The procurement boss at Just Eat has described how his team uses “collaborative co-piloting” to align with other functions.
John Butcher, group procurement director at Just Eat, told delegates at CIPS Procurement Futures he learned about collaborative co-piloting while working at Nestlé, and he had deployed it in his current role to improve stakeholder relations.
He said he had built “this idea of collaborative co-piloting, and this collaborative co-piloting goes across everything”.
“Co-piloting for me, why it resonates, is because procurement should never work in a vacuum, it should never decide on its own,” Butcher said.
“We're an advisor and people make decisions based on our conversations. We will never get a better result on our own. Stakeholders will never get a better result on their own.”
Speaking as part of a panel discussion on sustainability, Butcher outlined how Just Eat’s procurement function and the role of procurement director was established in 2019. He said the procurement team worked alongside other parts of the business including Just Eat’s Responsible Business department – which focuses on reducing scope one and two emissions – as well as logistics and marketing.
Butcher said: “This whole idea of creating coalitions is I think is a phrase you might hear in trying to start a movement, and that's what it really felt like for us, because coming into a procurement function and creating it from scratch, I wanted sustainability at the heart of it.”
He said the procurement director role was “a new ally” for those already working on sustainability initiatives throughout the company.
Katie Tamblin, chief product officer at Achilles, said she was increasingly seeing firms introducing separate sustainability teams that are disjointed from procurement and the wider business.
“The challenge that creates is that sometimes we find that organisations, especially extremely large, complex organisations, have different groups that don't know what the others are doing,” she said.
In a separate session on sustainability, Jay Doyle, group procurement director and chief procurement officer at ITV, said external collaboration was needed and sustainability should be something that united firms rather than a source of competition.
“We've strengthened our external collaboration with our peers. We work with the BBC, we work with Sky, we work with Viacom. We've realised that as an industry that we've got to take action together,” he said.
“We think this is the only way to really address it. We don't see this as a point of competition, we see it as something that we need to work together on.”
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