110 visibility to decide who we will and won ’ t deal with ,” he says . “ It ’ s about being conscious of footprints as we buy closed requirements , and encouraging sustainable strategy .” Compass , through its document scanning functions and end-to-end digitalisation , has also seen a marked shift towards paperless operations , the sustainability benefits of which speak for themselves . “ We have been able to eliminate what amounts to around a million paper invoices from suppliers each year ,” enthuses Smith . “ That ’ s a very tangible example of how Compass is reducing our environmental impact .”
Implementing such an exhaustive overhaul of procurement functions naturally conjures concerns around the ease with which a workforce will cope with the shift , but Smith is confident that BP ’ s procurement teams have been receptive and supportive . “ A lot of the effort that goes into procurement is effort that most of our workforce would rather not expend ,” he says . “ Such as
“ It ’ s not a binary case of using this visibility to decide who we will and won ’ t deal with , it ’ s about being conscious of footprints as we buy closed requirements and encouraging sustainable strategy ”
— Alex Thomson , Head of Procurement Services , BP GBS in reacting to things we would have like to have better foreseen , or in manually collecting information that allows us to make better decisions .”
This effort , he enthuses , is better spent on creativity and value added tasks . “ The organisation is somewhat frustrated by the drains on its ability to act in a creative capacity because of the challenges in the data landscape and the manual activity required to keep our operations running . We want to be orchestrating rather than
APRIL 2020