purchasing was based out of Leeds [ it ’ s now in London ] and there were about eight or nine of us looking after procurement . We weren ’ t as fully involved in all of the areas as we are now . Packaging , for instance , didn ’ t sit under our remit and though print purchasing was an element of procurement , it was managed in isolation whereas we brought it into a centralised function ,” he explains .
“ Over the past few years we have pulled the more commercial aspects of the business into our team , enabling us to have wider control over the spend in multiple areas across the business . We have around 48 people working within procurement now , so it ’ s grown massively ,” he continues . Energy and utilities is an area of particular importance to Laurent , who says he initially started looking after this about nine years ago and quickly found Arcadia had a large number
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