A Pivot to Agile, Collaborative, and Outcome-Focused Procurement with Lauren Tennant

Welcome to this episode of  Procurement Reimagined, brought to you by Gatekeeper. Today, we are joined by Lauren Tennant, the CEO and Founder of Horizon Seven Consulting, a leading technology procurement company providing a unique agile procurement services platform. 

Join Daniel and Lauren as they discuss the limitations of traditional procurement methods and the need for a more collaborative and outcome-focused approach. Lauren shares her expertise in agile procurement, highlighting the benefits of close collaboration, flexibility, and concurrent negotiation. Discover how Horizon Seven is reinventing technology procurement and learn how to implement agile sourcing in your organisation.

Lauren is the Founder of Horizon Seven Consulting and a technology procurement guru. Her research and development have led Horizon Seven to the forefront of technology procurement innovation, using agile principles to reinvent the procurement process and deliver rapid high value.

A career in tech as a CIO has taught her the complex challenges businesses face, and she helps businesses resolve these through tech sourcing.

Key Highlights:

• 10:07 - 11:12 - A Pivot to Agile Procurement

Agile procurement is being clear about the desired outcomes and not the process to get there. Hence, it replaces the written RFP document with the chance for buyers and suppliers to co-collaborate, to sit down together with what those outcomes need to be, and then to create solutions that map to the supplier's capabilities. The buyer and the supplier must sit down at the table, look each other in the eye, and work together so that the buyer puts their stamp on the process design and outcomes through a joint sign-off with the supplier. 

• 14:03 - 14:55 - How is Agile Procurement More Cost Effective?

The reason agile procurement is cheaper is because of two factors. The first is that you eliminate the supplier's cost of integrating into a lengthy RFP process with you. Effectively, you pay for the supplier's integration, and they will return that to you at the final price. The second reason is that you end up having a good rummage around in the solution and get to the bottom of what the desired outcomes will look like. You mitigate the risks together. And that takes all the contingency and risk costs out of the supplier's proposition. They don't feel the need to risk load or contingency load the price because they understand what it is.

Quotes:

• “Customers are always telling me they want suppliers to come up with innovative, creative solutions for their business problems, and yet we aren't giving them the opportunity, the platform, the stage to present their ideas in a way that is free of word count limitations and size of A4”. 
• “There's often, you know, hacks and fudges made the way the supplier would normally work to sort of accommodate those requirements. So, it's really important that the buyer and the supplier sit down at the table, look at each other in the eye, and work together so that the buyer puts their own stamp on the design so that they can feel they can consume it”.