Focus on the Value
As chief procurement officer at the Atlantic Richfield Co., Lawrence Aldridge helped save the company $50 million by fundamentally changing the way the petroleum giant managed their supply chain. All it took was a little innovation and a lot of data.
[From iSource Business, March 2001] Atlantic Richfield Co. (ARCO) brought Lawrence Aldridge to the United States from his native United Kingdom in 1997 to create and head a new group within the company that would coordinate procurement activities across the corporation and source goods and services more strategically. Stymied by the lack of off-the-shelf tools on the market at that time (this was four years ago, after all), Aldridge's purchasing organization developed proprietary data management software tools. These tools were so innovative and powerful that when BP Amoco purchased ARCO last year several members of Aldridge's team set up their own company, licensed the software and then joined with e-procurement solutions provider eBreviate to market the tools to other corporations.
Aldridge joined ARCO as a consultant in 1984 and went on to hold positions in Asia and the Middle East before accepting the U.S. chief procurement officer position. He holds an undergraduate degree in quantity surveying and an M.B.A. from Hull University in the U.K. A fellow of the Royal Institute of Charter Surveyors, Aldridge is also a member of the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply, essentially giving him the equivalent of a certified purchasing manager (C.P.M.) title.
In an interview with iSource Business, conducted shortly after he left his CPO post at ARCO following the acquisition by BP Amoco, Aldridge discusses the impact of e-procurement on the supply chain and the importance of data for strategic sourcing efforts.
iSource: How is electronic procurement affecting the supply chain?
Aldridge: There are a couple of aspects to electronic procurement. One is the way that it's changing the transactional process. As the technology develops, we are seeing the empowerment of the user and the elimination of the transactional work in purchasing. You will increasingly see a move toward more center-led organizations that will manage and coordinate activities across the company.
That's the transactional piece. The other piece
