An Exclusive Interview with Vincent Teyssier

1. Finish this sentence: As we get down to deciding which projects are most important and most urgent, a common question arises, “what is the risk?”

2. How is Telenor helping customers respond to unprecedented disruption and meet constantly evolving demands and challenges?

“In Telenor, we exist to empower societies by connecting you to what matters most. Never has our purpose been more evident than during the C19 pandemic.” This is the opening sentence of our 2021-2023 Strategic Action Plan. Providing connectivity comes with many challenges though… from supply chain disruption, semiconductors shortages, operating physical infrastructure remotely, currency variances,etc... Even simple things like sourcing energy to power our antennas can be challenging in some circumstances. To overcome these challenges and not let down our customers, procurement needs agility, in terms of rethinking processes and become a strategic partner to our internal and external stakeholders. The foundations to become this strategic partner are in my opinion mostly relying on 2 factors: risk modeling and data analytics. You need to be data driven to navigate through uncertainty, and you need to understand your risk picture very thoroughly to develop effective mitigation plans, and create this needed resilience.

3. How has Telenor gone about improving data and leveraging it more effectively?

Standardization of processes across multiple business units is a key. Rolling out global P2P solution was another key. But ultimately, it all boils down to establishing a proper master data strategy, writing a clear policy, and communicating this policy across all the actors of the digital procurement chain. It starts with our vendors’ catalogues, and continues through all other internal channels.

A usual decoupling in data standards is often about categorization of spend/items between procurement/logistic and Finance. Working closer to Finance and trying to bridge the gap as much as possible will help at so many levels! From end-to-end visibility of supplier performances to greater efficiency that frees up reconciliation man/days and shift them to value adding tasks.

4. In your opinion, what makes the difference, going beyond sourcing and procurement function borders, to be the best in the industry?

First you need to scope your ambitions. You cannot be the best everywhere. Once you accept this, understand the value pockets in your specific business model, and focus on them.

Secondly, to achieve excellence within these value pockets, I don’t think this is something specific to procurement, but something that is the same in all business functions and also in life, it’s the mindset. It starts with having a culture of ownership. Whatever you do, own it! We keep our promises, we are accountable for our actions, and we are always respectful. This creates the drive, the motivation that people expect when your ambition is excellence.

Finally, digital maturity. Digitalization and tools are great, but if you don’t achieve first a certain data culture within your people, you’ll face lack of adoption of technologies, or lack of maturity in their use, and you’ll realize only a fraction of what you were expecting to achieve.

5. What are your most proud achievements during these trying times with your team at Telenor?

Rolling out a full scope P2P project in not only one, but several business units, with only virtual meetings!

In such complex projects you need to gather many different functions and align them together. Doing this fully virtually, including timezone challenges, was highlighted as a major risk for us when C19 started. Today, looking back at what the team has achieved while maintaining timeline and budget is truly admirable! We had some situations where one implementation team had half of their members testing positive, and yet the project went through! That’s the kind of moments that shows you that people really care about what they do (and own it).

5. What are the top 3 popular benchmarks that looks towards guiding an organization to their success?

I think we need to stop trying to benchmark everything. Your ambitions are specific to your own organization. It’s great to see how leaders are performing on specific metrics, but metrics are only one measure. Understanding your maturity and driving this up is a very hard task with little to no metrics available. Competence assessments are a great tool to understand your starting point, and then you design a structured roadmap (people, process, tools) to elevate your organization maturity, based on your own specificity.