Colin Davies
Associate Consultant
colin.davies@reading.ac.uk
Colin brings expertise in procurement strategy and transformation, category and contract management, supply chain risk management and talent development to SUMS members and clients.
Colin is MBA-qualified with over 25 years’ experience at the Procurement Director level across a broad range of sectors and blue-chip organisations including GSK, Pfizer, EY, Lex/RAC, Cancer Research UK and Sony Europe. He has strong HE Sector experience and between 2014 and August 2021 Colin led the Procurement Team at the University of Surrey, operating both within the Public Sector Procurement Regulations and, since 2018, outside of those regulations.
Colin has extensive experience in leading category teams across most indirect spend areas including Estates and FM, IT, STEMed, Professional services, Marketing, HR, and Travel. He is an expert in category management having acted for three years as the Global Head of (Procurement) Functional Excellence at Pfizer, where he developed the global category management processes, tools and training for several hundred procurement staff.
He takes a value-based commercial approach to procurement to help ensure the Procurement Team, working closely with the internal client, identify all the value levers to optimise service levels, minimise risks and reduce costs. This includes implementing specification optimisation, demand management, target cost down budgeting as well as traditional and leading-edge procurement techniques.
The key success factors have been early engagement, full client buy-in and managing the total lifecycle costs including effective contract/supplier management, which are all the areas where Colin has in-depth expertise.
At the University of Surrey, Colin successfully expanded the Procurement Team to provide dedicated procurement support for both IT and Estates, where these colleagues are co-located as business partners with the clients. This has resulted in the procurement function being positioned as trusted advisors, involved in all major projects and punching above their weight when it comes to delivering savings and commercial value-add. Surrey is in the upper quartile for the HE Sector on the key metrics of savings and the percentage spend impacted by procurement.
Colin’s success is driven by strong engagement with both senior leaders and colleagues at all levels, through listening to what they need and jointly developing solutions on how Procurement can help them achieve their business goals and value over the short, medium and long term.