And that’s a wrap! An incredible three days of inspiration, collaboration and networking saw the World Procurement Congress 2024 bring together more than 1,000 procurement rockstars in London, culminating in the glamour of the World Procurement Awards.
What an experience, what an inspiration, what a community!
It’s incredibly difficult to give justice to the sheer level of insight that was shared across the days of this event; the amount of progress that individual procurement executives will make having had the opportunity to hear first-hand from hundreds of global organisations.
Knowledge shared is a priceless commodity. And with $10tn of collective revenues represented by those organisations present at the Congress, that’s a lot of knowledge, and a lot of commercial influence.
The theme of the event was fully aligned with our wider Glide Path strategy, which we are using to bring focus and purpose to the conversations, the content and the curation of the activities that take place across the entire Procurement Leaders community.
Our concept of Horizon 2030: Glide Paths for Sustainable Growth resonated well with guests across every part of the agenda. Those individual paths of ESG, resilience, performance, partnerships and digitalisation proved hugely relevant, providing real focus within which we will be able to drive real progress and real business and societal impact.
Our first speaker at WPC was Dan Bartel, CPO of American Airlines and until recently the multi-award-winning CPO of Schneider Electric, and he tied his visionary session into the Glide Path concept nicely. How much progress had he seen during his career was one question he posed; but how much opportunity and how much upside is there still to go was the bigger and more important one.
He was in no doubt, that while this function has progressed incredibly far and that we are delivering meaningful impact across the areas of our five Glide Paths, we are only just getting started.
It’s a positive message. We have built a platform to drive impact across all areas of the business spectrum, which in turn will have extremely positive outcomes for society more widely.
It’s a privilege and humbling to be part of that.
A lifetime of achievement
Perhaps my favourite moment of the whole week was having the opportunity to join Procurement Leaders CEO Nandini Basuthakur on stage at the World Procurement Awards to hand out the final gong of the evening, the Lifetime Achievement Award.
And there has been no-one more deserving than Bertrand Conquéret, President of Henkel Global Supply chain and CPO of Henkel, co-founder of Together for Sustainability and of the Sustainable Procurement Pledge.
Bertrand has worked incredibly hard to help build the platform from which this profession can build from, from which we can drive sustainable growth strategies that support business priorities and societal necessities.
Like he says, it’s the responsibility of procurement to do so.
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