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Evolving Past 'Procurement in Title, Purchasing in Mindset' with Euan Granger
Euan Granger, a seasoned procurement professional at Morgan Sindall Construction, shares his take on why the function needs to move beyond its purchasing roots to deliver strategic value, the endless possibilities of an AI-empowered team, and why sustainability is a must for modern procurement.
With 15+ years of experience spanning multiple industries including defense, consulting, public sector, and construction, plus his thought leadership at Procurious, Euan champions the strategic evolution of procurement. With a sharp focus on sustainability, Euan has successfully deployed sustainable procurement processes across three organisations, leading to significant reductions in carbon emissions and overall spend.
Previously, Euan managed a team that delivered a 15% cost reduction in procurement for a manufacturing business within a year. His expertise extends to improving on-time delivery, recovering time in critical build programs.
Digital Transformation
Why do you think there is still resistance to digital transformation in procurement?
You know the positives are there. You can quantify them, they are tangible, but that might not be tangible until 12 months, 24 months, so on. So selling that within the business is very challenging. You hit this buffer of other stakeholders who are trying to reduce the number of solutions or systems that are being used or are concerned about “how much is it going to run us a year?”
As procurement, the right people are now bubbling up to the top, who are open to these conversations. It’s how positive or open-minded you can be. It doesn’t really matter whether you’re 20, 40 or 70. It just largely depends on your perception of it. Then it’s about selling it into the business.
People have been trying, with a variety of systems and are still coming up empty. I think we just have to be persistent.
There’s a certain inevitability about it. If you’re not getting on board now, then you’re going to get left behind because somebody will. There will be that tech leader who jumps onto it and says, right, we’re going to take this risk. And if it works, then we’re going to fire way ahead of our competitors.
You said that AI can actually enhance the human factor in procurement. Where do you think the opportunities lie when AI and humans work together?
The removal of these manual, time-consuming processes.
AI will enhance procurement, but because procurement is so people-focused, it will never ever replace the human in the chair.
You can have an amazing team of procurement professionals and they just get bogged down in the day to day tasks. They’re on the phone to suppliers saying, “is that still the right date?”. And then they’re updating a system, having to tell the stakeholders who are waiting for it, if it is on time. Or if it’s not on time, why is it not on time?
It’s these repetitive tasks that you want to remove. You shouldn’t have to spend your time doing this. What you’re trying to do, is on the people side of it.
You might have a supply base of three to four hundred suppliers and you might only engage with 30 of the strategic suppliers. For each of them, you need probably a set number of hours a month to manage that relationship properly and make sure that they’re feeling the benefit of the relationship. That doesn’t happen if the only conversation that they get with you is on a Monday morning with you picking up the phone and going “I need to know whether that order is coming in on Thursday morning like you promised”.
It’s too transactional.
Purchasing Mindset
What do you think is holding the profession back from being truly strategic? How can organisations shift the function away from this transactional mindset?
There’s two forces holding procurement back. One of them is the operational mindset of that traditional KPI set up, the method of cost, quality and delivery. The other factor holding procurement back is procurement itself.
If we’re not banging the drum loudly enough to change our role within the organisation, no one’s going to do it for us.
You see a purchasing mindset in organisations where the day-to-day operational side of things is still very much the old fashioned sourcing, day to day order placement, order management, goods in, goods out and that’s it.
There’s nothing else built on top of those transactional tasks that we end up doing.
The transactional is critical but it makes up such a small percentage of what we could be doing and should be doing.
How do we integrate with the rest of the business properly? Align strategic objectives with the overall business? Who are your key stakeholders in the organization, your key internal customers? Work with them, understanding what you drive for them, how they can help you and how you can help them.
You start building this strategic mindset and you begin to push procurement up into the conversation elsewhere, because nobody’s looking at you and going, “you’re just delivering nuts and bolts onto the shop floor”. Yes, that is part of the job, but you are supposed to look back around to things like sustainability and social value,
For us to do it properly, we need the time and the resource. The first step is having that mindset that says, “my job is much wider than pushing that button for a purchase order on an online system”.
Sustainability
Sustainability is one of the key metrics for procurement to demonstrate success to the board in 2025 (GEP Outlook). What are your thoughts on how procurement teams should evolve to meet these expectations while somewhat still balancing traditional KPIs?
Been advocating for sustainable procurement probably for a good 10 years, from when sustainability was very much in its infancy.
It’s a very tricky balancing act. As much as you would like to push on sustainability, social outcomes, and the ESG package as a whole, a lot of the time it ends up as background noise in the conversation of cost, quality, delivery. The balance comes from not doing it in isolation. Procurement needs to build this in through the whole business.
It’s all very well for procurement to push a sustainability agenda. Ultimately people are going to look at that in the business, and go “but how much does that cost?”, and there’s still this notion of sustainability costs more money. If you’ve got two figures at the bottom of the page and tight margins, then sustainability is going to naturally be shuffled off to one side with the notion that, “we can afford to do this next time”.
The problem is we are now rapidly getting to the stage where next time just isn’t an acceptable time scale to work with. This is no longer an option. You WILL reduce your carbon by X percent. You WILL have a carbon neutral or net zero supply chain. Then it’s about building the collective relationships, not just forcing this on suppliers, manufacturers, contractors etc.
You wrote that you think engaging with social enterprises is an important value add to consider. Can you touch on why you think this is so?
If you’re looking at delivering social outcomes, community engagement and sustainability as well, it all ties into developing and leading a more local supply chain. Social enterprises are a huge part of this and there are so many that do fantastic work around the UK in helping disadvantaged groups and putting people back into the workplace.
There’s ways that they can be engaged and it might not just be through directly working with them in the supply chain. It could be bringing them into events. It’s making people more aware of their existence. And that means that you are spending closer to home as well, naturally.
Not only do we get reduction on the sustainability side for the carbon footprint because it’s closer but you’re also putting money back into the community, which drives this positive cycle of spend in the local community so they can invest and develop more.
The whole ESG and sustainability package needs to include these smaller companies and the social enterprises.
Disclaimer: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Deana manages community efforts and creation of thought leadership material at Kavida. For inquiries, reach her at deana@kavida.ai.
