CIPS Asia Supply Management Awards 2020 Overall Winner: DBS Bank Ltd

Overall winner at the 2020 CIPS Asia Supply Management Awards, DBS Bank's CPO Donna Trowbridge shares with us her thoughts on striving to deliver the best value despite the coronavirus disruption .

CIPS recognised DBS Bank as winners of Ethical Procurement, Risk Mitigation and the Overall Winner.

DBS won the overall team awards; could you tell us more about the project?

Ethical Procurement

DBS has been actively engaging our suppliers on sustainable business practices. We also co-founded the National Sustainable Procurement Roundtable, aimed at scaling up sustainable procurement in Singapore. We believe that such a collaborative industry approach will provide more sustainable outcomes for the entire supply chain, which will ultimately benefit society.

Risk Mitigation

We also embarked on data-driven innovation to self-learn Python to Build Our Own Surveillance Tool (BOOST) – a platform that ingests procurement data, analyses anomalies and triggers remediations. With BOOST, we can now monitor 100% of e-procurement transactions on a single tool, reducing manual effort by 81% and enhancing flagging of non-compliant behaviours.

What contribution have you made to the project that is most meaningful to you? 

I fully enable and support my teams to deliver amazing results. Data-driven innovation and sustainability initiatives are set as key agendas in our organisation scorecards, goals and KPIs.

What are your top 3 overall tips for procurement leaders? 

i. Ensure your customer is the focus of everything you do, make your procurement process a joyful journey.

ii. Ask for and act on feedback.

iii. Be data driven and use experimentation to test your assumptions. 

What kept you and the team going through the tougher times?

It is important to clearly articulate the key success factors of the project and continually question if what we are developing will help to achieve these. At the end of each sprint, we also made sure to showcase the work developed to our end users to get feedback. This was critical in ensuring we were focused on the end users’ needs and solving their problems and could pivot any idea that was nor optimal very quickly. We also spent time on a retrospective at the end of each sprint to understand as a team what we could do better.

How does winning the award impact the team at DBS?

We are delighted to have won 3 CIPS awards in 2020. Our aim is to be a world-class procurement team and these accolades validate that we are on the right track to achieve this.

Once again congratulations to Donna and the team at DBS Bank!