882: Reengineering Procurement for Greater Impact W/ Polly DeSouza

"If you want a seat at the table, you've got to pull up the chair." - Polly DeSouza, APAC Transformation Leader

Procurement teams have spent years talking about the need to move away from tactical and transactional work and create more time for strategic priorities. As AI begins to take on more of that work, the opportunity to finally make the shift is growing. The question is whether procurement teams are ready to take advantage of it.

In this episode, Philip Ideson is joined by Polly DeSouza, an APAC transformation leader whose career spans finance, procurement, consulting, and operational transformation. Polly shares lessons from working across more than 20 transformation projects and explains why successful transformation requires procurement to think beyond processes and technology.

They discuss what procurement can learn from finance, why teams need to understand the language of the business, and how strong stakeholder relationships can help procurement earn earlier involvement in business decisions. Polly also explains why she sees procurement as a "guardian of resilience," responsible for creating supplier ecosystems capable of supporting the business through continued uncertainty.

In this episode, Polly discusses how to:

-Connect procurement priorities more directly to financial and business value

-Earn earlier involvement by becoming a trusted partner to stakeholders

-Strengthen procurement's role in organizational resilience

-Use AI-created capacity to tackle higher-value priorities

-Help teams move beyond familiar ways of working

-Build transformation around clear business problems and desired outcomes

-Develop the skills and mindset needed for procurement's next chapter

Links:

Polly Desouza on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pollyana-desouza-52304a85/

Subscribe to the AOP Newsletter: https://resources.artofprocurement.com/art-of-procurement-podcast-subscribe

Subscribe to Art of Procurement on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ArtofProcurement

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