The Big Interview with Amy Head for Pret a Manger

The Procurement Heads Big Interview Series launched in 2017, and features Procurement Professionals throughout London and the Home Counties. It’s an opportunity to shed some light on the specialist world of Procurement and those who work within it. To be featured in Procurement Head’s next Big Interview, contact info@procurementheads.com

How did you get into Procurement?

I did a business studies course at university, and at the time I didn’t really know what Procurement was – I had always quite fancied going into Marketing. If I’m honest, I was kind of getting a feel for what I wanted to do and I spent my third year of uni on placement with Virgin Atlantic as a Buyer’s Assistant – which I genuinely felt quite excited about! On my return to university I made sure I took certain modules that were more Procurement and Supply Chain focused.

At the time, my university was one of the first to allow you to study for your CIPS qualification alongside your degree, and you would get exceptions based on modules you’d taken. When I finished university, I had a couple more modules to top up but I graduated with my degree as well as MCIPS! It was a massive bonus and gave me a great head start. Sadly, I don’t think this is something that universities offer anymore. We’ve got members of our team doing their CIPS qualifications now and the amount of time and commitment they need to give to studying alongside full-time work has been phenomenal.

After graduating, I went to work for Veolia as a Buyer, then I took another Buyer position at Sainsburys before being promoted to Senior Buyer and finally came here as Purchasing Manager and have progressed through to Head of Procurement.

What success are you most proud of in your career to date?

I’d say the success I’m most proud of is creating my role here. I’ve been with Pret for 6 years and when I joined there wasn’t a Procurement function at all. We have a great team of food buyers, and they were just treating indirects like a ‘bolt on’ – it wasn’t managed and there was no official process in place. On joining the business, I set about creating the Procurement function. Six years later, we’re far more embedded and we have a centralised approach to Procurement which is a huge achievement. Naturally it has been a challenge to release some of the controls people have around local sourcing.…. Building the function was both a greenfield and transformational project in terms of introducing new processes and improving the old. Sometimes I lose sight of that but on reflection, looking back at what we’ve achieved – I’m really proud of where we’ve got to.

What does your typical day at work look like for you?

At the moment I travel in from East London to Victoria, getting to the office at 8 o’clock which gives me a bit of time to collect my thoughts and put a theoretical ‘to do’ list in place. Each day is slightly different but typically I have about 3-4 strategic projects running at any one time and, as we’re only a team of two, I’m very much involved with the projects myself. I have one buyer who works for me, who I catch up with informally throughout the day. She’s fantastic and I’m really keen to focus on her development and give her a lot more opportunity with different stakeholder groups.

My days are filled with a series of team meetings with various departments, updating them with key projects we have going on in Procurement, and then project meeting upon project meeting just simply to make sure that we’re on track! There are a lot of curve balls actually – we can get drawn into anything. People will email our CEO directly and ask why we don’t have a reusable coffee cup, and we drop everything and get involved in that! It’s great – makes for a really varied, interesting and enjoyable role!

What key skills or personality traits would you consider essential for anyone hoping to be a Head of Procurement?

Understanding how to fit Procurement to the business’s culture – adjusting the style and approach to Procurement rather than trying to fit a square peg in a round hole!

The ability to influence upwards to influence to company towards more strategic thinking in sourcing.

Achieve balance – leave your ego at the door – compromise a good combination of the rights (price, quality, time and place) to serve the business.

To read the full Big Interview, please visit the Procurement Heads website.