Before taking on the top procurement job at Prudential Global Digital Services, Richard Beaumont held leading procurement positions at the Co-Op Bank and Rolls-Royce. Combined with his background in consultancy at McKinsey and as an Officer in the British Army, Richard’s deep knowledge and understanding of the procurement profession position him perfectly to steer discussions as Chairman, Panel Moderator and Roundtable Leader.

Michael joined KPN in 1998 as a Process Engineer and took on increasingly senior roles until 2008 when he joined the commercial innovations department of Telfort, another leading Dutch telecommunications business. Over the next 8 years he moved between KPN and BASE, always focusing on innovation projects, until taking his current role as Head of Corporate Procurement for IT, in which he is responsible for group-wide IT hardware, software and services procurement.

Elena Bernardo joined Amazon EU as Director of Procurement in October 2014, based in Luxembourg. Prior to Amazon, Elena spend nine years with McKinsey and Company as a leader in their Operations practice, based in London and serving clients in North America and Europe. She has an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a BA from Brown University.

Mars, Borealis and Masterfoods are just 3 global businesses where Richard has held senior procurement positions over the past 24 years, each role involving production, technical and engineering responsibilities. In his current role, working for the family-owned Erber Group, Richard has overall ownership of spend management and engineering oversight, making him a unique business expert contributing to this edition of ProcureCon Europe.

With 10 years’ experience in procurement training and practice Budi now heads up the Market Approach team at Schiphol Group – in this role he is responsible for bringing in knowledge and innovation to benefit the business. In addition he has an integration role to coordinate procurement projects between Schiphol and Aeroport de Paris, making him a good source for best practice collaborative sourcing.

Arjan is an expert in rapidly analysing markets, formulating strategic plans and effectively leading employees through significant change. In his role as senior VP Procurement, Leader Indirect Materials & Services he is globally responsible for all indirect Materials & Services spend within Philips, focusing on sustainable performance improvement and upgrading organisational capabilities.

Lianne has over 25 years’ experience in engineering and the steel industry, working in three different Corus and Tata businesses, mainly in manufacturing, engineering, and technical roles. A Fellow of the Institute of Materials, Minerals & Mining (FIMMM) and also a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FRAE), she is also a Visiting Professor at Cardiff University of Engineering. Currently her main areas of focus are achieving large savings in focused categories via cross functional teams and improved end user engagement. Additionally, Transforming from regional based procurement functions to a pan European procurement function, which will include increased training and capability of 330 employees.

Ton built an international career with Royal DSM, taking various senior management roles before joining AkzoNobel as Chief Procurement Officer (CPO), reporting directly to the Board of Management (later Executive Committee). In his current role as CPO and SVP Supply Chain Excellence at NV Bekaert SA he directly reports to the Bekaert Group Executive. A lifelong learner Ton completed the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School and continues to take an interest in business optimisation in every sector.

Brian has more than 25 years’ experience in senior management positions in the Telecom, Media and IT/Digital Industry including several C-level roles. As Chief Procurement Officer of Teliasonera in Denmark Brian is responsible for setting and executing the HR procurement strategy for the business in the Nordic region, giving him a unique strategic perspective on developing skilled workforces in a fast-growing regional market.

Deeply involved in the digital business revolution from an early time, starting out as a web designer, Andreas has held increasingly senior procurement positions at companies including Hitachi Zosen Inova. For the past 4 years he has held the role of CPO at Ringier, an innovative business in Switzerland which is now largest international operating media company in the country.

With more than 20 years in procurement at P&G,Henkel, Colgate Palmolive and Suntory Europe, Nina has moved quickly into the most senior procurement positions in the businesses she has worked for. Recently her three key focus areas were about creating a high performing Category Management Procurement organization over Europe, improving stakeholder management, developing business leaders in her team and flowing innovation from the supplier base.

Andreas has over 20 years’ experience in the consulting sector starting out at Baan and then spending over 11 years at Capgemini in various procurement roles. As CPO he currently manages the procurement team and spend in the UK, Nordic and CEE regions, providing him with unique regional experiences in both transformation and supplier relationship management to share at ProcureCon Europe in 2016.

Reporting to the Management Board in Germany, Juergen oversees addressable spend up to 350 million euros in his role as the national CPO of BNP. Other responsibilities include professionalising procurement activities, deploying supplier risk management strategies and executing the savings roadmap in a cross-entity programme entitled ‘Simple and Efficient Germany’. His background includes acting as CEO for a publishing business and various senior management roles at Consors Bank and later BNP Paribas.

Recently appointed as Chief Procurement Officer of the biggest Danish Pension Fund, PFA Pension, Mikkel moved from a senior procurement role at Maersk Group to take on this new challenge. Previous experience includes 4 years as Strategic Purchasing Executive at Novo Nordisk then Rolls Royce, dividing his time between the UK and Denmark. Mikkel’s background in consultancy early on in his career make him an excellent presenter and analyst of complex concepts, perfect for leading discussions at ProcureCon Europe 2016.

Johan currently oversees all procurement of indirect materials for Volvo’s Car Group, based out of Gothenburg, Sweden. In this capacity he manages a team of category leaders and spend in excess of 300 million euros. Previous experience in consultancy, business leadership and start-ups make Johan an exciting and knowledgeable speaker, providing a new perspective to challenges facing the procurement and sourcing audience at ProcureCon conferences.

Winner of the 2014 CIPS Procurement & Supply Chain professional of the year award, Fabienne is an international procurement executive with 20 year experience in senior management roles at major global businesses including GSK, Britvic and now the Co-Op Group. Her strong business acumen and dedication to professionalization of procurement make her an excellent discussion leader.

Miguel has over 15 years’ experience in various senior sourcing and procurement roles at some of the worlds’ biggest businesses including GE, BMS and for the past 6 years, Nokia. His current remit is to lead the global procurement organisation at Finland’s biggest communications organisation at a time when the business is undergoing dramatic and exciting change. Miguel’s expertise is in leadership and a deep understanding of how supplier markets operate, especially when it comes to harnessing innovation.

With 10+ years’ experience in sourcing first at Egmont and, for the last 5 years, at Denmark’s leading Pharma business, Lundbeck, Ditte has managed sourcing across all categories of spend. Her passion and expertise are anchored in managing and motivating teams to achieve better than expected savings whilst creating supportive relationships with stakeholders.

Maria Madrid Rodenas manages strategic sourcing and purchasing of all the international contracts for 401 properties in 24 different countries for the NH Group of Hotels. With corporate assets worth in excess of 1.9 billion euros NH is the 4th biggest Hotel Group in Europe. Maria’s role includes managing risk and insurance across the global portfolio as well as the global teams who oversee sourcing and change programmes in the business. With 20 years’ experience in sourcing and procurement Maria has a wealth of experience to share in outsourcing best practice.

With more than 16 years’ experience in procurement roles at P&G and Bacardi-Martini, Matthias currently heads a global organization across packaging development and innovation delivery. Matthias’ biggest challenge today is to successfully lead a transition into a new integrated organization structure across global operations functions.

Pedro has a wealth of experience at the highest levels of procurement leadership including CPO roles at NH Hotels Group, L’Oreal and now SGS. Concurrent with these responsibilities Pedro found the time to develop his own business, the leading Group Procurement Organisation for the hospitality industry in Europe called Coperama. Innovative, pioneering and generous with his experience, Pedro will be an excellent Chairman.

Nafeh Masood is an experienced senior leader who has a strong understanding of how to leverage technology to “ignite” organizational performance and mature businesses to drive cross team collaboration, process efficiencies, improving customer experience and product offering. He currently works as Chief Procurement Officer for New York University, Abu Dhabi Campus. Nafeh has served in capacity of a Chief data officer for enterprise-wide data processing and data mining of indirect goods and services for Sears Holding. His strong expertise in Procurement and Information Technology has helped him serve as an expert to transform the supply chain processes to a “predictive” model by optimizing existing elements within an organization.

Mildred has a unique end-to-end view on procurement operations having worked on strategic projects at Genpact and from 2013 at Ericsson, where she leads projects in the global sourcing office. No stranger to ProcureCon events Mildred has been an active member of the Women in Procurement sessions over the past 18 months and will be leading the Women in Procurement Workshop at ProcureCon Europe in 2016.

Mihaela is a regional sourcing leader in Ericsson’s global sourcing services office, responsible for managing IS/IT and Business Services categories, and reporting directly to Simona Pavelescu, overall head of the global sourcing team. With over 14 years’ experience in various sourcing and procurement roles at major businesses in Romania including Anheuser-Busch InBev, OMV Petrom and now Ericsson, Mihaela is the perfect speaker to share insight into unlocking innovation from your supply chain.

Ravi has a unique mix of experience that he brings to life during his unmissable workshops, drawing on a residency as a Neurosurgeon, consultancy as a senior practice leader at McKinsey and Company and most recently as a senior executive at Novartis Pharma. Also an author, of the book ‘Emotional Business,’ Ravi challenges conventional thinking about connectedness and relationships to boost business profitability and sustainability.

Matthias has held tactical and strategic procurement management roles at various businesses in Germany since 1997 including Manz and VAG-Group, taking over as Chief Procurement Officer at Rohm in early 2016. Drawing on experience transforming very different procurement organisations in different sectors Matthias will be offering a toolkit for new and established CPOs to consider as they enter new phases of change.

Marcel oversees in excess of 1 billion swiss francs of spend for the Pharma business Lonza, managing a growing team currently of 7. With more than 5 years’ experience in sourcing and 6 in auditing and investor relations Marcel has a rare understanding of how business and procurement can co-deliver value to customers, a topic he will be exploring at ProcureCon Europe in 2016.

Christian is a rare example of a CPO who was a CFO and a finance expert with more than 15 years’ experience in the role. In this sense he provides a complete perspective of how procurement organisations can transform to deliver even more value for the business, a process he will bring to life during his presentation on Transformation Best Practice on November 8th.

Aamir has held a variety of senior procurement roles at 3 of the biggest businesses in Europe: Beiersdorf, Mars and now as Chief Procurement Officer at Jacobs Douwe Egberts. Not all of Aamir’s time has been in Europe, nearly 6 years were spent in Asia between Thailand and China, providing him with a truly global perspective on procurement transformation best practice. Don’t miss his session on the topic on November 8th.

Doug is a Guru on Networking, Behavioural Psychology and Relationship Management, whose services are sought after by Major Corporations around the World and also some of the biggest names in Sport to help them manage their Sponsorship obligations. This includes the Elite, in Soccer (including David and Victoria Beckham.!), Tennis, Golf (The Ryder Cup) and Formula 1, so you can imagine what his address book looks like! His company slogan is “the people behind great people” and his passion for people development is both insightful and inspiring. So don’t miss this session on ““Emotional Intelligence” What amateurs ignore and professionals exploit as I know from experience you will feel refreshed, energised and equipped to take your Networking and Relationship management up not one gear, but two!

Gordon was appointed to his current role as Group Purchase Director for Rolls-Royce in April 2016. Prior to this he has held a range of senior leadership roles across Operations, Supply Chain Management and Purchasing at both group and divisional level. He has successfully led major global organizations with both operational and profit and loss accountability, developing an expertise across the Aerospace, Energy and Marine market sectors.

JJ Van der Meer joined PA Consulting in 2015 as a member of their Management Group in the Consumer & Manufacturing sector. JJ has over 20 years industry experience from global leadership roles in FMCG and Pharmaceutical companies including Unilever, FrieslandCampina and GSK. He has a broad ‘End2End’ experience following leadership roles in Supply Chain Management, Procurement, Manufacturing, Co-Manufacturing and R&D / Product Development. He was Global VP Procurement for Unilever, and his most recent role before joining PA was Head of Procurement / CPO for GSKs Global Manufacturing Division, responsible for the supply of all materials and services to around 75 factories around the world. He is experienced in leading significant transformational change projects and was responsible for the delivery of step-change organisational capabilities, spend and working capital savings, complexity reduction, business process outsourcing and building of strategic alliances.

Ann-Francoise Versele has spent most of her career as a senior legal counsel only recently switching to take on a senior procurement role at NV Bekaert as global category manager corporate services. With such a wealth of legal expertise Ann-Francoise is well positioned to offer insight into the opportunities offered by changing relationships outside the business with suppliers and in the hidden possibilities of partnerships with business stakeholders too.

Giuseppe Conti has over 20 years of Procurement experience with leading multinationals (P&G, Novartis, Merck) and over 10 years of teaching experience at leading Business Schools (including Oxford, HEC Paris, INSEAD, IMD, ESADE and Bocconi). He is the founder of Conti Advanced Business Learning (www.cabl.ch), a company that specialises in negotiation and influencing training. He is also a Director at Merck in Switzerland.

Anthony heads up the procurement organisation at Eir, the Republic of Ireland’s biggest telecoms business, managing in excess of 600 million GBP of direct and indirect spend each year. With a wealth of experience in contract lifecycle management and reconfiguring P2P processes, Anthony will be sharing his lessons learned getting the most from limited resources and achieving operational excellence.

Nicolas Passaquin is a global executive with twenty years of hands-on international experience in sourcing & procurement, successful in building high-performance teams and having led several restructuring efforts focused at maximizing the return on investment in supply chain and procurement resources.  

Nicolas worked in Paris, London, Singapore and couple of cities in Switzerland in hospitality, airline, baby food and nutrition sectors before joining Thomson Reuters, the world’s leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals. 

In his current position, he is leading a large multicultural team of Sourcing professional spread across 22 locations in Asia Pacific, Latin America and Emea. His responsibilities include leading the strategic sourcing team in those regions, the Global Travel category team and the Sourcing Shared Services Centres (which he designed and set up).

Majk Strika joined ARI in July 2014 as the company’s Director of European Sales. In his time with ARI, he has successfully built a significant foundation of strategic business partnerships that has helped drive ARI’s growth in the market. A graduate of the University of Augsburg in Germany, Strika has nearly two decades of experience in the fleet management industry working with large, multi-national companies in strategic leadership roles.

Wendy has held a range of procurement leadership roles in large multi-national engineering and technology companies, predominantly in Aerospace and Industrial sectors. She is currently Head of Group Purchasing for Rolls-Royce where she is working alongside the purchasing leadership teams in Aerospace, Marine, Nuclear and Energy sectors to develop and deliver a strategic transformation programme.

With more than 25 years’ experience in procurement Peter did a lot of tenders. Recently Peter tendered the development of the new twin Airport from Schiphol: Lelystad Airport. Those tenders were done with Best Value (Procurement). A Best Value (Procurement) market approach is quite different than the usual market approaches. At ProcureCon Peter likes to share his experiences from this game changer with other procurement professionals.

Mike has worked in nearly every area of recruitment during his 20 plus years in the industry. His experience includes SME 360 recruitment management, Corporate client management, RPO and MSP solution design, sales and implementation and business transformation as Managing Director responsible for the turnaround of the UK arm of a global recruitment IT business. A technologist at heart Mike is passionate about recruitment and the evolution of the sector.

Jean-Noël is an executive coach with main practices in career management, leadership & team development and change management.

He has previously served as Global Procurement Director with multi B$ accountability across all spend categories and as Regional CPO, successfully leading multinational teams over 25 years. This specific experience leads him to offer unparalleled capabilities to accompany Procurement executives in their strategic duties, including relationship management at large as a key success factor.

As an experienced leader, Jean-Noël has also a successful track record in transforming multinational organizations. He has also developed corporate Supply Chain education programs, served as mentor and trainer on leadership and technical matters.

Jean-Noel is certified in the field of Human Ressources Management and Professional Coaching in addition to his primary food technology and packaging education.

James May has worked in the talent acquisition solution industry for 16 years and has extensive experience of implementing, operating and expanding Managed Service Provider and Recruitment Process Outsourcing operations for major clients. James joined Allegis Global Solutions in 2010 as the first Operations Manager in EMEA and was pivotal to our exponential growth in the UK and Europe through client expansions and new business wins.

James is now our most senior solution designer in Europe applying his extensive knowledge and experience to support the integrated functioning of our teams as part of the future state service delivery to new and existing clients in EMEA.

Alex Li is the Principal Standards Analyst from Microsoft. He is responsible for enabling global regulatory consistency, business growth, and customer trust by leveraging international standards. His experience in the technology industry was concentrated in developing international standard and influencing government policies. He has been with Microsoft for seven years and SAP for ten years prior. Alex earned his MBA from Georgetown University and BS from University of Michigan.

Richard has almost 20 years of Procurement experience developed in a broad range of industries and categories. His current role as AstraZeneca’s Procurement Improvement and Innovation Lead provides him with the opportunity to engage with the business on a broad range of major change and improvement programmes. After recently leading the implementation of AZ’s Operational Global Procurement Services Programme (OGPS) his focus is now upon the implementation of their Transactional GPS solution, along with the implementation of AZ’s Procurement Innovation strategic priority.

Anton was a Program leader of the Global MTS Procurement transformation across all categories and MTS Subsidiaries. As a result, a centralized Procurement category management approach had been implemented with effectively automated operational process. 

At present moment, Anton is leading Contract management function.