There's a lot spoken about diversity and inclusion.

But one thing's for sure. The industrial manufacturing sector and SMEs tend to lack behind the larger corporates and professional services industries when it comes to diversity.

While a lot is spoken and written about making procurement teams more diverse, one thing that is out of procurement leaders' control are the external factors.

The reality is, in more traditional industries, the salespeople and the internal stakeholders are still overwhelmingly male.

My guest today, Beth Seager, comes from the chemicals industry and has a background in MRO and technical procurement.

Not the easiest of categories to garner respect and acceptance from stakeholders as a procurement professional in general! So, even harder in a more traditionally male dominated industry and stakeholder base.

We dive into how to deal with challenges from stakeholders vs. dealing with the supply base.

Beth gives tips and advice from someone who's been there for how male colleagues should behave to women in a very male dominated environment.

Beth also walks through some of the challenges faced, how to mitigate them and push through the prejudices and offers a great one line question to put the ball firmly back into the court of the person challenging your authority or knowledge.

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Protcocast is a part of the Proctopus network.

Join our Proctopus LinkedIn Group here!

Connect with James here

Connect with Beth here

We're on a mission to make the procurement community more engaged and our profession better understood.

Our events and content are way more exciting and fun than the traditional conferences hosted by established industry bodies.

No jargon. No acronyms!

Another great episode of ProctoCast for you today, this time examining the prickly issue of how to get indirect procurement savings recognised by finance.

Reporting savings on direct materials is easy because most companies use Purchase Price Variance, or PPV.

On indirect, as we know, it's not that simple. Especially if spend is not repeatable, or it's scattered around multiple areas of the business.

My guest today, Pauline King, has worked for many years with the "dark side" i.e. our colleagues in Finance.

She is joining me today to share practical methods for procurement pros to use, in order to get Finance's buy-in to the contributions we make on indirect savings.

Listen in to hear Pauline's simple but effective method to evaluate how to approach indirect savings discussions with CFOs and senior financial controllers.

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Protcocast is a part of the Proctopus network.

Join our Proctopus LinkedIn Group here!

Connect with James here

Connect with Pauline here

We're on a mission to make the procurement community more engaged and our profession better understood.

Our events and content are way more exciting and fun than the traditional conferences hosted by established industry bodies.

No jargon. No acronyms!

Welcome to the very first episode of ProctoCast.

A bi-weekly show making procurement more fun and less formal, while delivering valuable content to procurement professionals everywhere!

My guest on today's show is Rich Ham, CEO of Fine Tune, a US-based service provider helping large businesses to deliver significant savings on categories often viewed as "nuisance" spend.

We dig in to 3 different examples:

• Pest control
• Waste management
• Laundry services and workwear

All of these are categories usually managed locally at site level, and rarely touched by corporate procurement.

We look at why there are so many savings hidden in plain sight in these "unsexy" categories.

Listen and learn how we got to the point where suppliers can so easily pull the wool over our eyes when it comes to slipping in cost increases and maximising their margins on this spend.

It may be the easiest couple of hundred thousand in savings you're likely to find, all by listening to a 15 minute ProctoCast!

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Protcocast is a part of the Proctopus network.

Join our Proctopus LinkedIn Group here!

Connect with me here

Connect with Rich here

Fine Tune website

We're on a mission to make the procurement community more engaged and our profession better understood.

Our events and content are way more exciting and fun than the traditional conferences hosted by established industry bodies.

No jargon. No acronyms!

Welcome to the very first episode of ProtoCast, where every 2 weeks we will bring coffee break-sized podcasts full of insightful content to the procurement community during these difficult times.

This inaugural episode looks at how ProctoCast came into being, and how we fit into the Proctopus network and community.

Join the Proctopus group on LinkedIn

Looking forward to have you with us on our journey into ProctoCasting!