Sean McPartlan

Head of Solutions Consulting

How did you get started in Procurement? What was your role?

I started my career in corporate finance and then worked on my own startup for a couple years. When COVID hit, I started applying to jobs and landed on procurement consulting as a natural fit, combining my analytical and entrepreneurial passions. I loved that procurement allowed me to dig into the numbers, while also collaborating with different people and teams, internally and externally. Through my procurement consulting work I helped clients drive cost savings and maximize value. Most of my client engagements were focused on sourcing projects, running RFPs, or negotiating supplier agreements on behalf of clients. A favorite project was working on a procurement transformation initiative for a client, including a review of their procurement tech stack and software solutions in the market, which piqued my interest in procurement technology.

Did you use SpendHQ in your job prior to working here? How did it impact your work?

The procurement consulting firm I worked at used SpendHQ to cleanse data for one-time spend cubes for client engagements. So, while I didn’t have much experience working directly in the SpendHQ tool, I certainly benefited from its data processing capabilities. Using SpendHQ saved me a ton of time by removing any manual efforts to cleanse and categorize data and allowed me to focus on reviewing the spend and identifying potential savings opportunities for my clients.

How does your procurement experience impact your relationship with customers and our platform?

My role at SpendHQ primarily focuses on working with prospective clients as they evaluate the solution. Having experience being in their shoes helps me relate to the pain points they are experiencing and their goals and priorities.

What’s your funniest or most interesting procurement story?

I often think back to when I was fresh out of college working as a financial analyst at Delta Air Lines. One of the senior leaders asked me for the last 12 months spend with one of the primary cargo suppliers. I quickly pulled a query and sent him the report. He was back at my desk 5 minutes later telling me there was no way it was correct and the spend should be millions of dollars more. It turns out I had only pulled the spend for one instance of the supplier when there were 10 or 20 different name variations for that supplier in the ERP. Looking back, I wish I had had a tool like SpendHQ to help de-duplicate the supplier names to avoid looking like a fool in front of a senior leader!

Theo Drouillet

Customer Success Manager

How did you get started in Procurement? What was your role?

I started in Procurement as a junior packaging buyer, part of my studies!

Did you use SpendHQ in your job prior to working here? How did it impact your work?

Yes, I implemented PPM as part of a procurement consulting mission. We were creating a new indirect procurement function and we started an Excel file to track projects and savings. It soon became difficult to centralize the information and to track the evolution of projects.

We looked for a solution and decided to go for PPM. It smoothed the whole process and allowed us to control savings reports and connect easily to Finance to report real savings that impacted the P&L.

How does your procurement experience impact your relationship with customers and our platform?

It allows me to adopt a constructive approach and to feel close to their problems. I can act as a “consultant” and provide advice based on my experience.

What’s your funniest/most interesting procurement story?

I worked as a de-pollution buyer, and we visited a site where our suppliers developed a technology to use bacteria to digest polluted soil and clean it. It was fascinating to discuss with our engineers and suppliers team to understand how it works and evaluate the different technical propositions and their feasibility.

If you went back to working in procurement full time, how would you convince your boss to check out SpendHQ?

Two main things: having spend visibility is a big struggle, especially for big organizations. For example, in order to have a view on my spend as a buyer, my main source of information was asking suppliers how much we spent with them.

The other thing is the collaboration, both inside the procurement function and across the whole organization. In my previous role, we had shared suppliers and the only way to get some information was to go “fishing” for it. With Procurement Performance Management and Spend Intelligence, I would be able to identify potential synergies much quicker.

Jared Ackerson

Customer Success Manager

How did you get started in Procurement? What was your role?

I originally was an Accountant and found it to be too monotonous. What drew me into Procurement was the ability to work with and impact all parts of the business.

Did you use SpendHQ in your job prior to working here? How did it impact your work?

Yes, I used SpendHQ for 6.5 years prior to joining. Since a big piece of my role on the Procurement COE was reporting, and we had over 30 source systems, the platform made it exponentially easier to access company-wide spend data for progress tracking. Additionally, SpendHQ incorporated mappings and enrichments that could not be found anywhere else in the company. It was truly the source of truth for our Procurement org.

If you didn’t use SpendHQ, how would it have impacted your work?

It would have made it literally impossible to generate the metrics I needed. We had too many source systems to pull and consolidate each one individually on my own.

How does your procurement experience impact your relationship with customers and our platform?

The main benefit is having a better idea of the challenges procurement professionals face in their day-to-day role, as well as intimately knowing what data will help impact their day-to-day jobs.

What’s your funniest/most interesting procurement story?

After having been a client of SHQ for six years, we ran an RFP for Spend Analytics to test the market. Following many client demos and QA sessions, our internal team still found SHQ to be the best in the market. The scorecards submitted reflected this. It gave our team an extra sense of confidence having gone through that exercise.

How would you sum up the value provided by SpendHQ?

I would simply say without spend analytics, Procurement does not have the visibility to perform their job to the best of their ability. Further, I would recommend moving savings tracking from Excel to PPM to maximize efficiency and eliminate all manual savings tracking.

Stefan Barolin

EMEA Solutions Team Lead

How did you get started in Procurement? What was your role?

I came from a modest family and did not receive a lot of guidance for my studies. Every step in my journey happened thanks to my curiosity and meeting people. I was naturally good in physics and math at school, so I did my own research and decided to pursue engineering. I actually have an engineering degree in Physics of Materials, but I’ve always been attracted by business and technology, so I decided to look for an opportunity where I could combine them. That’s how I got my internship at Airbus in the Material Procurement Department as a Data Analyst.

This was at the beginning of digitalization, and I made tons of interesting analytics around cost vs. weight vs. material across different aircraft programs and also built the department’s first procurement database. I then decided to follow a career in Procurement and got a management degree in Procurement from a business school. Right after this, I was hired by two global automotive organizations to hold several Direct Procurement roles from junior to more senior levels.

Everywhere I worked, I always came up with ways to automate spend reports or initiative tracking. I even built my own eSourcing template using VBA. We say that engineers are lazy, I was too lazy to do repetitive tasks, and it was crazy to find out that some of my colleagues have been doing it that way for twenty-five years.

I quickly realized that what I liked in Procurement was the business impact and to have an impact you need to get data and automate non-value-added value tasks to redirect most of your time to work that contributes value.

Did you use SpendHQ in your job prior to working here? How did it impact your work?

Although they’re described as mature in terms of procurement processes, the automotive and aeronautic industries were and are still lagging behind in terms of pure procurement technology, in my opinion. In my time at Renault Nissan, Faurecia, and Renault I always had a vision for a better future with fewer admin tasks and better access to data.

I built some automated tools and did a side consulting activity to push our senior leadership for more technology budget. We managed to unlock some funds for a digitalization roadmap at the time, to the point that I enrolled in an entrepreneurship track on my free time (programming night classes) with the aim to launch my own business. That’s how I started to learn about procurement technologies and bumped into SpendHQ, which was Per Angusta at the time.

The company was solving two critical challenges that were slowing down the procurement teams : quick access to clean procurement data and project management. You can’t imagine how many bad decisions teams make or how much time they waste due to a lack of data availability, transparency, and performance management. I would have loved to have SpendHQ back in those days. You can save at least two hours in a day by getting on a supplier call with all the information you need at your fingertips or directing managers and department stakeholders to your PPM pipeline when reviewing work.

How does your procurement experience impact your relationship with customers and our platform?

I have experience in both direct and indirect procurement; it helps a lot. Both share the same goals, but the approaches are different, and my experiences create a real connection with our customers because I’ve been in their shoes. I feel like customers appreciate my challenging questions and my perspectives as well, which give them the confidence that SpendHQ is a tool their buyers will also like.

I really spend a lot of time trying to understand customers current situation, processes, and tool landscapes. It helps me visualize the day-to-day for each organization. Direct procurement is by nature very transactional and tends to overlook value-based approaches or global pictures. In my approach, I always try to ask customers and prospects why it is important to them and their CPOs and make them realize the strategic business value of SpendHQ.

What’s your funniest/most interesting procurement story?

My manager granted me access to SAP Business One because I found out we could buy a user license from a catalogue. I ended up building queries to create reports on spend and purchase orders. I was not sure what I was doing as I received no training, but all the managers saw what was feasible and they were amazed to see this level of data for the first time. Shortly after, we had a cash freeze and these reports became crucial. Every procurement department needed to postpone their payment to suppliers, and with these reports it was easy to find out which suppliers had POs assigned and postpone the payment. But at some point, I moved to another part of the business. Desperate managers tried to reach out to me on LinkedIn or via my personal email until my last day at the company. I think the experience left with me for a while. So, I would say don’t let just one person own such an important part of your process or data governance. Data is critical and technologies exist to serve you in a way you can’t imagine.

If you went back to working in procurement full time, how would you convince your boss to check out SpendHQ?

I can definitely imagine myself back in procurement in situations where I would answer questions just using SpendHQ. But I would say that teams need to be able to answer some of these questions accurately in less than 30 seconds:

• What are your top three measurable goals this year? Not knowing your goals definitely leads to failure and shows you are not adopting a value-added leadership position across the board.
• What’s the current status of your goals and how many more projects do you need to complete to meet your targets? Not knowing this demonstrates you are not tracking your goals, you don’t have a plan, and you are relying on luck. Not good.
• Can you ask your Category Procurement Directors who are their top 5 suppliers/bottom 10 suppliers, what spend % have they addressed this year, and where they see risk in their supplier base? How long would it take to get answers? Not being able to answer such questions limits your team’s efficiency and ability to be proactive and lead data-driven conversations with stakeholders.

Spend Intelligence gives you and your teams the knowledge, Procurement Performance Management gives you the action. The full SpendHQ platform puts you in a very powerful position.