We are working towards building a new way of procurement which will impact our employees, systems, procedures, relationships with suppliers and customers.

Launched early in 2011, our Sourcing Together to Achieve Results (STAR) 2012 programme is reviewing supply chain processes, procedures and skills. Already 112 employees have been trained in skills related to procurement such as The Build, Understand, Yield measures, Execute and Review (BUYER) process, negotiation skills, identification of sources of waste and analytical tools. We are working to standardise all procurement activities across the business, thereby enabling operational efficiencies and sustainable cost reductions in future.

Although we have already documented benefits in terms of seven key performance indicators (savings, procure-to-pay cycle time, reach, working capital improvement, compliance, people development and user satisfaction), we are not able to report quantifiable results to date as we are improving our reporting systems, and will only be implementing our KPIs for each operation over the course of 2012.

We have acknowledged up front that the complexity of the processes, systems and scale of our business makes it challenging to roll out such a wide-ranging programme Group wide, but hope to complete rollout in 2013.