Procurement mistakes and conquering digitalisation with GM Head Group Procurement, MISC Berhad

In this exclusive interview for ProcureCon Asia, Jan Piskadlo, GM Head Group Procurement, discusses the two global strategies currently being rolled out within the next three months for MISC Berhad. With over 40 years in procurement, Jan has an undeniably deep understanding of the inner workings of procurement having worked in Europe, UK, Africa and Asia across pharmaceuticals, insurance FMCG and Oil & Gas.

Exciting topics we cover includes the three big issues procurement leaders face now that are rarely synergised namely, availability, sustainability, and affordability. With the increasing importance of automation in procurement and the race to optimise productivity while lowering uncertainty, we hear about the lessons learnt and his opinion on the industry’s overuse of AI, ML, and blockchain.

What are your top tips for creating a strong culture of collaboration with suppliers that supports your digital transformation?

Collaboration with suppliers is, irrespective of what the outcome is, a skill but the environment must be right too, to create a collaborative culture.

So when is that right? For me, I think that's when you have mutual vulnerability although that's very rare. Usually, relationships between suppliers and customers tend to be skewed one way or the other and it’s quite rare when you find them to be equally dependent.

The question is how do I get my suppliers to vote me in the race to learn things? They're going to give you first refusal on ideas, on insights, on trends and that drives competitive advantage. So sustainability is a very good example - How am I going to drive my sustainability agenda, which is obviously in everyone's annual report? It's committed to shareholders. You know, this is something that is non-negotiable, but it's a 20, 30 to 20 - 50 game. How am I going to achieve that unless I have these long-term deep collaborations and partnerships with suppliers?

Globally and in the macro environment there are things happening. We absolutely have to drive collaboration in a way that perhaps we haven't driven it before and I think that's a challenge for procurement because that often mitigates against some of the standard ways procurement likes to work.

How can large enterprises foster a culture of continuous improvement, both in-house and with partners, and what technologies have you used in order to achieve this?

In my business, we move energy globally. We move oil. We move gas. Out challenge is sustainability, it’s decarbonisation. If you look at the journey for us on to decarbonise - it's oil to gas, gas to ammonia, and ammonia to hydrogen. Now that's a long journey, right? No one exactly knows when those transition steps will happen, when the tipping point for each energy, reaches its zenith and then goes down. We have an organization internally that's focused on that journey - from an internal partnering point of view, procurements symbiotically aligned with that organization.

What's our role there? Our role is to understand what that journey is for and be the bridge to that external market, to bring those ideas, to bring that innovation, to bring those insights and join up the dots between what we're trying to do internally and what our supply partners can bring to deliver that that that imperative.

It’s more about ideation, It's more about what are the technologies, how are we going to harness those technologies and how are we going to actually make that transition work. Maybe the technology overlay comes a bit later. For us, it's more basic now around trying to work out how those technologies are going to work and then are they going to be sustainable, economical and even realistic, given the fact we have 120 plus tankers rolling around the world every day.

Can you give us a bit of a sneak peek into what you're going to share with the audience?

It's about getting procurement to start thinking how to take all these challenges and turn them into massive opportunities. That's not an easy question to answer and it works at multiple levels. A lot of it is to do with to do with the capability and DNA of the people that that are facing those challenges and having to navigate their way through them, for their organizations. But that's a massive opportunity and there's never been a better time. Carpe diem :)

Jan will be speaking on the 13th July 2023, 9:40am at ProcureCon Asia on "CPO Interview: What's on the CPO's 2023-2024 to-do list? How are you leveraging the current disruptions to shine and drive your own agenda?"

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