Rich Sains

Acada

Working with a number of FTSE100 and large enterprises such as M&S, Canon, Boots, Diageo, Costa Coffee, Premier Inn, ASOS, Janus Henderson, Dentsu and Value Retail to transform their IT and procurement functions.

Managing Consultant

The Procurement Conversation

Host of The Procurement Conversation Podcast - speaking to Procurement leaders and industry experts about the biggest topics facing the profession. 

Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube

Podcast Host

Marks and Spencer

Head of IT procurement

IT and Ecommerce Procurement Manager

buyingTeam

Working with O2, Reuters, Man Group, Countryside, Universal Music and others to optimise their procurement of IT.

Solutions Developer - IT and Telecoms

Touchbase

Head of Procurement and Logistics

The Procurement Conversation Podcast Host | Elevating Procurement | Procurement Leader | 10x Procurement |

My mission is to increase the love for Procurement. I want our people to love the job and stakeholders and suppliers to love working with us.

I do this through:

1) Acada: Software that prioritises strategic activity, measures the impact we have on our businesses, and facilitates self service for low value, low risk buying.

2) Elevate: An online learning experience to develop our peoples 'Procurement EQ' and the Procurement Lounge community to support this learning.

3) Advisory: Strategy development, transformation, benchmarking and process re-engineering.

I also host the Procurement Conversation podcast and write the Procurement Weekly Newsletter where we share insights and best practices on procurement topics and trends. 

If you are interested in working with us or learning more about our products and services, please feel free to contact me at rich@acadatech.com.

Founder

We help procurement leaders to solve many of the challenges they face in today's complex environment and manage their teams more effectively and objectively.

Landscaping Your Life

Dialing down logic ( by sending logic and the story you’re telling on a coffee break) to access more creative thinking to help you break through the overwhelm when you're stuck and don’t know what to do.

Using my LANDSCAPE toolkit full of gorgeously creative and down to earth, if unconventional, tools to help you get back on track when you're stuck, stressed or overwhelmed.

All the tools in the toolkit help you to understand the range of options available to you rather than the limited number you may believe you have when you’re stuck and don't know what to do.

See featured posts for more about how I use this toolkit with individuals or in organsiations with teams, or follow #LandscapingYourLife or pop over to your favourite podcast app and follow Landscaping Your Life with Alison Smith.

Breakthrough and Creative Facilitator, Speaker, Coach and Podcaster

SCOTLAND: The Big Picture

As my work at Landscaping Your Life supports you to restore balance and connect to your own inner landscapes and wisdom you will also be helping to restore balance in Scotland’s natural landscapes.

That is, I'm very proud to say Landscaping Your Life Limited (LYL) is one of SCOTLAND: The Big Picture's rewilding business partners.

How cool is that.

Rewilding Business Partner

Headtorch

100% of us have wellbeing and mental health – even procurement teams, our stakeholders and suppliers. It’s why you’ll often find me posting about supplier mental health when it’s #MentalHealthAwarenessWeek or #MentalHealthAtWorkDay

After attending their wellbeing conferences for a number of years I’m very proud to be an associate trainer and coach for Headtorch. 

Since the start of the first lockdown I have been involved in delivering a number of live interactive sessions as part of Headtorch@Home, a programme designed especially to support workplace mental health and well-being during these extraordinary times. The programme is made up of a series of 10 live interactive online sessions. Each session aims to build confidence, knowledge and inner strength toward effective working at this time.

More recently my work for Headtorch has involved a programme of wellbeing coaching sessions. Supporting individual team members who have or continue to experience stressful situations at work, and who have welcomed the opportunity to explore what they, and the organisation, can do to support their wellbeing and mental health more at this time. 

Because you don’t have to be a mental health first aider to be able to ask someone how they are, nor to listen as they share how they’re feeling. It’s part of being human and we'll all get on much better if we remember that in our daily working lives.

Follow the link to hear a recording of a lunch & learn I did for Headtorch using a poem I've written to help uncover opportunities currently hidden from view about improving or finding more balance in your wellbeing.

The poem is entitled Paths & Destinations I'm blown away every time I use it by how much insight people get from it. See featured posts on my profile for more about this poem and other poems I use in my coaching and training to help people get back on track.

Associate Mental Health & Wellbeing Trainer & Coach

Future Purchasing

It’s as an associate where I do most, although not all, of my category and supplier management training; competency assessment; and category strategy development, coaching and certification. All for global corporates.

It’s certainly where I’ve learnt and understood more fully the critical success factors for category strategy development:
* Business Sponsorship – because it’s a business document not procurement only
* Cross functional approach – without which you might as well not bother
* Value lever application – because it's more than just about price reduction
* Flexibility of approach – one size does not fit all
* Comprehensive data – even if the strategy identifies gaps in data needed to be filled before the strategy is revisited
* Business Requirements – to help inform all decisions 
* Supply Market Engagement – of course
* Opportunity pipeline – no idea is a bad idea – its time may just not have come – yet!
* Documented strategy – if it’s in your head it’s not a strategy, if it includes recommendations with no data to support it’s not a strategy. And don’t start me on ‘supplier rationalisation’ strategies where there’s no data to tell me how many suppliers you have currently nor the pain associated with that number and benefits to be gained from reducing them. 
* Continuous improvement – because we might not get it perfect first time, and 
* The need for strategies to be written to uncover the unknown not simply as a tick box exercise to end up in a drawer as soon as it’s finished!

For more details see http://www.futurepurchasing.com/

The recording shown is a webinar I delivered at the start of the pandemic to help procurement teams find motivation and keep on track in these unprecedented times.

Senior Procurement Consultant, Trainer & Coach

Can’t see the wood for the trees

I’d always wanted to write a book and knew back in 2000 that it would be sharing unconventional tools to help people who are stuck to get back on track. To help them see the current situation they’re stuck in from a different perspective, to uncover options currently hidden from view.

There’s a number of books that were written during the 18 years that are still and may remain unpublished!

Can't see the wood for the trees - landscaping your life to get back on track emerged from a realisation that people use idioms when stuck. Idioms such as:
* Stuck in a rut
* Going round in circles
* Like a fish out of water
* In at the deep end
* Treading water
* Up a creek without a paddle, and of course
* Can’t see the wood for the trees

Using nature as our coach, nature’s landscapes as metaphors for our lives, I invite readers to use the landscape in their language when stuck to find hidden solutions which means they're found in the very ruts, creeks, and trees that they believe are confining them.

Described by one reader as "first aid kit for the mind" after they shifted their thinking after reading one chapter that resonated when she felt like she couldn't see the woods for the trees.

It's a book that's also used by many coaches as a reference manual of unconventional coaching and problem solving tools to help their clients to get back on track.
 
One NLP trainer has it on her reading list :-)

See #LandscapingYourLife for more about the tools in the LANDSCAPE toolkit.

See the three PDFs with extracts about hints, tips and tools about what to do when you're either stuck in a rut, are going round in circles or can't see the wood for the trees.

Author

The Purchasing Coach

I love procurement and having worked in this profession for over 38 years I am very passionate about helping solve procurement team's long term problems and also developing their behavioural skills, mindset and personal development including taking our humanity into the office not leaving it at the door.

Do see featured posts on my profile for more about how I work with procurement (PDF to follow very soon).

Having exclusively shared my talents and unconventional tools within a procurement arena for the majority of those 38 years the last 8 years have seen me coming out from behind procurement’s coat tails and offering my coaching and training to the wider business community.

See my Landscaping Your Life experience above for more about the LANDSCAPE coaching and problem solving toolkit full of unconventional tools to help you see situations from a different perspective. Also see #LandscapingYourLife

The Soft Skills toolkit and Dear Organisation, with love from Procurement PDF's shown here are two, if unconventional, ways in which I encourage Procurement teams to develop their behavioural skills.

Procurement Mindset and Soft Skills Speaker, Trainer & Coach

Fife Young Enterprise Board

Voluntary work with local YE board and local school (Balwearie) in support of Young Enterprise. My unconventional way of looking at situations certainly helped engaged the young people. 

I was so pleased when one of the teams made it to the YES Scottish finals. Although leaving the group of 18 year olds to go to a night club after the event gave me a very sleepless night - with them promising to text me when they got back to their hotel rooms.

Deputy Chairperson and Business Adviser

HBOS

Having learnt so much in 2000 about communication and influencing I was honoured to be trusted with the role of internal and external communication, team building and personal development for the expanded Procurement team when Halifax and Bank of Scotland (BOS) merged (bringing together teams from 4 locations).

Six months after the merger I remember someone from the original BOS team saying to me “you meant what you said” when remembering the promises made during the difficult transition from four teams into one. 

I was a little surprised as I couldn’t see the point in not saying it as it is.   

As a result of the collaborative and, at times, unconventional tools used to engage the whole team improvements in employee satisfaction within the department were achieved as shown below:

* Feeling motivated in present job: 19% increase
* Feeling valued: 32% increase
* Satisfaction with Communications: 42% increase

I was also responsible for successfully delivering the first Procurement Development Programme to expand the capabilities and confidence of all Procurement colleagues. This included the enthusiastic facilitation of the Management Development Programme for 25 colleagues - that many still remember.

It’s a role I’d love to emulate on a part time basis for a number of larger corporate procurement teams working x days a month to support the personal development of the team. Not least because 15+ years later I’ve so many more tools in the toolkit.

Procurement Commercial Manager

In addition to my category expertise (category strategy development and management of a range of categories including Marketing (above & below the line) and outsourcing Travel) this is where my speaking, training & coaching journey began.
 
When delivering training I often share a story about the travel category manager telling me that “you’re easier to deal with” and yet there I was thinking she was easier to deal with and more open to my suggestions.

The difference that made the difference was attending a Neuro Linguistic Programme (NLP) training and understanding how I saw the world wasn’t necessarily accurate.

Beliefs that helped me become “easier to deal with” included: 
* There’s 3 versions of any situation – mine, theirs and the truth
* The meaning of the communication is the response that I get 
* Flexing my behaviour doesn’t threaten my identity
* What I value informs how I judge others 
* There’s always more perspectives from which to see any and every situation 
* Logic isn’t always my best friend as it can run rings around any direct intervention to change my behaviour – it’s where my love of metaphor to facilitate change arose. 

During this time I also developed my speaking and training skills:
* Delivered procurement training to internal stakeholders and used gardening as a metaphor for supplier management with them and discovered even more the power of metaphor to convey insight.
* Facilitated a session for the Chartered Institute of Purchasing & Supply (CIPS) board of management on strategy creation – one of the first external uses of what is now the LANDSCAPE toolkit (see experience at Landscaping Your Life for more.) 
* Delivered a workshop on influencing at CIPS conference 2004
* Presented to Financial Services Purchasing Forum (FSPF) on Inspiring action
* Delivered Procurement training to Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA) Procurement group
* Presented at CIPS/ISBA marketing conference
* Delivered 2 x 20 day NLP practitioners

Procurement Consultant

University of Leeds

It felt scary turning up on my first day to a blank sheet, and an expectation by the finance director that I could set up a procurement department that would transform procurement at the university.

It’s no surprise that it was achieved through effective communication, motivation and collaborative working with the network of over 400 departmental purchasers.

I was also an active member of a consortium of north eastern and UK wide university procurement officers developing best practice guidance and sourcing strategies for the university sector more broadly.

Procurement Director

GEC Plessey Telecommunications

When I moved into non production buying and management of a team and never looked back. 

The first challenge was turning up on the Monday and having the person who had been my boss now as a member of my team. I'm pleased to say that we found a way of making a difficult situation work. An early work memory that being a human being first not a stereotype works.

Purchasing Manager - non production

Where the procurement journey began after the university careers advisor said "procurement is for you" based on my statistical analysis thesis and love of people.

I remember having to walk across the factory to send a fax to the PCB supplier in Hong Kong and then wait a day or two to get a fax response back.

I also remember turning up for a negotiation with an integrated circuit supplier and having the wrong data with me (no laptop to rely on back then I'm afraid). Something that horrified me, and yet the reactions of my manager and manager's manger reminded me we're all human and as a result will make mistakes. The key is learning from those mistakes.

Expeditor and Various production buying roles

Helping you see the wood for the trees when you’re stuck or don’t know what to do by breaking through the confusion & overwhelm using unconventional and creative tools in my LANDSCAPE toolkit.

From not knowing to knowing what to do - a poem

I certainly didn’t know what I didn’t know
Even if I did know I didn’t know what to do
I knew I was stuck
Without options
At a dead-end – or headed for it at least

That’s the problem with not knowing
I got caught up in a never-ending cycle of stuckness
An absence of options
Every direction I looked simply reinforced the lack of choice I believed I had
I was stuck in a reality I neither wanted nor knew how to walk away from

A belief in the lack of options is hard to shift
More information can often be used to reinforce the correctness of that belief
Circling around and around falling further and further into a hole, rut, or up that creek
Stuck may not be the word you give to your predicament
And yet there’s that absence of knowing what to do keeping you where you no longer wish to be

How then can you discover potential solutions
Find the answers you crave
Explore the options and opportunities
Uncover what’s hidden from view, and
With new eyes see the situation from different and alternate perspectives

The answer for me was the unconventional
Not just because I feel at home there
Because it is our conventional eyes that are seeing the lack of options
Unconventional looking gives permission to act ‘as if’ there’s other ways to view the situation
To believe there’s a solution, or even multiple solutions, out there

Comfort zones may need expanding
New tools embraced too
Your logical mind will certainly require quietening and comforted with the promise that you will return after this adventure
Creative thinking will become a new friend
Resulting in an expanded awareness of self, a connection with your inner wisdom, and a commitment to return

Will you join me in the adventure
Let me help you to see situations from a different perspective
To shift to knowing that you do know what to do
To get back on track
Confidently taking steps along that previously unknown path

Do get in touch if you’re stuck, don't know what to do & would like to find out about getting back on track - whether personally or organisationally.

You can buy 'Can't see the wood for the trees - landscaping your life to get back on track' or my ‘Your prescription for wellbeing journal’ from online retailers.

Alternatively subscribe to my Landscaping Your Life YouTube channel.

alison@alisonsmith.co +44 (0)7770 538159

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The Battle

Rich Sains

Alison Smith

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