Kees Linse (left), Royal Dutch Shell’s first global CPO, has left the job and taken on the challenge of bringing greater “consistency and discipline” to its shared service centres around the world.
Linse stepped down as the oil giant’s executive vice-president, contracting and procurement, at the beginning of February, exactly four years after accepting the role. He will continue to be based at its headquarters in The Hague, Netherlands, as project director, shared services, reporting to the company’s personnel director.
Dominique Gardy, previously Shell’s head of exploration and production in the Far East, has taken over the reins as CPO.
Linse told CPO Agenda that his new role would be to streamline and optimise shared service centres based in Scotland, Poland, India, Malaysia, the Philippines and Guatemala.
Managing the growth of these back-office operations and being in a position to capitalise on future opportunities meant taking a global view and integrating them where this made business sense.
Linse said the CPO role had given him “a tremendous perspective across the whole company”, and one that was broader than all the other jobs he had done in nearly 30 years at Shell combined.
Under his leadership, Shell’s procurement function now had much better visibility of spend information than four years ago, thanks to the implementation of a data warehouse across the group, he noted. Senior executives could now be briefed on how much the company spent with a particular supplier, the status of the relationship and the sourcing strategy it was based on within one hour of requesting it.
“That gives us credibility that is far bigger than savings claims that people may or may not believe,” he said.
Standardised core processes in areas such as category and contract management, and a much greater focus on talent management were two other areas of “significant progress”.
Linse, who invested a lot of his time getting to know the procurement community during his spell as CPO, said he was impressed by the “high degree of professionalism and ethics” in the function, and argued that this was often undervalued by organisations.
At the same time, he urged procurement people not simply to chase the “big deal of the day” favoured by their stakeholders, but to follow their “own mission” and concentrate on managing the totality of their external spend.
“Showing performance on their terms, rather than those of others, takes real confidence,” Linse said.
