Comments on: Luca Guzzabocca – Banking on Procurement (Part 2)

By: Luigi Serravalle

Luigi Serravalle — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 10:20:50 +0000

Ciao Luca,

I appreciate this article. As you know we agree on the necessity to improve sourcing, procurement and cost management maturity in the italian banking industry.

Coming from another industry you can have a crucial role in fertilizing your company but also the whole professional community. Through events, initiatives, mutual benchmarking and also this type of interventions I hope we will be able to achieve a structural improvement. Let me say, sustainable too !

Finally I believe it is very much a matter of talents; we need to attract, motivate and grow a larger number of talents in the sourcing/procurement environment. It has not been an exciting world in the past but it has rapidly evolved into a strategic arena: it must be our goal to translate this to young professionals and future managers.

Best !

By: Luca Guzzabocca

Luca Guzzabocca — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 10:28:25 +0000

Re. Steve’s questions:
1 – Talents/people involvement: as you know there is not a “magic wand;” people have to be involved at the early stage of any big change/innovation project for it to work. What I have done and continue to do is to create a mini “think tank” managed by a small team of people reporting directly to me. This Team takes my key ideas and vision and then builds upon them to produce a proposal, project plan or a business case. If approved, the team is involved in developing the deployment plan for my organization.

“Communicate, communicate, communicate”

is another very significant part of the success in having the best people who are talented, dedicated, and motivated. Regular meetings are planned at different levels across my organization, including a quarterly plenary meeting. Major KPIs and achievements are also displayed on a public wallboard following the “visual factory” model.

2 Benchmarking: Across the Italian banking sector, my role and responsibilities (procurement, but also logistics, HSE, security, etc.) are unique which makes benchmarking a challenge since it depends on the story, the organisational model, and the size of the comparable enterprises for benchmarking to be effective.

By: Andrew Bartolini

Andrew Bartolini — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 21:37:28 +0000

Levon & Steve –

Thanks for the comments. I agree that Luca’s doing some very interesting and impressive things – like the topic of our next article: sustainability – and we hope to have him back soon to discuss other strategies and initiatives.

By: Steve Hall

Steve Hall — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 13:27:38 +0000

Hi Andrew – great post. Having spoken to Luca, I’d have to say he’s an interesting individual in a slightly unusual role. Which I think gives him a lot of useful views.
I’m curious to hear how he finds and encourages the right talent for his practice, given the various focuses he’s talked about and how his function compares to others in a similar industry.

By: Levon Hovsepyan

Levon Hovsepyan — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 17:26:05 +0000

Brilliant article.

Given the specificity of banking business, especially those that are involved in community development, procurement is key. Savings made in strategic sourcing (spending) may total to considerable amounts compared to those banks’ earnings.

And look, segmenting into three large groups – IT, Real Estate and Facilities, and General tells a lot about the nature of procurement operations of that bank. So this is indeed a “hub” for this business.

Good job, good practice to learn from.