VANQUIS BANKING GROUP
“ This was a monumental undertaking ,” Steven adds . “ It started at the board and had to go all the way down to all of the infrastructure .”
Some of this infrastructure needed serious rehauling . The Group had three legacy IT infrastructures determined not to be viable , so Steven and his team had to support the integration of a brand new cloud-based IT stack into the procurement strategy and the migration of products onto the new IT stack .
“ We ’ ve been supporting the IT teams and the development teams so they ’ ll be able to purchase the other smaller products needed to glue all of these big products together ,” Steven says . “ It was critical they were able to do this in a reasonably fast and agile fashion so that we don ’ t slow the delivery of the overall project .”
To achieve this procurement had to be engaged from day one , ready to go with products contracted and systems set up to begin configuration and implementation processes .
“ We worked with the different teams around the business to help them partner with the right suppliers . We helped them build their transformation plan alongside our own .” Steven adds .
The finance team was also transforming during this time . Procurement needed to coordinate with them to balance supplier delivery and internal time because both teams had systems being delivered in parallel . “ So they were looking to unify their general ledger and we were looking to bring out a single P2P system ,” Steven explains . “ We ran these two projects in parallel because there was an awful lot of crossover , they were directly linked as purchasing orders are connected to the general ledger and determine if invoices get paid .”
Prior to delivering these systems , sending a spend report across the Vanquis Bank Group would take someone in the procurement team up to three weeks to collect and merge the data . After the delivery a report could be processed and delivered in minutes , giving the procurement team a live view of daily , weekly and monthly spend activity .
“ This enabled us to create much more targeted category plans and grow more flexible in the way we do things ,” Steven explains . “ So , for example , we ’ ve created a policy that empowers the category managers and the sources in my team to work out what ’ s the best way to market so they can do as light a touch as possible or the full flavour of a tender as long as it ’ s appropriate for what we ’ re trying to achieve .”
Ultimately this has enhanced the flexibility of procurement at Vanquis Banking Group , enabling the team to build long-term plans and strategies centred around financial data reporting .
Balancing regulations and business objectives Banks and regulation are like cars and handbrakes : partnered together for a reason .
Financial institutions like Vanquis are duty-bound to comply with the regulations laid out by regulatory bodies such as the Prudential Regulation
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