VODAFONE PROCUREMENT COMPANY
“ More than anything , it ' s a mindset around excellence and wanting to be the best at what you do ,” he says . “ We try and get everybody in the team to be at their best and we try and develop tools and technologies to help support them . Are we there at the moment ? No . Are there companies and sectors that are way ahead of us ? Absolutely . So we ' ve got a tremendous amount of work still to do .
“ You ' ve got to have a digital first mentality – you ' ve got to really think about how you can digitise what we do . One of the other technologies we use to sign contracts is DocuSign . It ' s really simple . You go in and you click it , you point and you put your signature right here . And I was sitting thinking this morning , we also have our compliance sheet on the front of it . So you look through the compliance sheet and see if you ' re happy . But I was thinking if I ' ve got a compliance sheet and everything is positive , why am I actually spending time going and clicking and putting my signature on it and why isn ' t that completely AI and automated right through ? And if that was automated and , given we sign off 3,500 contracts per annum at the Vodafone Procurement Company , how long does it take to do that ?
“ So I ' m trying to think of the productivity gain . And then I ' m trying to think if I got that extra time for me or my direct reports could be running more workshops with some of our key partners around how we can add more revenue together . So that ' s how I ' m trying to think of the operational excellence question .
“ I think you ' ve got to be excellent in supply chain and you ' ve got to have all of your processes really nailed because if you don ' t have that excellence at an operational level , how can you actually step up and add more value to the business ?”
DID YOU KNOW ...
HOW TO SPEND € 24 BILLION
“ If you think of what we spend to make Vodafone successful for both us and our customers , we have about € 9 billion of spend in our network around about € 3 billion of spend on IT , hardware , software and professional services .
What I ' d call the indirect spend accounts for about € 5 billion . So that ' s everything from property facilities to fleet . On content , which is a new category for us , which we ' re bringing into the Vodafone procurement company , we spend about a billion . So that ’ s Spotify , Netflix , big deals with Discovery .
And then the final one is devices spend . With great companies such as Samsung and Apple , we spent about € 6 billion a year . It gets you to roughly € 24 billion , give a give or take a bit of loose change .” supplychaindigital . com 57