New hires

Cirtuo is pleased to announce the successful onboarding of our Q2 new hires, John Thong, and Luke Thompson. John and Luke will lead the growth of our EU and US operations by each supporting Cirtuo’s customer success, and digital ambitions.

John Thong

With our US expansion in full motion, we invite you to extend a warm welcome to John Thong, who has joined Cirtuo as a Customer Success Partner.

John has 20+ years of experience as a Procurement and Supply Chain professional and is an expert in shaping and implementing procurement strategies that deliver superior outcomes. He has served in various executive roles with T-Mobile, Sprint, Accenture, and the SoftBank Group.

He has led teams responsible for Strategy, Transformation, Digitization, Strategic Sourcing, and Operations.
John also has a deeply rooted desire to invest in and develop people and the community.

As the President of the Board of the Asian American Chamber of Commerce of Kansas City, he is energized by enhancing the economic opportunities for Asian American businesses. John has also served as an adjunct professor at the University of Missouri. He is passionate about teaching and transferring knowledge for Procurement and Supply Chain to the next generation of industry professionals.

John and his wife, Lara, are “semi-retired” marathon runners who now run after their three children (17, 15, & 13 years old) and dog around Kansas City.

Luke Thompson

With our EU and US teams expanding, we invite you to extend a warm welcome to Luke Thompson, who recently joined Cirtuo as our Head of Content Design. Luke will continue to support the company’s growth by managing our website development, UX and is responsible for leading Cirtuo’s digital ambitions with the wider Cirtuo team.

Luke is an experienced multi-disciplinary content designer with a background in the Dutch and SE-Asian technology sectors. He has held digital roles at Energy Publishing Asia Pacific as part of IHS Markit and for CTB Inc. (Berkshire Hathaway). In addition, he formerly worked as a Website-UX Manager for The European Fine Art Foundation (TEFAF) and global Dutch IaaS provider, Leaseweb.

Luke is fascinated by technology, design, economics, and, most recently – procurement. He’s an avid botanist, a fan of bad jokes, and enjoys spending time in the garden at home in Amsterdam when offline.

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Navigating complex business environments through category strategies – reflections on the Cirtuo Procurement Forum 2024

Twelve months. That is the time between the first and the second Cirtuo Procurement Forum. Twelve months, since we witnessed the resurrection of category management in Procurement with a renewed focus on customer centricity and aligning category strategies with business objectives. It is fair to say that the timing couldn’t have been better. Twelve months in which GenAI shook the business world, and Category Management claimed its place as the guiding light to navigate complex business environments.

Demonstrating tangible business value by implementing actionable category strategies

Too often, category strategies end up in drawers. They don’t get implemented, or struggle with low adoption. Reasons range from low stakeholder involvement or buy-in to limited practical applicability under given market conditions or simply botched implementations. With disjointed project planning, task management, and value-tracking activities, bringing the carefully created strategy to life is not a given. In the end, a strategy not implemented is a wasted strategy.

Winning over stakeholders: achieving strategic alignment in Procurement

In the webinar “Winning over stakeholders: Achieving strategic business alignment in Procurement”, Michael DeWitt, VP Indirect Spend Management & Center of Excellence at Walmart International, Sam de Frates, VP Procurement EMEAA at Mars, and Drasko Jelavic, CEO of Cirtuo, discussed with Fabian Lampe, Founder of Advance Procurement, the importance of engaging stakeholders, aligning Procurement with their objectives, and translating the objectives into actionable category, supplier, and negotiation strategies.