £20 million across categories like energy, infrastructure, and materials. She has delivered impressive cost savings, including a 25% reduction (£875,000) in high-spend categories within six months and a 15% decrease in raw material costs, equating to £500,000 in annual savings.
Courtney has successfully implemented e-procurement platforms and led procurement transformation initiatives, aligning procurement strategies with business goals while promoting sustainability and ethical sourcing practices. Her leadership extends to mentoring emerging procurement professionals, enabling collaboration and continuous improvement within high-performing teams.
Digital Transformation
How would you describe the difference between a strategic and a transactional procurement function in today’s AI-driven world? What are some of the biggest bottlenecks you’ve noticed due to transactional, manual workflows?
Transactional functions generally are cost-first, and there’s a lack of accurate data. There may be a plethora of data, but it might not be accurate. Tactical functions tend to kind of use these phrases – edgy asleep buying, last minute stuff, firefighting. It turns into a little bit of the Wild West eventually if it carries on like that. You’ve got a lot of mavericks burned.
It’s difficult to tidy up if you then want to move into a strategic place. As a result, you don’t have any time. Also, there’s a lack of curiosity when you’re in that fight or flight mode. You don’t have time to think about- can we look strategically at this? Who are our vendors? How are they performing? What contracts have we got coming up? You just don’t have time.
It means that curiosity, which is so fundamental, for procurement and supply chain professionals, just gets parked. But when you get that cross functionality between the policy and the process working well with the P2P- you can focus on the strategy because the background noise is muted to some degree. Data, if it’s accurate to an extent, can then be pushed into AI or digital transformation. And that’s when it really gets exciting because then you can actually look for opportunities, risk, and sometimes hidden costs. Things that you just wouldn’t necessarily have picked up in a short space of time because it would take you another two weeks to go through all of that data manually. It just enables strategic mindset and workflows to be embedded into procurement.
Digital transformation still needs humans at its centre. What are your thoughts on the human element for procurement in this AI driven era?
You’ve got no chance in hell of integrating something if you haven’t spoken to your people about it first. Leadership roles tend to be guilty of thinking that something’s going to fix all their problems and just implementing it, and not really worrying about the impact on the front line in terms of operational efficiency. It’s a panic from leadership to control as much as they can so they over-engineer so many processes. The bottlenecks it creates downstream costs a massive impact in terms of operational efficiency, cost, and the time it takes.
When integrating these processes and these technologies, you really need to talk to your people first. Go out and speak to the engineers in the field. Go and speak to the people that are delivering health and social care services to your end user. Go and speak to the people that are buying your products or making the products in the factory. Find out what their problems are upstream and work backwards. I look at a workflow from start to finish, and I’ve done that at every business I’ve gone to. I’ve looked at the start and the finish and looked at the process and gone, “That’s really not actually very helpful, we’re over-engineering things. We’re making people’s lives harder than they need to be”.
You need to get that buy-in, first and foremost. It’s fundamental that you engage your stakeholders as soon as possible. The key thing with people is you need to get their trust that what you’re doing is going to benefit them. You need to get their trust that it’s not going to inhibit the way that they work and it’s going to actually accelerate the way that they work.
Implementing that change is not something that’s gonna happen overnight. Managing expectations when it comes to system integration is fundamental. There will be glitches along the way. There will be teething issues. It’s just being really honest and upfront about those milestones as you go through those changes. Because if you integrate something that works for you, great. But five minutes later, you’re to have everybody emailing you saying, you’re causing me a headache, we need to get rid of that. And you’ve spent a lot of money for something that doesn’t work.
Any advice on this you would give to organisations aiming for a successful digital transformation journey?
There is an oversaturation of products in the market and systems that companies use. You go out to market, not really knowing what you need. It probably ticks two or three boxes, but does it feed into your other systems? Does it track your spend? Does it cultivate all your CRM information as well? And often the answer is no. You’ve got five or six different systems doing different things, all tracking different metrics and deliverables.
And none of them are actually talking to each other.
There’s definitely an educational gap in terms of tech offerings. That’s mainly because procurement have only really started looking for tech for procurement recently. That market has exploded recently and there are so many offerings out there when it comes to supplier management, risk mitigation, commodity markets and insights, P2P, contract management, even negotiation.
It could be really difficult to navigate what the right tech solution would be for your company. It’s funny because procurement people are so good at going finding other solutions for other people, and we’re really rigorous. We look at the large market and we go to town on it and we’ll find the right thing. But we look inwards and we go, what do we actually want? What do we need?
That’s a difficult question to answer and I think it’s usually when tech is trying to be integrated too early on. We’re trying to jump ahead when we haven’t necessarily got everything that we need. People that are engaged with procurement in the first place, the right data, the right suppliers – that whole ecosystem needs to be very well balanced before you can start thinking about integrating tech.
But playing devil’s advocate, if companies don’t start integrating tech, they’re going to fall behind. So it’s a catch-22, isn’t it?
Sustainability
You’re a strong advocate of sustainability, and it is certainly a cornerstone of modern procurement. Do you think the industry is doing enough in this space?
Sustainability to me is not just checking if your supplier has their accreditations and doesn’t partake in modern slavery. That’s just tick box nonsense to me. If I think about my work at AB Sports Nutrition, we went to a procurement conference with a wider group. Primark is owned by AB World Foods and Primark is a fast fashion brand, right? It’s really problematic in terms of fast fashion space. They manufacture at scale, on mass.
The product that they put out, although it’s better now, back in the day was in landfill majority of the time by the end of that product life cycle. Now, the initiatives that they had, although they were a fast fashion brand, looking at their supply chain in terms of the silk production in the farmlands that they were sourcing from, setting up schools and making sure there was efficient water and educational facilities. That for me is true supply chain sustainability- it goes right back to the root of where we are sourcing from.
As procurement we talk about people, planet and profit. Profit’s at the bottom of that list in my view. People and planet are at the top. People are, in terms of our supply chain, what makes it go round. If we don’t look after those people, we can’t hope to sustain that supply chain, and then that loops into the planet.
Women in Procurement
Any advice you’d give to women aspiring to reach leadership positions in procurement?
A lot of the stuff that I have done and I have achieved has been off the back of, yes, some very hard work, but equally just having the balls to go for it in the first place. Make sure you’re learning and putting yourself in front of people as much as possible. Have the confidence to say no. If you’re in a negotiation or you’re talking to the business about something that you fundamentally don’t agree because you think there’s risks involved or from a strategic perspective it’s perhaps not the best way forward, then be brave and say it. They’ll actually have a lot more respect for you if you say it, and you say why, rather than sitting back and never challenging them.
Men generally are more pragmatic and logistical, whereas women can really tune into that emotional intelligence. We all have our strengths. If you’re a woman in procurement, I would say just play to your strengths. Make sure you’re aware of your strengths, they’re aware of yours and vice versa. Whether you’re a male or a woman, I think it does come down to how you work with people.
Disclaimer: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Deana manages community efforts and creation of thought leadership material at Kavida. For inquiries, reach her at deana@kavida.ai.
