Danish Pastries and Bacon Baps

Good turnout at the Iris Procurement Breakfast with very generous breakast choices ( I just had the fruit!).

Jane Dormer (Head of GB Procurement at Coca Cola) said that agencies should always look to invite their procurement clients into the agencies as soon as they are aware of the procurement person so they can understand the agency and what they are doing for the client. Totally agree. It happens as soon as a new Marketing person is appointed but not when Procurement are appointed (and we won't just look at the chocolate biscuits!).

She also touched on the new value compensation model that Coke have been rolling out globally and have just started to discuss with their UK agencies. It is about paying agencies on output / on their deliverables with zero profit. There is then a performance payment based on agreed measurement. This can be up to 30% of the agreed output level, and there are upper and lower limits on the output. I quite like the concept of paying by output and have worked with a few agencies that have used this model. My only observation is that it is the client 'dictating' the value of the output when all agencies work differently and is this bringing a degree of uniformity and standardisation into the commercial model ? Good food for thought though.

Tony Spong (Head of DM, SP & Integration (I think that is his title sorry Tony if it is not) from AAR) discussed the fact that a pitch is always a good time for the client to have a 'clear out from their garage' and use the pitch process and time to review how they work as a client. I really liked this idea as procurement can really help to evaulate ways of working and processes to make them more effectively and utlimately more efficient for all parties.

At Orange I worked with our contract publishing company - John Brown, to look at one page of amends and the costs that we had incurred. I then sent this information around to the marketing team for them to see. They could see that just by changing one word - what the impact on the timescales and the cost of doing that was. Quite powerful information.