There were several key elements of our approach at the ODA. We held workshops with our directors to agree wider objectives – beyond the buildings and infrastructure itself – at the outset, which also developed the senior level buy that was fundamental in establishing broad support and understanding of procurement.

We then delivered these wider policy objectives and priority themes by building them into our procurement process and measuring progress in the subsequent contracts, at tier one and throughout the supply chain.

By engaging a delivery partner, we mobilised high-quality resources in a short time and could also demobilise them as appropriate and bring in different skill sets.  We also ensured the delivery partners’ objectives were aligned with our own, driving the right behaviour through the programme.

Within the supply chain, we identified all of our critical contractors at tier 1 level and at tier 2, and monitored their financial stability, which allowed us to take remedial or contingent action where this deteriorated. We also monitored supply capacity throughout the supply chain, particularly to prevent specialist suppliers over-committing themselves.

We also worked to open up competition throughout the supply chain using initiatives such as CompeteFor, creating many more opportunities for competition than would have been available, especially for SMEs. For details on these activities, you can visit the Learning Legacy website.

This may have been put in place, but our remaining time before the ODA demobilises isn’t all spent reminiscing.

We are now thinking about how we can prepare for games time and, in particular, what arrangements can we make to cover the ‘what if’ scenarios and how can we balance seamless delivery with value for the taxpayer in a super-pressurised environment.

It doesn’t get any easier (thank goodness).

We, the collective purchasing staff, have collated our thoughts on how you could help us to help you. Here are a few things we hope you will keep in mind:

1. You are our leader and we need you to lead. Help us tackle those difficult business partners and ensure we get a seat at the table. Assist us by having those tough conversations when we struggle to get co-operation from the business. Without your leadership, it is likely we may only have minimal success from the bottom up.

2. Understand the business and partake in key decisions. We aren’t seen as a participant in business decisions by other divisions in the company, including our stakeholders; and chances are you won’t be yet either. Do what you can to drive the culture by making sure your role on the board is meaningful; and educate those around you to ensure we have an appropriate role in management teams.

3. Treat us how you want us to be… not how we currently are. If you believe purchasing should add value to the organisation and be a strategic partner, we can only start to do so by walking the talk. Your faith in us, and your assistance in removing non-value-add work, will be the first step towards building this vision.

4. Keep the communication lines open. We like to know we are part of your big picture. Visit us, talk to us, share your visions with us. We will reward you with our dedication and hard work.

Yours faithfully

Your purchasing staff

☛ Claudine Swiatek is head of materials procurement at the engineering asset management firm Downer EDi.

At the CIPS Supply Management Awards 2011, I was delighted to go up on stage with the rest of the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) team to receive procurement’s equivalent of both the King of the Mountains and Overall Leader jerseys, winning ‘Best Public Procurement’ and ‘Overall Winner’.

This was the first time that a public body has won the overall award and we all feel honoured to have been recognised in this way.

I use the Tour de France classifications as a metaphor as there are a number of similarities to our programme.

The Tour is a tremendous feat of endurance, with riders covering over 2,200 miles in three weeks, while at our peak effort we let over 130 major contracts in 15 months. A bad crash can be disastrous for whole teams on the Tour, preventing them winning or event finishing. For us, the equivalent would be legal challenges to our procurements that could delay the award of contracts, holding back the construction programme and completion. We avoided challenges and the procurement programme stayed on track.

The Tour and our programme involve great team work – the Tour with its mechanics, soigneurs and lead-out riders who sacrifice their own glory to get the team in the best position, while at the ODA we built an integrated procurement team with our delivery partner, as well as a range of consultants and interim staff who have supported our core team.

It is also pleasing to see that many of our procurement colleagues, who have now left the programme, picked up the news and sent messages of congratulation. Really, they need only congratulate themselves as they have all contributed to this successful delivery.

To find read about the ODA’s success at the CIPS Supply Management Awards 2011, including awards photographs and a video interview with John Fernau, click here.

The fundamental commercial principle behind public cloud is standardisation, so most service providers have core principles that they are not prepared to be flexible about.

Aside from the considerable issues arising from where data might be sent and held, in my experience cloud contracting has included the following issues:

• Providers can’t yet commit to high levels of availability or no customisation of the service, for example client-driven down times
• Providers can’t yet guarantee rapid response and issue resolution times
• There is little independent assurance regarding information security and/or ability to confirm compliance for different regulatory regimes
• There are none or few service levels, other than an ill-defined availability level
• For major application services, providers required a contractual obligation for the customer to be current with specified technologies that enable the service – a real challenge for organisations with a large legacy estate

While the range of cloud benefits are certainly there to be had, the challenges above may limit the immediate adoption of public cloud for core services such as email or major business processes.

That said, private cloud (essentially managed service provision that all IT buyers are familiar with, but with a few technological changes) is definitely an option to consider. While potentially not delivering quite the same level of cost savings, it does facilitate many of the other benefits associated with the cloud model, such as flexibility, speed to market and rapid innovation.

As cloud services mature and buyers become more confident in the service providers’ abilities to deliver the level of service required, public cloud may well become as much of an option for service provision as the various models of private cloud.

Alaba Adedayo is director of performance improvement – supply chain & operations at Ernst & Young

After the expected congestion of London, the route became even more crowded in the Surrey hills as a result of narrow roads and the combination of increased gravity and rusty machinery (both human and metal).

As I swerved around a cyclist dressed as huntsman, who in turn was chasing another dressed as a fox, I narrowly avoided another dressed as a French onion seller (complete with garlic and odour), who then disappeared into the verge.

I pondered the similarities between my predicament and that of a buyer in a crowded market where demand is high and supply limited.

I have seen this scenario before, in a past life at international development specialist Crown Agents. In the aftermath of major disasters, aid agencies and relief organisations would scramble to react and provide shelter to those affected, with their procurement teams chasing dwindling and increasingly costly stocks of emergency supplies and tents, in particular. We did try various methods of preventing this scenario, but the only one that really worked was to ‘buy forward’ and contract for these stocks ahead of the requirement for them.

At the Olympic Delivery Authority we, along with the other bodies involved in hosting the London 2012 Olympic games, are facing the possibility of similar market issues in event-related equipment and personnel. As before, there is only one certain method of avoiding escalating prices as buyers compete against each other and that is to determine the requirement now, run the procurement and enter into a contract before the market becomes congested.

Of course this isn’t easy and procurement has a key role in driving the businesses it supports to make key decisions on what it will require well before these decisions would normally be made.

In these situations, it is often better to make a decision – even if it turns out to be wrong in parts – rather than wait for requirement certainty, but then face a difficult market. This may not make us popular within the business in the short term, but it will help to prevent markets like those Surrey hills and make them more like the fast and open roads of Sussex that thankfully followed.

Data is also crucial to managing companies and organisations; in procurement terms this is normally to track and control spend, for instance, how many suppliers are used and how spend is distributed among them. This allows areas of leverage to be identified and maximised and un-procured vendors to be identified and brought under procurement control and commercial management.

At the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA), spend is under particular scrutiny as we seek to track the economic benefits of the Games, which is almost entirely based within the UK. We are regularly asked about how many contracts we have let to companies in particular areas, from as large as the whole country, down to individual towns.

The issue of course is that although all of this data needs to be correct, as strategic decisions are based on it, it is easy for it to be wrong. Just as if I enter the size of my bike’s wheels incorrectly into the computer I may end up foolishly entering bike races or alternatively buying a new bike in a desperate attempt to go faster (although the latter is quite likely in any case).

A single point of capture is crucial to ensure that contract and spend data is accurate and not under-reported (where spend is going through different and unreported channels). At the ODA we use our ERP system as this point of capture as payments can only be made through this channel, giving us a complete view of our spend. That is not to say just because we have complete data it is guaranteed to be accurate. We still need to check that we are not double-counting information or including data in error.

Fortunately we have a small army of observers to keep an eye on us.

☛ John Fernau is deputy head of procurement at the Olympic Delivery Authority

At the Olympic Delivery Authority, we have used e-tendering and e-evaluation for all procurements over £25,000 and this technology has been crucial to us.

It has delivered robustness, efficiency and resilience to the process, providing a full audit trail of the decisions we have taken. It has enabled more than a thousand evaluators, based in different sites, to log on to a web-based portal and conduct their evaluations, reviewing numerous documents from suppliers. That has allowed us to keep to our procurement programme and therefore the construction programme of building the Olympic Park in Stratford.

But could the technology be pushed further? Could the workload of our procurement managers be reduced?

Potentially yes, but when we deal with a new stakeholder, who has never dealt with a formal procurement before, they are often sceptical of the process and are nervous about releasing their decision-making control to a process they don’t understand.

At this point the procurement manager must explain how the whole process works and how the stakeholder is involved in it, making it clear that the checks and balances in the process, (such as having two evaluators for each question and a final consensus scorer), are to ensure that decisions are fair and the process is transparent.

It is this stakeholder management that is fundamental to the smooth running of a procurement process. Maintaining the satisfaction of all involved ensures that the final result is a good one.

So just as tyre technology could be improved, (please let it be so!) it is still the human being riding the bike that is fundamental to the journey.

E-procurement is a vital tool for smooth procurement but it is stakeholder management that is fundamental to delivery.

☛ John Fernau is deputy head of procurement at the Olympic Delivery Authority

Actually this last one did offer a slightly different take, bringing data together from various sources and analysing the data to provide answers and conclusions. If it works, I can see some value in it. It got me thinking – what do you lose by getting a computer to make the deductions for you? It’s like the wizards you get in your office software. Yes they will help you produce a very nice graph quickly, but in doing so you gain no knowledge of how to do it yourself, and you miss out on all the options you could choose to get your graph to show the data precisely how you want it to.

I like my staff to understand the numbers, how they interact with each other and the differences between various options. I want them to do scenario analysis, not just to see what the final outcome is but also to understand how the various parameters interact. Maybe there is an optimum position that can only be discovered by doing the calculations yourself. Only that understanding of the numbers can uncover a pricing anomaly that allows a negotiation challenge to be made to a supplier.

In another example, I was recently presented with an Excel spreadsheet that showed Supplier A had scored 12/20 on the commercials and pricing compared to 14/20 for its competitor. But it wasn’t until I asked for the underlying pricing information that it became apparent the first supplier was more than twice as expensive as the alternative.

Excel and the like are fantastically useful tools and should be used to take the burden out of calculations. They enable quick and complex ‘what if’ scenarios to be explored. But they should never be used as a substitute for really understanding the numbers.

Given our fixed deadline for delivery, contractor mobilisation and delivery timescales, and the time required for the procurement process, our programme sometimes forces us to go to market before all of our requirements are fully defined.

The problem is then how to elicit strong commercial offers from bidders and stay within the law without a firm scope or specification?

I doubt we are unique in this experience because it seems that the requirement uncertainty increases in proportion to the complexity of the project and the number of stakeholders involved. Take for example the collaborative procurement of shared services.

Our approach is twofold. The first is to go with what you’ve got. Often an element of the scope (hopefully the core of it) is defined and this can be used as the basis to drive the procurement forward. The known scope can then be built on with options to cover the uncertain elements.

Commercially, the core scope can be used to obtain firm pricing with some sort of rate card to support the uncertain scope. Also, if the general requirement is known but the specific details are not, the procurement can be let as a framework. This allows the specific details to be firmed up at a later date in a call-off contract.

The second is to engage the market as a way of using its expertise to suggest solutions, both informally prior to the procurement process in a programme of soft market engagement, and formally in a procedure such as competitive dialogue.

In both engagement models, care must be taken to ensure that the buyer’s objectives are being pursued rather than the supplier’s.

Also, if the requirement is known enough to identify the results required and the client organisation trusts the market (and its procurement function) the scope can be let as outcome based – giving the market freedom to propose the best technical solution.

There’s no such thing as a perfect scope of works or services (you would hope that goods are correctly specified, but that is another story).

So, if procurement is to enable the business it supports, we must always be flexible in our approach and employ these practices to some extent.

☛ John Fernau is deputy head of procurement at the Olympic Delivery Authority

Climbing those hills always gives you time to think. When I turned up on Friday night at the house, one of our party – who frankly isn’t the most technically savvy of individuals – was using his iPad to check the weather for the next day’s walk.

Now I have been able to access the net in the Lakes for a number of years – routinely getting out my 3G card, starting my VPN client, entering my password etc, etc .

In short, I had to jump a few technical hurdles, deal with occasional frustrations and have a little technical know-how to get it to work. Many people are turned off by having to do this – a form of technical dyslexia, if you like. My friend would be a good example of such a person.

So from his perspective, the fact that he could just turn on his iPad to get the internet justifies any extra cost, or lack of USB port, or flash video etc. In fact, he probably doesn’t even know what those things are – and why should he? He just wants it to work.

Apart from the great aesthetic design, Apple is so successful because it delivers technology that is not quite bleeding edge, but is reliable and simple for the average person to use.

So perhaps I shouldn’t be berating buyers for buying iPhones or iPads. Woe betide any IT person I see using one, though. And don’t get me started on iTunes!

•    Guy Allen is vice-president of global procurement at Fujitsu

About Guy Allen

Vice president of global procurement at Fujitsu since January 2010, Guy previously worked as director of Sourcing and Supply Services at Fujitsu Services . He has also worked as the director of procurement at Abbey National (between 2002 and 2006) and was director of global IT procurement at GlaxoSmithKline for more than 10 years (January 1992-February 2002).