A new approach for YPO Procurement Services

As 2018 gathers pace, we're transforming our approach to procurement through a reorganised Procurement Services team. Alongside our excellent standards of customer service, a new, market focused approach to procurement will position our markets very firmly at the forefront of everything we do, and with robust strategic category management in place, it will help strengthen how we support our customers going forward.

The Procurement Services function, led by Gillian Askew, will be engaging even more closely with customers to help us better understand pressure points, future priorities, emerging strategies and drive innovations that enable YPO to create frameworks that are easy to access, simple to use and tackle the increasing pressures our customers face.

Gillian says: "YPO strives to develop products and services for our customers that support the drive for real value and that enable organisations to meet their core objectives using procurements that are easy to access and use in very difficult and financially constrained markets.

It's a real privilege to work in public sector procurement right now as the need for effective money management has never been greater. The whole team at YPO are focused on doing whatever we can to help alleviate some of the pressure our customers are facing. Our new structure helps us to align better with our customer markets and enables us to really work at the heart of solving problems through procurement. Budgets have never been under so much sustained pressure and YPO wants to help wherever we can.”

Social value

We're delighted to put dedicated resource into social value, an area of increased importance for our customers. YPO has a strong social value heartbeat - we work hard to connect supply chains and communities and we need to work closely with our customers to help deliver your local social value objectives. We're committed to embedding the UN Sustainable Development Goals in all our procurements and to reflect the socio-economic needs of our customers in our products, services and routes to market. We believe that YPO has a significant role to play in enabling local contribution through our procurements. We aim to work on a national basis but ensure our products can make a real difference at a local level. For more details in this area, contacts should be directed to Melissa Bell. 

Suppliers and partners

As a procurement organisation, we recognise that excellent delivery comes from our supply chains and we aspire to truly recognise and reward the achievements of our supply chain partners.

We want to work as closely with our supply chains as we do our customers and throughout 2018, we'll be introducing some dedicated supplier initiatives, designed to represent our suppliers as well as we possibly can.

Gillian adds: "Often suppliers are not given enough support, even though the increasing pressures of tough economic markets flow directly through to our supply chains. YPO aims to lead from the front in this area with a series of initiatives designed to help and support our incredible supply chains. Details will be announced in 2018 but we hope that our suppliers will welcome the support we aim to offer."

Who’s who

While in the main people remain same within the team, the management tier for Procurement Services has been streamlined to: 

• Gillian Askew, Head of Procurement Services - [email protected] or 07872 420123
• Duncan Spokes - Strategic Markets Manager - Health, Social Care and Education [email protected] or 07872 424689
• David Bemrose - Strategic Relationships Manager - [email protected] or 07738 075463

We currently have an exciting vacancy for a Strategic Markets Manager for Local Authority and Wider Public Sector. Organisation charts will be available shortly with the details of the new team. In the meantime should you require any further information or help, please direct your queries to [email protected] in the first instance and one of our team will be happy to help.