Making Services Procurement Visible
As services procurement grows, organisations struggle with limited visibility into who is delivering work and how value is measured. The conversation examines why that gap creates friction between procurement and the business, and what stronger governance enables.
With David Orme, Global Head, Services Procurement, Pontoon.
12:29 - 19:10 - The main services procurement issues in the market
20:19 - 29:21 - Why are people struggling to get started
29:50 - 35:45 - The benefits of tackling services procurement
41:42 - 51:27 - The services visibility gap
57:03 - 01:02:21 - Bridging the services procurement gap
Episode Highlights
Transcript
Auto-generated. Please excuse any minor errors.
00;00;00;16 - 00;00;05;17
Jonny Dunning
So, David Orme, welcome back. It's lovely to be speaking with you again. How are you doing?
00;00;05;19 - 00;00;10;28
David Orme
Doing well. It's a new year, a new start. A lot to do this year. How about yourselves?
00;00;11;00 - 00;00;38;03
Jonny Dunning
Yeah. Very good. Thank you. Very good. Agree. It's been, pretty manic first week back, but, Yeah, lots of exciting things going on. And I'm really looking forward to this conversation with you. We're going to be taking the next steps on from our prior conversation, talking about more of your journey, but outside, Cox where you worked previously and ran the, service procurement, program.
00;00;38;06 - 00;01;00;27
Jonny Dunning
So just as a little bit of a quick recap for people. David Orme, global head of services procurement at pontoon. You were previously. In fact, do you know what? Give us a very quick the kind of one minute reminder of of what you did previously. Obviously you came through the of consulting world and then really Cox was was a super interesting project for you.
00;01;00;29 - 00;01;28;02
David Orme
Yeah, sure. So I've had about a little over ten years of services procurement specific experience across vendor management, procurement, operations, sourcing, category management, spent a little bit of time at emphasis consulting, doing delivery. Post my MBA, last year five, six years I before I joined pontoon, I was with Cox communications started out doing sourcing for them and some category management.
00;01;28;05 - 00;01;59;14
David Orme
Switched over to procurement operations. My last few years managing their supply chain enterprise programs of which are managed service provider VMS program was one of those, we grew that program, doubling it in size. And when I left, we, were managing probably about $1.5 billion in spend. Most of that, probably 95, 90% of that was, services procurement spend, you know, across the three companies for the Cox family.
00;01;59;16 - 00;02;20;19
Jonny Dunning
Yeah. So I'm glad we were able to go into that in detail in our prior conversation, because it's it's the sort of thing people need to to hear about. The these programs are becoming more common. And no doubt in years to in two years time, you know, everybody's going to be doing this and doing it really effectively.
00;02;20;21 - 00;02;42;07
Jonny Dunning
But when you certainly when you did that, certainly coming into where we are now, the market is really just starting to expand out. So I think there's some great takeaways from that conversation in just the real world experience you had of of running it and growing massively a significant program, you know, 1.5 billion is not to be sniffed at.
00;02;42;09 - 00;03;24;17
Jonny Dunning
It's it's a pretty impressive, you know, it's a it's a big, big program. And with the bulk of that being services procurement, it's, it's a great example for people to see the challenges you faced. And the journey along the way. But in this conversation, what I really want to do is, is step forward to what you're doing now, with pontoon solutions and, and just maybe initially start with the kind of thought process that you took into making that move from working for an end client organization like Cox to coming to, a managed service provider that's effectively providing solutions into, into other organizations like Cox.
00;03;24;24 - 00;03;32;05
Jonny Dunning
And what what was the kind of thought process? How did that where when did you first start kind of pondering the idea? Yeah.
00;03;32;05 - 00;04;04;09
David Orme
So like I part of my role at Cox, when I switched over to managing the MSP VMS program, it was initially it was just that MSP VMS program. But then I took on more of our, our enterprise, our strategic program. So our supplier diversity program, our contract life cycle management system, our supplier diversity programs, and was really expanding into more of that strategic program management, managing the products that were that we were providing as a procurement organization.
00;04;04;11 - 00;04;45;06
David Orme
And that's really, I guess I could say I developed, passion for I wanted to grow into building solutions for our internal stakeholders, providing the best customer service. Almost more of a product development side as compared to your traditional category management, sourcing, supporting the business. And so that's really where it led to is, you know, I, I started bringing on more strategic programs, expanding the influence that we had as a procurement organization from that, from that lens and seeing how we could expand those programs, how we could optimize the programs and better fulfill the needs of our internal business stakeholders.
00;04;45;09 - 00;05;09;12
David Orme
So looking at, you know, kind of our managed service providers, pontoon, you know, the role opened up for, you know, our head of services procurement really, really coming in and driving the strategy, driving the product, developing the product to go to market for our and for our stakeholders, our clients and, you know, our prospective clients.
00;05;09;15 - 00;05;30;24
David Orme
You know, and I looked at that role and I said, you know, honestly, it's a lot of where I was driving my previous work within Cox. Right? I was trying to expand, influence, develop, you know, a baseline product for us to say, hey, we we want these services, the suite of services that we as a procurement organization, provide.
00;05;30;26 - 00;05;53;26
David Orme
We want to help you. And this is how we do it. This is how we enable you, whether it be through, you know, do you need increase your supplier diversity spend? You need, you know, our supplier risks. Are we making sure that we are adequately managing and, and reviewing our suppliers and understanding who's in our ecosystem or even from the MSP VMS side, growing that services procurement offering?
00;05;53;26 - 00;06;20;06
David Orme
We weren't a mandated program, from a MSP VMS program. Right. So we grew I mean, honestly, the program started in 2006, 2007 years before I did, but as a staff aug program. And then a few years before I took over the role is when they actually started trying to bring in the services procurement. And they had a baseline, but then we were able to grow and double that while I was, you know, building that program out.
00;06;20;08 - 00;07;00;29
Jonny Dunning
Yeah, I think that's that's where the opportunity lies for organizations to move forward, you know, contingent workforce programs. It's a there's a very well established solutions out there, both on the technology side with the vendor management systems and also with the managed service providers. And, you know, lots of companies are in a fairly mature, set ups around the the big gaps and what people have been, you know, kind of talking about nibbling at for the last ten plus years is this service procurement opportunity and just looking at the size differential, within Cox as to how much of that 1.5 billion with like over 90% of it being services procurement
00;07;01;01 - 00;07;18;27
Jonny Dunning
It just really is a big eye-opener. Not for me, not for you, because you lived it and I see it all the time. But maybe for some people who don't realize how much of a problem this is within their organization or within organizations in general. And that's not that's no slight on people that have this problem.
00;07;18;27 - 00;07;39;08
Jonny Dunning
Pretty much every company has this problem. But but now companies are really trying to become more efficient, become more effective in how they get work done. And a big chunk of that is the service procurement and statement of work engagements. So these companies aren't getting that buttoned down. They can't compete in the market. So it's becoming this much bigger topic now.
00;07;39;08 - 00;08;07;28
Jonny Dunning
And with people like yourself, coming out and talking about your kind of real world experiences of delivering this and delivering all the benefits, you know, it's great to see the market en masse is really starting to take notice now. Whereas before I say to a certain extent, to this point, there's been more kind of like pioneer type activity, which is why I find it really interesting that you kind of come from this pioneering position within Cox to now you're effectively like a transformation advocate.
00;08;08;00 - 00;08;17;00
Jonny Dunning
For other for other organizations to to achieve similar results. So that must feel quite cool that you can you can take all of that experience with you.
00;08;17;03 - 00;08;36;17
David Orme
It's amazing. Right. And that's kind of that's the position we take on our side. A lot of the conversations I've had with our clients are whether it's existing clients or prospective clients talking about how you transform or what the need is or even how do you get started, right? I mean, it's it's a huge problem to tackle.
00;08;36;17 - 00;08;57;26
David Orme
And you, you hit a couple of a few points, right? I mean, this that's the visibility is becoming more and more prevalent. You know, how do we actually tackle our workforce and know what our spend is if we don't know what is being spent at the business level? So often, you know, if you don't have a vendor management system, you're going through Oracle or some of your traditional procurement systems.
00;08;57;28 - 00;09;15;15
David Orme
You can see what the actual spend is, but you don't see what the service is being done or who's in your or who's coming in and doing the actual work. So it's a little more than just, oh, I know I've got X, Y, Z suppliers and they spend 10 million a year or 15 million a year.
00;09;15;18 - 00;09;39;09
David Orme
You don't know, you don't have that next layer down of, okay, what's the work that's actually being done? Is it being done well? do we have cost controls in place. Do we have compliance in place where we're onboarding off boarding these workers? You know, and historically staffing has been the focus for that. And that's where the industry started with your traditional, you know, software systems, your vendor management systems.
00;09;39;12 - 00;10;02;09
David Orme
And now it's procurements realizing, well, we don't have that same level of visibility or control. And as well with HR and now with those teams working more closely together, you you're seeing a bigger push of, well, what are we actually spending on in services procurement. You know, how many people are actually coming in. What headcount. What services are we actually buying.
00;10;02;11 - 00;10;36;27
Jonny Dunning
Yeah. And the thing is, at the same time as that has happened, services, the use of services have grown massively. There is a really interesting guy called Tom Everleigh, who's been doing a lot of research into services, he's actually writing a book on it. I love a niche player Tom is awesome. He's been on the podcast couple times, but he, some of his research is showing some of the sources he's used have shown that the spend in services is growing five times the speed of the spend in goods, which is not surprising because we're moving towards more of a services led economy.
00;10;37;00 - 00;11;07;23
Jonny Dunning
But outside of that, work is moving There was a shift towards outputs and outcomes. I was at, a really interesting white paper launch at the House of Parliament in London yesterday. Looking at, how AI, for example, and the change in the workforce and the change in the way that we do work and the work that needs to be done is moving organizations towards the logic of output, an outcome based, work provision.
00;11;07;25 - 00;11;33;21
Jonny Dunning
So there's a lot of things, in flux at the moment. But the bottom line is that any organization, you know, they all use services, any decent size organization is going to have a big amount of spend that's tied up in this. And like you say, they're very unlikely to have the visibility, the control. And also they're making it difficult for buyers, potentially the the people within the organization that need to buy the services to get the work done.
00;11;33;23 - 00;11;50;27
Jonny Dunning
For that company to be effective and competitive in the market, if the procurement set up, the process is if there's no process, you know, not only if you got compliance and cost concerns, but you're actually slowing down the organization from doing what it needs to do. And making it less effective and, and, and giving the competitors an advantage.
00;11;51;00 - 00;12;11;29
Jonny Dunning
So by putting the right processes, using the right technology and actually having a dedicated program, to support services procurement specifically, it's just a total game changer. So it's it's really fantastic for me. I see what we're doing, with Zivio as a technology pioneer or as the services procurement system, where in that kind of pioneer space as well.
00;12;12;01 - 00;12;22;25
Jonny Dunning
So it's fantastic to be able to collaborate, with yourselves and the team at Pontoon. Pontoon, who are really trying to take this to the next level, just going back to sorry, carry on.
00;12;22;28 - 00;12;47;02
David Orme
Oh, as you say, it's interesting that you bring in the AI aspect of it, right? I mean, when you talk about, I mean, everybody's running to get AI in as fast as they possibly can, right. And and don't. And there are some huge benefits within procurement alone. Right. Just new softwares like Zivio itself. Right. But then also just process improvement, automating of tasks, things that historically just were
00;12;47;06 - 00;13;08;14
David Orme
You couldn't do. But when you look at a lot of what specifically in procurement, when you're looking at skills based or you're SOW and your services, if you don't have a baseline of good data to really feed into that AI machine, the machine language that you know, the gen AI, it's not going to give you the information you need.
00;13;08;14 - 00;13;30;09
David Orme
You won't be able it won't be able to process the information and and provide a valuable output. If you don't have that baseline of data. And that's the biggest issue that you see with a lot of companies, specifically in procurement. We go back to that conversation, the spend data they have, but they don't have the underlying project data of, you know, what was this work actually being done?
00;13;30;09 - 00;13;53;04
David Orme
Who were the people doing it? What were the skills needed to do it? You know, what were the deliverables we were working towards? You know, and then even on top of that, what was the performance of that supplier? Where were we actually satisfied with the product that they created? So it's like a chicken and egg, right. For, for at least if you're like in procurement, if you don't have that baseline of data to feed into your AI systems that you're trying to create.
00;13;53;06 - 00;13;56;12
David Orme
Yeah, it's the garbage in, garbage out methodology.
00;13;56;14 - 00;14;22;06
Jonny Dunning
Yeah. And this is where companies that aren't getting on top of this is just going to get left behind. And it's it's like AI has really reduced the amount of excuses that it's possible for organizations to have to say, it's just too complicated for us to tackle, you know, spend on procured services well, it's not, you know, previously it might have been massively, massive amounts of unstructured data.
00;14;22;08 - 00;14;45;03
Jonny Dunning
You know, the type of scale language, data problems that AI is particularly good at solving and streamlining that excuse has just gone away. And so I think where companies are even failing to recognize this, I almost see it as a bit of negligent thinking, to be honest, bearing in mind the amount of money the organizations spend on services.
00;14;45;03 - 00;15;10;11
Jonny Dunning
It's it's roughly 50% of organizations spend if you average out across every every industry and every location, it's massively significant. And also it's a very significant part of how those organizations execute their strategy, operationally in the market, how they deliver their products and services to their customers. So, you know, in terms of getting work done, it's it's absolutely critical.
00;15;10;11 - 00;15;34;17
Jonny Dunning
And it's it's really I feel like it's the time services, procurement time in the sun right now. Even people recognizing it, as a specific focus to say, well, the way that we buy goods, materials is pretty well sorted. The way that we buy people, whether it's bringing them, hiring permanent employees, we'll bring in contractors and temp labor is very well sorted.
00;15;34;20 - 00;15;42;00
Jonny Dunning
But this is this is a massive gap. And in a lot, in a lot of cases, it's, what, six, ten, 6 to 10 times the size of contingent spend.
00;15;42;00 - 00;16;07;02
David Orme
Easily or easily. Easily. And and and not even just that's the spend right. I mean in you talk about they've got it sorted. You know, they've got a process in place for contingent labor and goods and services. What are the bigger issues that you see with services procurement is just the compliance issue, right. You've got so much services procurement being done in a T&M model or even a, you know, a manager directly managing these resources.
00;16;07;05 - 00;16;26;15
David Orme
And no one's can, you know, no one's thinking about, you know, what are the actual impacts of that? Or tracking it or, or monitoring it. So if you don't have the systems in place, you don't know a lot of what work is being done. You know, especially in very unstructured organizations where managers are just managing to their budget.
00;16;26;17 - 00;16;46;26
David Orme
Well, and they're and they don't have a policy in place other than, well, I can I can sign an agreement up to $1 million based on my career level, and I can bring in any work I want, however I want to do it. So not being able to have that visibility creates a massive compliance issue, you know, and puts your company at risk.
00;16;46;29 - 00;17;10;18
Jonny Dunning
Yeah. And it feels like this is the last big area of workforce or work delivery that needs to be solved ahead. A really interesting, conversation with a lady from Dow Chemicals recently, and also with a chap in, in Singapore. Who was he was at most recently at Netflix looking, talking about like, total talent management.
00;17;10;20 - 00;17;40;28
Jonny Dunning
Total talent management. It's something that's been kind of bandied around for a long period of time, and it's kind of one of those topics that people, to a certain extent, when you go to conferences, you people would kind of switch off to it. It's like, oh, it's the same old stuff coming out and it's nothing new. But part of the problem with that and what's being recognized now with the growth of services procurement as a as a topic and a big point on the agenda, if you haven't got all of those channels visible and to a certain extent buttoned down, there's absolutely no way you can coordinate because you haven't got that base level before
00;17;40;28 - 00;17;59;02
Jonny Dunning
you move up to the next level. So I think the other exciting thing that this does, it opens up the door. Once you get services procurement under control and get visibility on it, then the organization can start to make decisions about what's the most effective way for us to get this work done. What are our resource channels? Where should we be pushing stuff?
00;17;59;05 - 00;18;14;21
Jonny Dunning
And in an environment as volatile and uncertain as today's, you know, economy, that's absolutely essential. And anyone who's anyone who's not thinking about that, they're missing a trick, in my opinion.
00;18;14;23 - 00;18;44;25
David Orme
Oh, absolutely. Right. I think it was staffing industry analysts put out a report, and I think they said 22% of your physical workforce is outsource third party labor, but that, you know, 3% of that is IC and contingent labor. The rest is your services procurement. So you're if you're not managing your services procurement, there's a massive portion of just people money spend that you were not even you know, you don't have visibility into.
00;18;44;28 - 00;19;10;11
Jonny Dunning
Yeah. And going back to the point made about data, the world runs on data. We all run our private personal lives on data and technology and these efficient processes that help us do what we need to do. And just simply not having the information on this spend is just it just seems to be completely crazy, but it's almost kind of snuck in through the back door in the sense that service has always been quite complex.
00;19;10;13 - 00;19;32;03
Jonny Dunning
Organizations have been trying to solve the kind of workforce, contingent labor problem, and all of the other things they've got to solve. But services have been growing, growing and growing really rapidly. And the technology, the procurement technology, there's been more focus towards, the kind of goods and materials that you would you had growing out of that kind of ERP and source to pay and procure to pay suites.
00;19;32;05 - 00;19;52;21
Jonny Dunning
So that kind of guided buying and cataloging is very efficient, sophisticated when you're buying things. But when you're buying services, it's just this topsy turvy world of services where the actual thing you're buying is incredibly hard to design and therefore it's incredibly difficult to measure compared to buying the thing. So I think it's kind of snuck up on companies, but it's so big now.
00;19;52;21 - 00;20;16;17
Jonny Dunning
And the, the ability to differentiate and compete in the market versus your competition, it's coming down to finer and finer margins, quicker decisions, more flexibility and agility. And that was just made services procurement come right to the top of the agenda for a lot of organizations. But still, I would say there are plenty of companies out there that know there's a problem.
00;20;16;17 - 00;20;23;16
Jonny Dunning
They haven't really looked into it yet, but I would say they really don't know where to start. Would you say that's an accurate reflection?
00;20;23;18 - 00;20;43;28
David Orme
I would agree, I would agree, like don't know where to start. And they don't understand the full benefit that they would get from managing it. Right, whether it be through their own internal like let's say they bring in their own vendor management system or a platform like, Zivio and create their own team to manage it, or an MSP like pontoon.
00;20;44;00 - 00;21;08;22
David Orme
The the benefit becomes one for procurement spend visibility. I mean, right, you have you've got your spend visibility. You're able to onboard offboard the tracking. But what procurement I feel like often overlooks is the efficiencies you automatically gain within finance, within corporate security, within your just your the time your business stakeholders have to put in to manage these.
00;21;08;22 - 00;21;32;08
David Orme
Right. Because there's typically the management of a statement of work beyond, beyond procurement, signing the paper and giving it back over to your business stakeholder or falls back in back on those folks. Right. The onboarding goes back to security. The manager has to put in the requests. They have to, you know, approve the invoices. They have to make sure everything's done in a timely manner.
00;21;32;11 - 00;21;56;11
David Orme
You know, they're tracking multiple requests, putting in multiple requests, potentially across different systems. Whereas if you have a consolidated, you know, centralized system that's done in one place and you can see just based on your profile, all the different SOWs, you have, all the spend the people that you have in there doing the work for you, the milestones, the deliverables, the outcomes.
00;21;56;14 - 00;22;15;19
David Orme
Which honestly, a procurement team doesn't think about because, you know, they don't beyond making sure they've got the best price, you know, they've got the outcomes. It goes back over the fence, for lack of a better word, for somebody else to manage.
00;22;15;22 - 00;22;49;29
Jonny Dunning
You making some great points there. I think so. Just making a couple of notes here is you're talking 100% agree with you. The there's other things that sort of often get missed as well. Like even just like properly documenting in a technology platform, your full services supply chain, you know, making sure it's, it's lined up by category, by competency, all these sorts of things that that helps suppliers get greater visibility, the ones that is you measuring performance, ones that are doing a good job, get better visibility within your organization, more opportunities, better relationships.
00;22;50;06 - 00;23;19;14
Jonny Dunning
But for all of them, it's that visibility. Rather than maybe just sitting on someone's desktop or in their their contacts in their black book or whatever, you know, it's like that's that's so inefficient, the organization, somebody even just, what you're saying about stakeholders, I think that's the, the ultimate crux of it, making lies easier, faster, safer for them to buy the services they need and get the work done and get great value.
00;23;19;16 - 00;23;52;24
Jonny Dunning
That, to me, is the absolute crux of it. That's what drives the organization forward. And like you say, if they're getting held up by poor process or trying manage things on email, team phone calls, you know, files, Excel spreadsheets, we we've seen it plenty of times. And they're not they're not because of this carnage. Procurement can't really help them effectively because the amount of the volume of statements of work lying about, if it's not automated, if it's not captured, and there isn't a proper process with the best all in the world, there's no way procurement can stay on top of that volume.
00;23;52;24 - 00;23;59;10
Jonny Dunning
It's just the the procurement teams are always lean and and that's just it's just crazy. Well.
00;23;59;12 - 00;24;28;13
David Orme
And you talk about like the, the difficulty of getting started, right? I mean, and I feel like that's where, like where it fails initially so often is because when they build the business case, they're not looking at the people impact across the broader organization. They're looking at the potential cost savings or just the visibility into the spend, consolidating into one set, one system that's a source of truth, which are all amazing benefits, don't get me wrong.
00;24;28;15 - 00;25;08;18
David Orme
But when you're trying to sell it across a multi-functional organization, it can't be your I guess it could be, but it's more effective if you're going across, you know, H.R. Finance, corporate security, legal, involving all those stakeholders, your business teams really building out that benefit to say, look, you know, Tom, you managed, you know, four SOWs a year on average, you know, within our marketing group, those four SOWs and the amount of effort that you have to put in, it's probably 20% of your time in a month because you have to, you know, whether it's time and materials, you have to approve and review the invoice, the invoice that comes in, or if it's a
00;25;08;18 - 00;25;28;22
David Orme
milestone, you have to go back and check all of that's done now within a system and within an MSP like pontoon. They manage all of that on your behalf. And then if there's an escalation or an issue, all of that resolution happens, you know, outside of you, you know, that it becomes more of a a process that you don't have to deal with anymore.
00;25;28;22 - 00;25;39;20
David Orme
Finance doesn't have to chase invoices. Finance doesn't have to chase your internal stakeholders. You have a team that does that for you, and it's all managed within one system versus across multiple systems.
00;25;39;23 - 00;26;25;24
Jonny Dunning
Yeah, it takes me back to that. That initial kind of point I think is really interesting is of of you moving from kind of pioneer within an organization running, being the internal kind of owner of that MSP, and tech program to, to becoming, your position now where you're effectively this transformation advocate that is enabling organizations to do this, going in and helping them solve the problem with regards for organizations taking it outsourced and going to an MSP like pontoon and, and and bringing in that advisory capability from people like yourself and that operational capability and quite often the tech as well.
00;26;25;27 - 00;27;03;12
Jonny Dunning
What was the where maybe the the MSP was. Sounds like it was in place at Cox before you came in, but how do you how do you see that stacking up in terms of the business case justification? Because a lot of organizations that the knee jerk might be, oh, we can just do this ourselves. My immediate response to that would be, well, why aren't you, this is a this is a serious thing that that should be under control but isn't, but with lean procurement teams, you know, and lots of other things going on in the business that always feels, like a fairly, straightforward argument to make, but it is a strong
00;27;03;12 - 00;27;07;08
Jonny Dunning
argument that people put forward. Why don't we just do it ourselves?
00;27;07;10 - 00;27;24;05
David Orme
They do. And it's and I'll tell you what, I, I candidly, seven, eight years ago, I probably would have been on that same bill being in procurement. Well, I mean, why do we want to bring in more people, like, why do we want to bring in an outsider to do this? Right? Why do we want to hire someone to do what we can do ourselves?
00;27;24;05 - 00;27;46;02
David Orme
And to your point, the do it yourselves never happens, right? You can you can say all day long that it does. But I think when people start digging into it, they realize there's more to managing it than the capability of doing it yourself. Right? You have to set up an office, almost like a vendor management office within your own company, to do it.
00;27;46;05 - 00;28;13;19
David Orme
Right. And you you look at most organizations, the vendor management is either done upfront with procurement, either through some third party risk management. Yeah. We onboard offboard the supplier, you know, in in our financial systems, we we sign the agreements. We make sure there's things, you know, you know, clauses in place to protect us. Then the actual vendor management itself kicks over to the supplier or I say supplier sorry to the business stakeholder.
00;28;13;19 - 00;28;41;09
David Orme
And then they do the management of the supplier through the rest of the lifecycle. So there's not there's not a consolidated place that actually does manage the performance of that supplier. Right. So unless something goes egregiously wrong on the business side, procurement never hears about it. Right. Or unless there is a misclassification or a failure of something within the systems or an indemnification issue, legal or and risk never hear about it.
00;28;41;12 - 00;29;03;03
David Orme
So there's nothing really controlling and monitoring the performance of that supplier once it's done right. Once once that agreement is signed. And like I said, I have seen subpar outcomes happen all the time that a manager is just like, well, we got to get something done and out the door. Yeah. And it is it the best?
00;29;03;03 - 00;29;21;07
David Orme
No. But then who tracks that after the fact? Nobody. So there's no there's no record saying, hey, they didn't do a great job. So how do we ensure that they either are performance managed or managed out of our network.
00;29;21;10 - 00;29;58;00
Jonny Dunning
Yeah. And it's I think also it's it's great to get your perspectives on this because you are now, you know, running the services procurement outsource function within pontoon. You're leading that and you've brought all your expertise to bear on that. But it's not like you weren't using an MSP when you were at Cox. You know, you you got from you made that program work and you obviously saw the benefits of that, which the thing that the thing that always strikes me about the services procurement side of it is companies are always surprised, how big the benefits are.
00;29;58;03 - 00;30;19;07
Jonny Dunning
But what I think they're underestimating is this is greenfield. Like, if you're looking at a contingent workforce program, the the incremental increase in benefits you get by going from Gen one to Gen two that they're never going to be they're always going to diminish, and that side of the, the work, the workforce solutions industry is more mature.
00;30;19;10 - 00;30;46;21
Jonny Dunning
It's not completely mature. There's always room for great. There's always room for improvement. But for a lot of organizations, it's kind of been ground down to, to, to smaller amounts with services to deal with. Just the risk, the cost, the efficiencies, benefits. People are shocked by that. So if they understood that in advance, the idea of bringing in an intermediary to get them moving, make it happen and that the benefits just it's a no brainer really.
00;30;46;23 - 00;31;12;24
David Orme
Well, and to your point, like so I came from a traditional category management sourcing role into managing the strategic programs. The first 3 to 6 months of my time was getting my feet under the ground, learning about the vendor management system, learning about the MSP. I knew what they were before, right? We utilize them within the company and from a procurement perspective, I knew that we were putting them in to the system.
00;31;12;26 - 00;31;37;12
David Orme
But beyond that, yeah, like I said, it's a very much transactional procurement, some strategic sourcing, aligned with our business partners. But if it went into Oracle or if it went into the vendor management system, you know, for, for process and payment and management, that didn't matter to me. Now, you know, for me, it was like I don't have to worry about that, you know, because I can I can get the spending either way.
00;31;37;13 - 00;32;01;00
David Orme
And beyond that I don't need to know. But, you know, managing the program itself, it was like it's kind of eye opening, right? You look at, you get in there and you're like, well, there's so much more kind of behind the curtains, right? Or it's the, you know, the duck on the, on the pond, you know, the duck looks calm, is floating around, but there's so much going on underneath that you never see right like that.
00;32;01;00 - 00;32;45;17
David Orme
He's just paddle along to move here, to there. So that's what for me, it's it's an education piece, right? I think that's the biggest issue that companies have is they they see the benefits from a staff aug firm or staff staffing kind of set up with the VMS, but they don't realize that from an operational perspective and just a tactical transactional perspective, you have all those exact same benefits on on the, the services procurement side, in addition to just being able to see that spend, see the outcomes, then drive more, more outcome based strategic decisioning with your internal stakeholders to say, hey, look, we're now actively managing the supplier.
00;32;45;19 - 00;33;13;06
David Orme
We see that there is there are concerns there late on there, late on invoices. They're late on the milestones. They consistently have multiple changeovers for for the scope. Now why is that happening? Well, the we actually changed scope or was it just really poorly defined up front. So you're able to really dive into that information and enable your business honestly to be and your procurement teams to be better partners?
00;33;13;08 - 00;33;41;18
Jonny Dunning
Yeah. And I think, you know, the fact that the MSP intermediaries like pontoon bringing in your expertise, they're looking to take it to the next level and, and being able to provide that to their customers, it can kind of this is where you're getting into closing the loop around your workforce ecosystem, your total workforce, your total capacity and capability management as an organization.
00;33;41;21 - 00;34;10;21
Jonny Dunning
And I, I applaud the organizations that are bringing in genuine procurement expertise, like yourself, to do that. Because it's recognizing that as an organization, you know, they've got some brilliant operations stuff in place that got all the fantastic ability to bring in technology and to make the processes what the absolute past masters of that, and all of the contingent workforce and the other hiring side of it is, is is a really efficient machine in a lot of cases.
00;34;10;23 - 00;34;34;19
Jonny Dunning
But this services procurement area is different enough. It's big enough. It's complicated. It's important enough being able to bring in expertise like yourself, really does change the game in terms of what the organization that's bringing you in is, is buying is the the ability to bring in someone who's done it before and say, okay, you got all these great benefits.
00;34;34;19 - 00;34;57;27
Jonny Dunning
Now help me get these great benefits. And that's, that's really where the, the kind of the business case justification comes into it. And, and I would argue that, as we said at the beginning of this kind of little segment where we're talking about this, so the people that say we're just going to do it ourselves, it's it's very, very rare to see anything even start to happen.
00;34;58;05 - 00;35;24;02
Jonny Dunning
So for most organizations, I think they would benefit from sitting down with somebody like yourself, hearing about your journey and and telling you all of their woes, telling you what their company is doing and where you, you know, you ask them, how do you manage this? How does this work? How does that work? And I've seen it many times in some of the conversations you and I have had with with customers and prospects and all the conversations that I have in the market, the light bulb start going off in people's heads.
00;35;24;04 - 00;35;45;12
Jonny Dunning
Actually, hang on a minute. There's this as well, which is a total nightmare for us or our CEO is really trying to drive this. And until we get this sorted, we can't manage that. It's it's definitely a conversation that that becomes logical. But people need to actually be able to talk to somebody like yourself, about the reality of it.
00;35;45;12 - 00;36;13;20
David Orme
I think you're not wrong. Right. And that's that's some of the best conversations I've had since I've been here. And it's only been 5 or 6 months at this point. Just talking to different clients and potential clients about. And we can, we can call a business case, right. What is the business case like if you already have an MSP in place, you know, or and you're looking to go internal or if you have, you're trying to expand or you don't have one, well, why shouldn't I do it?
00;36;13;21 - 00;36;29;04
David Orme
The internal way to your point. I mean, we looked at that at Cox. Why shouldn't we just in sources. Well, you've got now technology support that has to be done. Because if you're doing it internally, if you keep it on the same vendor management system or you try to bring it inside to a different system, who's going to support that system?
00;36;29;06 - 00;36;50;06
David Orme
Compliance risk, who's going to do that? Your MSP does that for you with the system. They they all bought off for the suppliers. They manage all the certificates of insurance, all the requirements. Same for the resources that come on, off and on board. Corporate security is going to have to increase the amount of work they're doing, because they're now going to have to vet all of these folks versus your MSP doing it.
00;36;50;08 - 00;37;14;10
David Orme
Just the management of the work and the SOWs, you know, things that traditionally finance would have to chase your internal business stakeholders. They're now going to have to bring in more people to do that. So just the actual people involved, I, you know, from a large program like ours, we had 30 plus people dedicated from an MSP that we did not pay for, like it more than paid for it.
00;37;14;10 - 00;37;28;12
David Orme
So just from a headcount perspective, much less the technology, the support and all of the other ancillary pieces that people don't even think about it. The third party integrations and everything else that are all managed and supported by your MSP.
00;37;28;14 - 00;37;55;21
Jonny Dunning
Yeah. I mean, I'd like to think that for me personally, you know, from the point of view of a tech vendor, I've got an unbiased viewpoint as to how people should do this. But what I do have a very, strong view on is that organizations should be tackling this. And so you know, even if just taking that principle into context, when I look at the market and what's happening in the market, I look where most organizations are.
00;37;55;28 - 00;38;16;19
Jonny Dunning
They need help. They need help to recognize it, to understand it, to see the possible. Because it's kind of like they can't see around the corner. They haven't done it. So they don't understand what the benefits are and how it's going to reduce their risk and enable them to compete. So it's very hard for them to, to to jump to that point or even a little lower, because you can put the business case together, as you say.
00;38;16;19 - 00;38;37;27
Jonny Dunning
So understanding people who've already walked this path and achieve those objectives and those massive benefits, you know, it's I've got I've got friends who, who are very good at, gaining expertise in particular areas or getting very good at things. And a lot of the time they're taking on expert advice whenever they do any of these things.
00;38;37;27 - 00;38;58;20
Jonny Dunning
What's the fastest way to get good at somebody? Talk to somebody who's already done it? So bringing in expertise and bringing in advice for me, the most important thing I'm super passionate about is organizations need to address this. They will be astonished at the benefits they create, but they do need to take action. And in a lot of cases, that's that's quite a lot of inertia to overcome.
00;38;58;20 - 00;39;03;11
Jonny Dunning
But it feels like that's one of the main things that stops people.
00;39;03;14 - 00;39;25;03
David Orme
Well, and if you think about it, a lot of companies, especially if you're talking about medium to large size organizations, a lot of growth through acquisitions. So you've still got systems that have an integrated already. So it becomes darn daunting just from that perspective, right, of, well, how am I going to, you know, get all of these systems that we haven't even reconciled on our back end to talk to something else, right?
00;39;25;03 - 00;39;54;14
David Orme
Or, you know, or even to get to, to handle the onboarding or handle everything else. And that's where I say, you know, a system like Zivio or a VMS is great because they've got native APIs as talk into all those systems. Right? So that implementation piece isn't as complex from that perspective to create a single source of record. And you're not wrong that I think it's that education piece of really well, what are we going to do from a technology perspective?
00;39;54;15 - 00;40;15;10
David Orme
How do we streamline it? Right. And it's like you're not trying to replace systems. You just become a single source of truth and an aggregate of all of of, you know, like your pay systems, your onboarding, recording, it all becomes the starting point where you can say, okay, now we know we've done it well, and it gets paid back in the in the source systems right through the data feeds.
00;40;15;13 - 00;40;40;08
Jonny Dunning
Yeah. And organizations, quite often I've had interesting conversations with people in like procurement excellence where they'll be looking across the process and across the technology stack. And there's quite often the people that say when it comes to managing statement of work engagements it all just falls in a hole in the ground. And if you take the way that goods are procured that's well buttoned up.
00;40;40;08 - 00;41;03;21
Jonny Dunning
If you take the way contingent labor is secure, that's well buttoned up. If you take the way service typically through statement works statements of work, it's often times so this it's just organizations taking a logical look at where they need to have efficiency. And you know, if, if they could be already doing that through the systems and processes that they've already got, why aren't they.
00;41;03;24 - 00;41;40;01
Jonny Dunning
I know also there's the market moves on. You know, vendor management systems didn't exist prior to the, you know, when they existed. It brought this contingent workforce market to life and really brought it forward at scale. And I think the same is going to happen with services procurement. And that's starting to happen now. But but that's why I think it's, it's, as I say, seeing around the corner from a, from a, an outcome and the benefit perspective of putting one of these programs in place, bringing in an MSP to help you execute on this, but from a technology perspective as well, you know, whatever the relevant by suitable technology is, we live in
00;41;40;01 - 00;42;05;09
Jonny Dunning
a world of data and we live in a world of technology. And when you look at organizations with billions of spend that's going basically through spreadsheets, the world's most popular software, Excel, word documents, scans on PDFs SOWs, you know, emails, phone calls, team slack, you know, that's that's not up with the times. That's that's severely old school and very limited.
00;42;05;12 - 00;42;28;22
David Orme
Well, and it's not it doesn't it doesn't suit the need for your executives have instant access to that information and the level of information to make strategic decisions. Right? I mean, you cannot make strategic decisions around your suppliers, around your services that you're providing. If you don't have that level of information easily, readily, readily at your your fingerprints right at your hand.
00;42;28;24 - 00;42;58;07
David Orme
And so, so I think I agree with you. We're seeing a lot. I you know, I was looking at a lot of the, the RFP that we've been responding to and we're coming in and most companies now, you know, are asking about some kind of component of services procurement. How do you manage it? You know, even if it might not be the focus of what they're trying to buy at this point, they want to ensure that they have that capability as maybe a phase two or a gen two right after something comes in.
00;42;58;07 - 00;42;59;10
David Orme
And so.
00;42;59;13 - 00;43;20;15
Jonny Dunning
Yeah, and I would very much encourage any organizations that are even considering or looking at trying to address this and worried about it, to talk to people like yourself who have been there and done it, even if they're not in a position where they're looking to buy something. Now, just to understand, because and that's why I really value you taking the time to have this conversation, because it's just spreading the word.
00;43;20;15 - 00;43;42;16
Jonny Dunning
It's just the the art of the possible, putting it out there in terms of the hurdles, the ability to overcome those hurdles where this could all go, what the benefits are, the business case implications. People just need to share this information. And it's, you know, companies don't have to be competitive about it. It's it's information that, you know, procurement experts can share with each other.
00;43;42;16 - 00;44;05;17
Jonny Dunning
The industry can share with each other. And, and it's there's opportunity for everyone. It's such a big problem to solve. And it benefits everybody involved in the chain. There's nobody that loses. It benefits the workforce solutions industry. With this additional growth, it benefits the organizations that are being served by that in terms of their savings, their efficiency, their market readiness.
00;44;05;19 - 00;44;30;28
Jonny Dunning
And it benefits the supply chain as well, because they recognize that the good work they do, they work. You see more efficient processes. And and you mentioned that. Now, how can the organization make strategic decisions around spend when they can't see what's going on about them? Performances, things like that. It's also that, you know, executive team within an organization saying, you know, effectively, this is all the work we need to do in the next six months.
00;44;31;00 - 00;44;51;01
Jonny Dunning
How are we going to do it? How are we going to apportion it? What's going to be the best way to do these different bits of work? If you, you know, if you're not efficient in doing that, you're you're going to you're going to lose out to people that are. And that's where this is a little bit of an arms race of organizations in the same sector saying we need to, you know, pull our socks up in this area and really get organized.
00;44;51;08 - 00;45;03;04
Jonny Dunning
And when they do that, anyone that isn't is going to get left behind. And that's that's where the, the AI side of it comes in. Again, just in terms of the, the pace of change, but feel like people are waking up to that. Would you agree?
00;45;03;07 - 00;45;24;08
David Orme
Oh absolutely. Absolutely right. And that's why we're seeing I think that uptick. Right. We're seeing a lot of more focus on services procurement of well how do we manage this better let to your point, how do we go to more outcome based versus T&M How do we shift the risk from our company to the the supplier providing the service.
00;45;24;11 - 00;45;43;20
David Orme
Right. You know, that's what that's the whole idea really behind outcome based, deliverables is I want a product. I want you to create this for me, and I want you to do it. Well, you know, and historically, we've done some of that, some of that's happened, but it's not the performance aspect of it isn't managed from that supplier.
00;45;43;22 - 00;46;03;21
David Orme
So you talk about like that six month runway, how do you get work done and these projects done if you don't have that visibility you're really working towards? All right. So John, who have you worked with before. All right. Let's use them like they've done. They've done work for us. They know our product. Great. But you don't really know if that outcome that the supplier has been providing the best outcome.
00;46;03;21 - 00;46;20;11
David Orme
You don't know if they've been providing the best price because you don't have that visibility and that information and so. Well, to your point, either they get left behind or they might get a product that's not the best it could be at a price that they did not want to pay to begin with.
00;46;20;14 - 00;46;47;18
Jonny Dunning
Yeah, yeah. And I'm looking at that from the kind of supplier performance angle. If you come at it, there's the other side of it as well. Where is it is competition for the best suppliers. There's competition for that expertise and those capabilities and it's new capabilities are being required all the time. You know technology changes these almost, you know, arithmetic and it's growth.
00;46;47;18 - 00;47;10;13
Jonny Dunning
It's exponential. So the requirement new capabilities, new skills, new things required, it's just moving at such a crazy pace where organizations have a good relationship with their supply chain. That makes it better. And putting one of these programs in place and using the right technology to centralize information makes that better. But it also gives you visibility of the capabilities you have in your supply chain and the ability to then build on that.
00;47;10;13 - 00;47;25;21
Jonny Dunning
And look at I spoken about it before, some of the companies we work with do a lot of what I would class as horizon planning, you know, what are the type of capabilities we need going to need in the future? Who in our supply chain has got those. Let's look at that. And then maybe they'll start upskilling themselves where they don't have it.
00;47;25;21 - 00;47;39;14
Jonny Dunning
But let's work together in, really close collaboration with our supply chain. And I think that competition. But it's only going to get more fierce a little bit like we've had the kind of war for talent within the broader workforce.
00;47;39;17 - 00;48;04;02
David Orme
No, you're not wrong. It's I look at that view into your workforce and the capabilities, you know, but like a company like mine or in the vendor management system, historically, you don't have that view into your gaps, right? If you're not managing those all of the suppliers and you know who you have and you know who you're working with and you know the strengths like you do for your typically you do for your workforce.
00;48;04;04 - 00;48;18;00
David Orme
But beyond that, from your supplier setup, you don't know who has the strengths, who's performed the best, where, you know, it often becomes a firefight to find somebody quickly. When you when you find out there is a gap.
00;48;18;02 - 00;48;50;11
Jonny Dunning
Yeah. Just, I just want to go back to something, saying earlier that I thought was really interesting when you were talking about procurement, bringing in an MSP to enable them to, to to put this full end to end services procurement, offering program management in place. One of the things that that you brought up, which I think is really interesting, is the the disconnect that quite often exists between procurement and the downstream post contract activity when in service procurement.
00;48;50;13 - 00;49;10;26
Jonny Dunning
Because quite often procurement are not really measured or judged or involved, as you say, they throw it back over the fence once the work is signed, but it goes to the business stakeholder and then it's like whatever happens downstream happens and it's there's a risk issue or there's a cost issue or the delivery issue generally procurement hear about it.
00;49;11;01 - 00;49;45;17
Jonny Dunning
It's too late. It's done. It's retrospective. It's a postmortem. And it's very difficult then if it's not in the system or if it's not in the program, it's practically almost impossible to go out, go back and really dig up why that happened and what can be done about it in future. But I thought the, the, the downs, the not looking at the downstream side was really interesting because I would also argue that when it comes to services procurement, most organizations don't have the upstream really covered very effectively in the sense that there's so much direct awarding going on and there's too many statements of work.
00;49;45;20 - 00;49;59;27
Jonny Dunning
So procurement, if it's not captured in a system and within program procurement, just cannot get their arms around it. So so although procurement will be judged on the upstream, are we to budget which stakeholders would be very good at doing to budget. Or they might be wasting the budget.
00;49;59;29 - 00;50;31;06
David Orme
Well, well I can't tell you how often we have. We were in the crunch of well, I've got $1 million left on my budget. I've got to spend it or else I don't get that same budget next year. So it's it's your point that upstream becomes much harder, to be involved in. And there's such a bigger benefit if you can get it in as part of that upstream, either just from a procurement professional being a strategic partner, being, you know, being part of the initial conversation of who do you use, where do they come?
00;50;31;06 - 00;50;56;01
David Orme
Because it's more so often a business stakeholder has already gotten a copy of the SOW that the supplier prepared for them with a price that they've already agreed to because it it's within their budget. Right. And so there's, you know, and they say, oh, well, we've been doing this service for you for, you know, two years now. You know, Jonny's been working with you on this service for two years.
00;50;56;08 - 00;51;16;04
David Orme
He really we really needed to change his price to $220 an hour versus the 190, because we've been promoting him internally. So they try to pass that cost back to you when it's like, well, no, you it's the same service that you're providing me. If you're paying him more, that's your that's your problem. So from a supplier perspective but your business stakeholder like yeah it's in my budget I don't care.
00;51;16;06 - 00;51;27;01
David Orme
So they'll agree to a price increase which now becomes your new floor for that service when it's really something that somebody should be paying significantly less for.
00;51;27;03 - 00;51;53;14
Jonny Dunning
Yeah. Yeah. And as I say, I'm sure you say it all the time. So just kind of we talked about some of the areas why it makes sense for organizations to tackle this. When you when you're talking to organizations about the problems that are facing, do you see any particular objections or what are the main objections of those organizations?
00;51;53;14 - 00;52;01;08
Jonny Dunning
Are there any people who don't think it makes sense to tackle this, or is that something they're just not really aware of the problem in its entirety?
00;52;01;10 - 00;52;33;23
David Orme
Yeah, I see some organizations and it's more of not that it shouldn't be tackled, it's more of probably that they should be doing it themselves. Right? Right. They should be managing it themselves. They they're like, well, why would we bring in an MSP to manage this on our behalf? Or in extreme cases it's you're not wrong. They don't think there's a problem because they're managing, you know, they have a procurement process in place, but it's a tactical procurement process.
00;52;33;23 - 00;52;54;24
David Orme
So they're really just getting an to check the legal boxes, check to make sure the price is within a range. And then it's signed and sent back to your business stakeholder. Right. So you're really your business team is effectively still your procurement organization because they're doing the sourcing they're picking they're selecting the supplier that they want to use.
00;52;54;26 - 00;53;20;24
David Orme
They're already agreeing to a price. And then they're sending it over to procurement for a final validation. I mean, at that point it's already too late, right? I mean, the procurement team, they're just a check the box. They're not upfront saying, well, this price is not a market price is a supplier has a history of poor performance. There's all of that upfront work that is missed in a tactical organization.
00;53;20;27 - 00;53;54;12
David Orme
So a lot of times I will see you in that extreme case, they're like, well, why would we need an MSP just because they're thinking more of from a procurement aspect in my silo? I don't need somebody managing an SOW because I don't manage an SOW right. I mean, and even in some of your scenarios, when you get in, when you do have procurement professionals, still part of the upfront process and they're helping source and they're helping, you know, do RFx events even or driving, they still would say, well, but I'm not managing ab
00;53;54;12 - 00;54;20;27
David Orme
SOW my business stakeholder is so what do I what's the benefit for us beyond visibility into this spend. Right. And we already have that because we're you know upfront as a strategic partner. So so it's some of those conversations. It really becomes that educational piece of like look it goes so much further beyond like beyond just that spend visibility that you need.
00;54;21;00 - 00;54;38;20
David Orme
You talk about yeah, that conversation with your strategic supply or strategic professionals where they are part of that upfront process. I'm like, well, why are you part of that upfront process? Well, I've got to understand what the business needs. I've got to understand who they you know, what they're trying to source, the product they're trying to make.
00;54;38;23 - 00;55;08;21
David Orme
So I can help get them the best supplier, the best price. Right. And make sure they're protect. Make sure protected, make sure they have a great outcome. I'm like, okay. So beyond that, what do you think the SOW does in the management of the SOW? That's that's still part of that procurement process, that fulfillment of the service that you negotiated, that's still your customer satisfaction, that's still making sure finance is happy, that the business stakeholders happy that they're getting the product they want, even the suppliers happy, right.
00;55;08;21 - 00;55;27;29
David Orme
Because if your supplier is a good supplier, but they're having a bad experience because of a horrible internal stakeholder, you've got to be able to know that that's happening. And if you don't, you're really still missing so much of the value you can create for your business team and for your corporation.
00;55;28;01 - 00;56;04;28
Jonny Dunning
Yeah, that's you summarized that really, really nicely there. And again, that's where your procurement expertise and experience comes in. Knowing what this is like, like living in real life. And it it plays again into that cost versus value conversation. You know, a procurement team might sit there and say, oh, we've done a great job of making sure everything's the budget or that, you know, we've done all we've done some cost work upfront, but if everything's going, you know, to hell in a handcart downstream, then then that's your savings and your, your cost benefits are gone.
00;56;05;01 - 00;56;28;19
Jonny Dunning
And not just neutralized, but taken into negative territory. So it's it's really that it's accountability within the business. So we need to get this work done. We need to do it really well to be competitive in the market. Our stakeholders need to be well supported. They need to be able to move fast because I'm telling them as their boss to move fast and get this done and the CEO is telling everyone to go faster, get all this crazy stuff done.
00;56;28;21 - 00;56;49;24
Jonny Dunning
If that's not filtering through to an effective set up where the stakeholder can rely on a slick process, the best supplier you know, an efficient set up and help with all the stuff that they shouldn't be worried about. Procurement should be worrying about it for an outsourced, an outsourced function, like, what you're bringing with pontoon, they're worrying about it.
00;56;49;27 - 00;57;03;07
Jonny Dunning
If that's not all happening, then the side is being massively let down by these inefficiencies. And the the concept of some sort of cost saving at the beginning is becomes pretty much irrelevant.
00;57;03;10 - 00;57;28;12
David Orme
It can't be all about cost anymore. I mean, I the best relationships I built weren't about trying to drive cost savings for them. It was about trying to drive value. Right? I mean, like I said, we were we were not a mandated program. So, you know, the it was a lot of building internal business cases of saying, you know, going in and understanding what the actual business was, what were their key problems, what were they trying to solve.
00;57;28;14 - 00;57;58;16
David Orme
And then saying, look, here's how our our current MSP VMS setup can solve all of these problems for you and frees up your time, gives you visibility. Still manages that stakeholder and manages that relationship. Manages escalations Ensures quality, ensures timely payment. I mean, I can't tell you. I think we talked a little bit about this last time, but most big companies have either early pay clauses or rebates based on spend.
00;57;58;19 - 00;58;26;05
David Orme
Well, your suppliers are smart. They put in there. Well, if you don't pay me in a timely manner, I'm not going to. This is excluded from your overall rebate. So so stuff that went through our vendor management system 100% pay rate and we could take we could take you that early pay, take a 100% of the time or 100% of the rebates if we went through outside the process through Oracle, I think the rate was 40% because of and it was more of a timing issue.
00;58;26;05 - 00;58;42;10
David Orme
Managers were responding in a timely manner. Suppliers didn't put the invoice incorrectly. So there was all these issues that are easily solved by somebody else, by somebody actively managing that for you.
00;58;42;12 - 00;59;10;21
Jonny Dunning
And one of the things that, has been mentioned to me time and time again from an end customer point is you is the importance of being able to prove the case, expand, prove the case, expand, move through different departments, move through different parts of the business, not necessarily try and crack the whole nut at once is a big problem because a big spend looking at breaking it down into chunks.
00;59;10;23 - 00;59;19;12
Jonny Dunning
Where do you see the role of the MSP in terms of helping organizations move in that kind of process?
00;59;19;14 - 00;59;45;24
David Orme
So your MSP is your your first line of defense, right? I mean, they are the customer facing, whether it be internal customer or your supplier. They are that bridge that is really making sure one that that customer experience that, that stakeholder experience is, is wonderful. Right. And is is it is going as smoothly as possible that there are no issues or if there are the resolved as quickly as possible.
00;59;45;24 - 01;00;11;20
David Orme
So they become that conduit. Right. Same thing in the back. And they're making sure the suppliers are doing everything they need to do. They're managing that process as well, making sure they're invoicing correctly. I mean, one of the biggest advocates for our program was finance. We we always got the timely payments. We made sure, you know, the finance got their accrual reporting so they could accurately plan on an annual basis.
01;00;11;20 - 01;00;37;28
David Orme
We were making sure, you know, giving them reporting on change order issues. You know, coming in spend overruns where they could make sure that they were tracking to their internal business teams, budgets. So we were able to help finance become another layer, that became an advocate for us to the business teams. No. Excuse me. You know, saying you go into them and saying, look, you're having issues managing or getting things done.
01;00;37;28 - 01;01;01;03
David Orme
Time done timely. The vendor management system is the best place to get that done. And then you've got a team on top of that that is managing all of these issues for you because finance is pretty lean as well, right? As much as your procurement teams are so there, they don't have the time and bandwidth to go through 80 invoices a day, right, to make sure that everything's being approved timely.
01;01;01;06 - 01;01;26;16
Jonny Dunning
Yeah, I guess taking that taking that forward, you're you're creating the evidence, you're solving the problem. You're providing the business case to move to the next step with the next team. And also with that MSP resource. That's where some of the flexibility comes in to say, okay, here's a different department. And here's a whole or here's a company that's part of our group that was acquisition.
01;01;26;17 - 01;01;46;18
Jonny Dunning
Here's a whole load of new cost codes, and here's a whole load of new complexity. You got to deal with. But that's what the MSP and the and the the program and the technology are there to soak up, and to just say the principals are doing this. The business case means you're driving X value and benefit. Therefore, it makes sense to apply it to this part of the business as well.
01;01;46;21 - 01;01;55;18
Jonny Dunning
There's going to be some wrinkles. And I think that's that's quite a large part for you guys. For organizations like pontoon, you've got that internal infrastructure to soak up.
01;01;55;20 - 01;02;21;03
David Orme
Yeah. The change management, the additional people like like you said, the implementation like you, we essentially become the front end for procurement. Right? So much comes in through that team. Yeah. You talk about classification risk issues, supplier onboarding up or all of that then gets handled by the MSP and then gets streamlined on that back end going back out, you know, from a customer, satisfaction standpoint.
01;02;21;06 - 01;02;40;26
Jonny Dunning
So okay, so really, really, useful points you're bringing across here. And, and I think we covered quite a good breadth of this topic area. I know you and I could, no doubt this this and I know this. There's more conversation to be had around this, which is, which is super cool. But if you just if you just break it down.
01;02;40;26 - 01;03;12;06
Jonny Dunning
Now look at look at the, the opportunity in front of you as an individual. And the opportunity within pontoon as an organization, you, you're, you've brought your expertise in and you're all of that experience of, of being successful at doing this. And you're also sitting within the kind of infrastructure and machinery of pontoon, which is a large, powerful global organization, which is part of Adecco Group, which is an even larger, global, powerful organization.
01;03;12;09 - 01;03;23;01
Jonny Dunning
That must be pretty exciting, right? But what what are your kind of thoughts and aspirations on how you want to change things with this, this opportunity that you have?
01;03;23;03 - 01;03;47;07
David Orme
You are not wrong. It is very exciting. And it is a it is a massive organization. I just just from pontoon going up to Adecco with the [unclear] with LHH And there's so many different inner working parts. You know, a lot of what we're trying to do right now is really focusing on how we leverage each other right across the organization.
01;03;47;10 - 01;04;20;18
David Orme
One of my focuses for services procurement is really I say focus. I'm gonna say focus a lot, making sure there's a bigger focus on services procurement. Right. We do services procurement across over 20 different clients that are billion dollar, some of which are multibillion dollar clients. And it's it's not that we don't do services procurement, it's that we have never really made sure that we take those best practices and bring them to bear in the market and, and say, look, this is how we have done it.
01;04;20;18 - 01;04;40;23
David Orme
This is how we are doing it. You know, some of it's a little bit of a simplification of being able to say, hey, this is how we speak to procurement teams, this is how we really show the value of what we've done across just internally with existing clients and what we can do with new clients, and it's just expanding at our current clients.
01;04;40;25 - 01;04;58;27
David Orme
So there's a massive opportunity. I feel like, the just because there hasn't been a concerted effort to really standardize and simplify our messaging, but then also to drive it actively out within the marketplace and then also just internally with, you know, expanding within existing clients.
01;04;59;00 - 01;05;26;16
Jonny Dunning
Well, yeah, you know, I think now's the time, the market, the market is ready than it's ever been. People are. This is a big concern to people. I think if you look across Adecco Group, like just the customer touchpoints that you guys have as a group are incredible. Truly global reach on a massive scale. All sorts of different industries and locations and types of companies, who are all going to have similar problems when it comes to services procurement.
01;05;26;16 - 01;05;49;23
Jonny Dunning
So I think I totally agree with you getting the message out there, talking about the all the possible and also getting people to to join the conversation. Like I say, even if they just want to understand their own situation or understand, what other people have done that is that is I think for me, that's the most important thing in the market at the moment is just to bring things out into the light.
01;05;49;26 - 01;06;11;00
Jonny Dunning
And share this best practice, which, as I say, you know, I've spoken to many really good advocates within organizations who are happy to talk about it. They're not protective of it. They'll say all the things that they were doing wrong beforehand, and say that the problems they overcome came in trying to put a program in place, that things that maybe didn't work in the program to start with, but then also share the benefits and the results they got from it.
01;06;11;00 - 01;06;24;15
Jonny Dunning
So, I'm very grateful to you for joining me again to to chat through this. And it's really interesting to see how this next chapter is, is going to unfold for you. But, yeah, certainly very excited.
01;06;24;17 - 01;06;48;17
David Orme
I it is, it is. And you mentioned the sharing. I mean that's really what it is, the education piece that's like you've been part of our talent strategy summits, So that's, that's the the whole point of those is getting together either existing clients, potential clients, they could have services procurement or not as it's really talking about how we do it, what we do, and it becomes a peer conversation.
01;06;48;19 - 01;07;05;14
David Orme
It's not a conversation for us. You know, I get to sit in and talk about high level. Yeah, this is my experience that I had. I don't talk about what we're doing at pontoon. I talk about what I did managing these programs, you know, previous companies. So and just driving those best practices.
01;07;05;16 - 01;07;23;09
Jonny Dunning
But that's always my favorite part of those type events, the TSS events you guys have been running, it have been fantastic. It's when those peer to peer conversations take place. That's when the magic happens and people might be a little bit quiet. Start off with, you know, I'm, I'm generally, the person in the room that has a bit of an insight.
01;07;23;09 - 01;07;41;08
Jonny Dunning
One of the people who has given insight as to some of the ways that technology is approaching this specifically, but just getting those those people from those organizations who might be a very low level of maturity, saying, does anybody else have a problem with X, Y, and Z or all the people who are saying, well, we tried this and and it really worked well for us?
01;07;41;08 - 01;08;04;12
Jonny Dunning
Does anyone else try that? That to me is where the magic happens with it all. And, yeah, it's, that's what the the market will benefit from. In a broader context, whether it's sitting down with the, with a, you know, a real subject matter expert like yourselves or getting to being brought together or getting together and being able to facilitate conversation just to understand the way forward.
01;08;04;14 - 01;08;23;25
Jonny Dunning
I think it's going to make a huge difference to organizations. And I think it's going to also help elevate the procurement function and that strategic value, when it comes to this critical area. Anyway, so that's fantastic. Thank you so much for joining me, David. I really appreciate it. Yeah. And, hopefully we can get together for, another session soon.
01;08;23;28 - 01;08;25;04
David Orme
Sounds good. My pleasure Jonny.