In April 2022, Procurement Magazine, Supply Chain Digital and Bizclik Media Group returned to London’s Tobacco Dock to host our second Procurement & Supply Chain LIVE.
Dubbed ‘The Risk & Resilience Conference’ the two-day hybrid event featured keynotes, roundtables, Q&As, and networking opportunities with inspirational and knowledgeable leaders in the procurement and supply chain space.
Daniel Weise is Global Topic Leader, Procurement, at Boston Consulting Group (BCG). Weise delivered a keynote based around the contents of a BCG book he has co-authored, called Profit from the Source.
After his keynote, Weise caught up with Supply Chain Digital, to chat about the book’s key messages.
What’s the take-home message of Profit from the Source?
If you want to have peace as a CEO, then you need to overinvest in procurement and supply chain, and that’s what the book is about. We define procurement a lot broader than just cost savings. We talk about sustainability, innovation, speed, quality, and having the risk. And that only works by putting suppliers at the core of the business. That’s our recipe, Profit from the Source. However, we show three obstacles how to achieve this as a CEO.
Who is Profit from the Source’s target audience ?
It is really a book for CEOs because we think procurement still is Corporate Siberia, those days. We know from facts and research that a typical CEO only spends 1% of time with the procurement professionals and hence the suppliers. That is something we want to train. So the audience is the CEO, but every CPO will learn a lot by making his pitch towards the CEO by reading the book.
Procurement is a lot more strategic than it used to be. It used to be a way to control costs. At what point did it become so strategic?
Living in times where we have a Ukraine conflict going on, living in times where there’s supply shortages and we talk about also future for our kids where we need to have scope three upstream emissions reduced, CO2 is important. So there’s a second, a third, a fourth currency in procurement.
