An interview with NICHOLAS WRIGHT, PROCUREMENT DIGITAL GARAGE, SENIOR MANAGER at bp
Procurement, like all business functions, is facing a pressing digital opportunity. Emerging technologies are poised to change the game when it comes to doing what we do and how we do it. But what does it mean for procurement teams? How will they need to adapt to get the most from ever-evolving solutions?
Proxima’s EVP, Simon Geale, sat down with those leading the way in the great digital procurement transformation, seeking answers to key questions. One of them was Nicholas Wright, Procurement Digital Garage, Senior Manager – who heads up bp’s Procurement Digital Garage.
In this interview, Nick explores emerging tech and trends, provides insight into what exactly a Digital Garage is, and offers valuable lessons from his journey so far. (The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the interviewee and do not necessarily reflect the views of bp or any affiliated parties.)
[SG] “If you look out into the market, there’s a huge amount of noise about tech and emerging tech, and of course, Generative AI. Tech always evolves, but do you think we are on the cusp of revolution, or are we simply in an evolution?”
[NW] “That’s a good opening question. I think when you take a step back and look at any of these technology waves or trends, they creep up on you, you know? Whether you want to apply this to AI or the next trend that we will be talking about in 10-15 years, it’s all very much an incremental journey. I don’t think you just wake up overnight, and it’s, oh, it’s happened, there’s been a revolution, and I’m in it.There is a perception gap. Often, with these new technologies like AI, people are looking for that Big Bang, that overnight change: “I’m going to do this, and everything will be different”. Well, it doesn’t really work like that very often. You might have to take 99 tiny steps that no one will notice, but looking back after step 100 could look like a revolution.“
[SG] “Is there an emerging technology that excites you the most at the moment?”
[NW] “I’d really like to be different and buck the trend on this one, but I will have to say AI. It’s a big bet for us in terms of how it can help us to do things quicker, better, smarter.”
[SG] “You said you like to be different and sometimes buck the trend. I can empathize with that, but how far is that really possible in a corporate environment?”
[NW] “It’s a good point. We are employed to make change happen. Some people just get it; they want in, and that gives you the wind in your sails and huge energy. Others may look at us, for instance, as more maverick and may be more resistant to that change. But that’s natural; when trying to be innovative or disruptive, you will inevitably be marmite, loved, or hated with perhaps very little in between. You have to accept and work with that balance.”
[SG] “Does that mean that in your role, leading the Digital Garage, a core skill is resilience?”
[NW] “Massively. One of the first interview questions I ask is, “How are you going to cope with being told no an awful lot in this role?”. You have to navigate around those “no’s” and those barriers, and in order to do that, you have to be resilient.When I think about other skills, aside from having a strong technical understanding of what you are talking about, we are really looking at people skills like empathy and communication.
Being able to read a room is as important as understanding Python codes or the underlying architecture of XYZ because people are the change. We test, experiment, and look at new ways of doing things, but ultimately, if you don’t have people on your side, you might have the best tool in the world, but it’s not going to do what it should be doing for you.
You have to be able to read a room, you have to be empathetic, and you have to be able to deliver a message with impact.”
[SG] “Can you tell me a little about the digital garage you set up? How did you set it up, and what is it ultimately there to do?”
[NW] “Compared to other sectors, bp might look fairly risk averse as an organization. And rightly so. But we also know that there is a lot of exciting procurement technology appearing and evolving that we would like to explore. When you put those two things together, you can see that any time we wanted to test something out, we were going through a governance process that was designed for much larger organizational change initiatives, as you might do for selecting a new ERP or case management tool, for instance. We are talking about a 6-9 month process, which is a very long time in the more agile ProcureTech world. Priorities and technology can move on in that timeframe.So, we started the garage with a unique mandate to have the authority to go out and test some of these things outside of this core governance process.
If that makes it sound like we are just playing around, we are not. We’re not magpies looking for shiny things. We are taking a data-driven view, so we know where we are looking and what we are looking at. We can go and test and collect some real field evidence so that if and when we go back into the governance process, we are going in with evidence and results about how this actually works in bp rather than hypotheses and guestimates.”
[SG] “And what’s the balance between make and buy here? Is your team predominantly looking into the ProcureTech marketplace or are you figuring things out yourselves?”
[NW] “A bit of both. In bp, whilst I lead the Digital Garage, there are two peer teams focused on Analytics and Insights. Through these teams, we have an incredible view across the entire procurement organization; every metric and transaction you could dream of is available there. We use this data to define problems, something that everyone is struggling with, or disparity, for example, differing performance from one category team to the next.I then work with another team called Network of Excellence. If, based on the data, we think we can solve a problem ourselves, then I work with the Network of Excellence to do so. For example, we may swarm around a category and give them the resources, skills, and capabilities needed to bring us up to the level where we need to be. So, I guess you could say that where we are doing it ourselves is where we have that disparity, where one area of the business is doing well, and there is no systematic reason why other areas shouldn’t be the same.
In situations where we can’t solve it ourselves, that’s where it comes to me and my team. A rough guide to our process would be, first, can we address it with existing tools? Quite often, that’s a no. We then look at whether it is already on our roadmap for the next 12 months. Then, once we have crossed those two thresholds, we are looking into the market. In that case, we will be looking at whether it exists in an existing partner solution, or whether it exists in a potential partner solution, or whether we need to develop/co-develop. But these design-type decisions will only happen after we’ve been through quite a structured process.“
[SG] “Does it have to be better and/or easier than it was before.”
[NW] “Our ambition within the Garage and within bp more broadly is to create a world where it’s just as easy to buy within bp as within our private lives. When we buy in our private lives, and the website is a bit difficult to find our way around or it’s not optimized for mobile, we give up. We just don’t buy from there or we do the bare minimum. It won’t be different at work, so we have to set ourselves high standards if we want people to buy the right things and be compliant.One of the biggest things we can get right with all this digital change is one of the simplest in terms of people’s expectations. And that’s just letting people know where things are in a process. In our private lives, we now naturally expect order confirmations, dispatch notifications, tracking numbers, etc, not much of which exists in the corporate world. So, finding ways to have that communication and set those expectations can make a huge difference in the customer experience.
For example, when you are on the phone with your doctor, and you know it’s urgent, but you are on hold for 20 minutes; I don’t know about you, but I am pacing the room after 15 minutes, and I can feel the anger building. However, if there is a message in the first minute that tells me I am in a queue with eight people in front of me and an average wait time of 25 minutes, that’s fine. I know. Expectations are managed, and anger is avoided.“
[SG] “So, any current plans for improving in this space?”
[NW] “Yes. Bringing it back to Procurement Technology. We hear many themes and names being bandied about, but the intake and orchestration is something we are very interested in for the medium to long term. In this case, we can have one central system that connects to several different “less user-friendly” back ends that people don’t need to see or know about to create a much more user-friendly process, and they will always be able to see where they are in it. Perhaps their request has stopped off at Due Diligence or IT security, but they can see that in a friendly UI/UX.Further, we’ve been thinking about how we can use AI to analyze hundreds of thousands of transactions, look back on them to help predict how long they should take in the future, and communicate that to the stakeholders. So, the last time someone bought some gas, a gasket, whatever, it took this long.”
[SG] “Within the Garage, what skills have you looked for and hired in? Part two of that question is how important it is to have core procurement skills.”
[NW] “We’ve been quite deliberate regarding who we’ve hired into the garage. On the one hand, I’m looking for a good mix of procurement experience and bp experience because we are quite a difficult place to navigate, and we want to deliver change quickly. But I’ve also been deliberate in hiring people that don’t have deep procurement experience because I think we can be a bit institutionalized in our world.For me, to drive innovation, you’ve got to have people who look at things differently, and it’s easier to do that if you haven’t been in procurement for the last 15 years. So it’s about the mix of skills. I say I don’t look at it at an individual level. It’s collectively, you know, how we look when we round off everyone’s skills. Do we have the right mix across the team?”
[SG] “Many companies are nowhere near as advanced as you and haven’t had a digital garage at their disposal. Let’s say they are going to embark on a digital program now, from greenfield; what building blocks would you advise them to put in place?”
[NW] “I’d say three things. First, just make sure you’ve got the backing of who you need to back it, whether it be a senior leadership, your CPO, or your CIO. You’ve got to have the right support top down because sometimes you need that mandate, and you need them to advocate for you to make things easier.
The second is to start with problems. When you see all these vendor maps, it’s tempting to pick a solution and go find the problem. Don’t do that. Think about what you are trying to solve. I ask my team not to bother looking at the market until they have a tightly defined requirement or problem.
The third, particularly in our spaces and within the garages, is that you’ve got to have an end goal. Because with these garages, you know, it’s great testing stuff. We’ve got a good track record of doing things quickly. We are very good at moving at pace. But we can’t just be running pilots for the sake of running pilots, right? We’ve got to have an end goal and a strategy in mind. How does everything fit together? You know, how’s everything going to complement each other? Because otherwise, without that end goal in mind, and it may change and evolve over time, you don’t really know where you’re heading. You’re just doing random things.”
[SG] “And what is that end goal or vision?“
[NW] “Absolutely. It comes down to that old chestnut of just freeing the people up from the more mundane things to think about and do the things that make more value for the company. In the garage, we have to work towards that North Star and translate it into an enabling tech landscape.
For me, the heart of what comes next is digitizing your category strategy, which, at an aggregate level, gives us insight into what we are doing across the entire organization and with whom. Then two key pieces bolt into this:
Firstly, can we improve the inputs into that strategy, be that spend, market, or demand information? Secondly, how can we improve how we execute them, with the big end goal being automated execution, of course? That’s the world that we are trying to get to, but all with the goal of freeing people up to think about and do the things that make more value for the company.”
[SG] “On that point, it does seem to me that while there are parts of our scope that can be digitally delivered, there are other parts where the tech enables or informs us, but it’s up to us to use our grey matter and creativity.”[NW] “The good news is that there’s always going to be a space for us humans in the grand scheme of things. I think when you’re trying to bring in some of this change, some people get quite defensive and, you know, worry that it will replace them. But you have to open yourself up to the concept to get a feel for how tech will empower you and what your ongoing role will look like.
For example, we had been testing category strategy generation tools and asked a few category managers to create their strategies and feedback. The expectation was that this was the beginning of the end, that we had a Category Manager in a box, click a button, and there was this fantastic AI-created strategy for you to go and execute. It’s not close to that. You are the subject matter expert. You know your market upside down inside out, and the tech can guide you to get that information out of you and into a nice, robust, consistent format. Maybe it reminds you of a few things you might have forgotten or prompts you to think about things you might not have thought about. But ultimately, the knowledge has to come from you, and I think that’s a great metaphor for the future. I think we can automate a lot, but we’re always going to need to be here in some way, shape, or form, looking at the bigger strategic picture.”
[SG] “Sometimes I feel like because of the messages that we hear around us, we desperately want tech to be disruptive and then get disappointed when it’s not. I recall a report we did years ago whereby we were researching why digital projects fail. A lot of the time, it was less failure and more failure against unrealistic expectations.”
[NW] “Definitely. And going back to your very first question, will you ever get a tool that creates so much step change? Like from zero to automated category management in a box? It just won’t happen. That’s not how the world works. Copilot is a great example. I’m a big fan of Copilot; we’ve rolled it out, and actually, through the Garage, we are looking at how people are using it and how we create some procurement-specific use cases.
But even in that context, when you take a step back and look at the things it’s helping us with, they’re just incremental. You know, it’s a quick summary. It’s reshaping some text. It’s maybe whacking some things into a table for you. It’s pulling some things together.
Something that might take you 45 minutes into 45 seconds. You know, it’s not groundbreaking stuff, but it’s those incremental steps that are helping us become more efficient. And if we continue with this over time, then a simple look back and we will think, “Wow, I am doing things a lot differently now”. There has been a step change, but it’s just not an overnight thing and I think that’s another great way to think about this digital change we’re all trying to make.
[SG] “As you have implemented more tech over the years, has the skills profile of the people you look to hire into procurement changed?”
[NW] “We have identified within bp that we need some future skills to complement where we’re going as a procurement organization that includes some digital skills and digital change/digital adoption. So, I think the way we dealt with that is to boil it down into eight future skills that we see as important for procurement professionals in bp.
We then do two things. First, we cross-check against these skills to make sure we’re hiring people who are future-proofed. Second, we spend more time working with our existing teams to help them achieve their goals.”
[SG] “If you were to go back and do all of this again, are there any lessons learned that would prompt you to do things differently?”
[NW] “I would say, Nick, don’t do too much. Don’t do too much to start with. When I got the role, it was completely new, and we just wanted to get some fast runs on the board. So, we did a lot. But even if your team can deliver the change, there’s only so much the organization can absorb at once. So, I think it’s important not to do too much at once. Figure out what you need to do, prioritize what’s most important, do it well, and then move on.
It’s really basic, but you know, I ask my team all the time to be clear on where bp is going and the priorities for your area and then how that feeds into your strategy and priorities.”
READ MORE ABOUT THE DIGITAL OPPORTUNITIES AND SKILLS REQUIRED TO DRIVE PROCUReMENT FORWARD
