BT Sourced is a recently formed, standalone procurement company within the BT Group (BT), established to challenge the traditional way of buying goods and services by simplifying processes and introducing new technology and partnership-based approaches to how BT works with its suppliers.
Based in Dublin, Ireland, which is emerging as Europe’s leading hub for ‘Big Tech’ businesses and technology start-ups, the company is led by Cyril Pourrat, Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board at BT Sourced. Cyril’s team of 95 category managers control a £13bn annual spend. A large portion of their procurement volume is spent on fiber cables and infrastructure to help BT Group roll out full fiber, 4G, and 5G services across the United Kingdom.
BT Sourced’s mission is to redefine procurement from top to bottom and build a more digital, socially inclusive, diverse, and sustainable business model to kick-start BT Sourced’s ambitious transformation goals. By using the latest advancements in blockchain, AI, robotics, and machine learning, BT Sourced aims to draw on technical innovations and new, partnership-led solutions to streamline BT’s global sourcing and procurement capabilities.
Building a standalone procurement company from the ground up in a new country is a complex endeavor. To play a strategically crucial global function, one of BT Sourced’s key objectives was to establish itself as ‘procurement as a service provider within the BT Group that receives remuneration–based on its success.
By putting itself up to the challenge of redefining the traditional way of buying goods and services through its suppliers, BT Sourced’s new approach relied on leveraging procurement technologies to increase the newly incorporated entities’ bottom line.
Such ambitious transformation initiatives come with their own set of unique business challenges. These obstacles depend on extensive knowledge transfer and employee upskilling programs that needed be successfully implemented across the company. BT Sourced needed to provide its category managers with extensive training and tools to transform its operations and digital procurement capacity — with minimal disruptions to its business operations.
Given the objective of playing a significant role in BT Group’s transformation, BT Sourced needed to upskill its category managers to become more “sales-like” and strategic in their thinking. This would complement their core skill sets in operational efficiency and support them in the day-to-day tactical deployment of their resources. The procurement organization needed to work with BT Group’s key stakeholders to instill a company culture that ingrained top-of-mind strategic thinking into their category manager’s daily routines.
This ambition required consolidating business-critical procurement functions onto a centralized, stable, and scalable platform that provided a complete historical timeline of spend visibility across categories.
“It’s important to keep up to date with the latest technology if you want to move along in your career — that means embracing innovation and not being risk-averse.”
— Cyril Pourrat, Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board, BT Sourced
BT Sourced engaged Cirtuo to implement a category management solution that could handle end-to-end value creation processes for Dublin and London-based category management teams. For example, a category manager can use Cirtuo to collaborate and create high-quality category strategies for stakeholders using a simple interface that delivers data-driven, impactful, and actionable savings opportunities. This provides innovation and accelerates outcomes for BT Sourced and helps standardize processes that benefit from a shared record system with complete stakeholder transparency. Cirtuo’s platform enables BT sourced to make more intelligent forecasts as they manage BTs entire multi-billion pound global sourcing operation.
“Providing proof-of-impact to BT and capturing the pay-for-performance element of BT Sourced’s total compensation enables our procurement team to develop high-quality category strategies that generate savings and present new opportunities.”
— Cyril Pourrat, Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board, BT Sourced
Cirtuo’s AI-enabled Guided Strategy Creation™ software delivers the BT Sourced team precisely what they need to create superior outcomes to run the organization efficiently. Cirtuo’s platform uses machine learning technology to uncover sophisticated data-driven insights into its specific challenges. The benefits of these insights, stored on a central system of record, are helping the organization better collaborate with stakeholders in creating high-quality category strategies that convert into impactful and actionable savings.
BT Sourced is leveraging Cirtuo’s AI-powered software to automate category strategy creation for faster decision making, leading to more significant business impact and value delivery. The organization can now document the entirety of BT Sourced’s employee workflows across all categories by uniting teams in one centralized location. By making the switch to Cirtuo, all records and activities are now adequately maintained and completely visible to key stakeholders — irrespective of their geographic location.
The platform is currently being utilized by Cyril and his team of 45 category managers and has rightly earned its reputation internally as a trusted, secure, and financially transparent record-keeping solution for BT Sourced and the wider BT Group. Cirtuo helps BT Sourced securely and reliably send notifications in real-time to the BT Group to approve and release payments while intuitively forecasting accurate revenue projections for BT Sourced.
Initially, Cirtuo was implemented for BT Sourced as a financial control and workflow visibility tool that has now improved efficiencies far beyond its intended use case as a category management platform.
As a result, BT Group now has a much clearer understanding of its business metrics and more detailed insight into BT Sourced’s day-to-day category management operations. By adopting Cirtuo’s best in class AI-enabled Guided Strategy Creation™ software, BT Sourced’s category managers now benefit from a single, shared, historical view of supplier information. Much like Salesforce, Cirtuo is helping Cyril and his team build better relationships, increase collaboration, generate savings, and increase their bottom line across the board.
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“Our ecosystem starts with a process and solving process pain points by using Cirtuo’s solution, and I market the solution internally as a Salesforce for procurement.ategory strategies that improve our bottom line.”
— Cyril Pourrat, Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board, BT Sourced
