AUSTRALIA
“ These are the lenses I tend to use to examine our current state and where we need to be heading . When I joined the team there was room for improvement under all of these headings ,” Halsall says . “ Today , data is like oxygen to any business . From a Procurement specific perspective , we have moved over the last 18 months from a data poor , insight poor position to one where we are richer on the data side and have created more insights through the use of analytics .”
The science of procurement is all about data and making the right choices based on the insights that the data provides , he believes . The art is the narrative around the data and the change it suggests .
“ We focus heavily on both those areas . We built a repository of spend , contract and business unit data that we could interrogate and visualise using a Microsoft product that was available to us in-house .” The painstaking task of building a database and a data analytics structure has resulted in far better transparency across the supply base and the spending patterns of the bank . Not so much cost reduction , Halsall says , as cost management ; enabling movement from the reactive to the proactive . “ At the very least , we are now able to say that we know what we don ’ t know .”
www . supplychaindigital . com 17