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CIPS honors top procurement team, best technology use at its 20th annual industry awards

09/21/2020 By

Amid a year tested by the coronavirus disruption, CIPS awarded 19 procurement teams at is annual awards, recognizing the chemical company Johnson Matthey with its top prize and awarding the supply chain team at the real estate firm CBRE with the top technology award.

The Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply hosted its annual Excellence in Procurement Awards event last week to celebrate the innovative solutions and providers in the global procurement space.

This year, the event was special. Not only was it the 20th anniversary of the first event, but it marked a virtual celebration in a time of great uncertainty due to the COVID-19 disruption. A global event, the CIPS Excellence in Procurement Awards recognized organizations in 19 categories.

“From heroic stories of procurement teams working with their suppliers to continue to deliver fantastic value right through to those helping to fight this deadly virus, procurement teams have been at the very heart of the solutions,” said CIPS Group CEO Malcolm Harrison during the event.

Harrison said the coronavirus has made clear how central procurement is to the success of an organization. He said this year has also led to more socially responsible organizations, which was reflective of this year’s award winners.

According to Harrison, this year has brought real cross-organizational challenges around the world. However, procurement and supply have made a real difference in organizations.

CIPS named Johnson Matthey, a specialty chemical company, as its overall winner. Judges particularly celebrated JM’s Procurement Excellence transformation as essential for supporting strategic delivery, generating savings to reinvest and driving business growth. JM reported that the company has delivered immediate savings beyond its initial £50 million target.

In the category for Best Use of Digital Technology, the team at CBRE, the global real estate firm Coldwell Banker Richard Ellis, gained recognition for using technology for supply chain fraud detection.

“Having consolidated internal and client spend data sources across 70+ countries and 130,000 suppliers into a global dashboard, the team developed a fraud analytics strategy to identify and display suspicious transactions,” the CBRE supply chain team said, according to CIPS.

“We consolidated, scrubbed a billion plus transactions, across 25 finance systems (19 different environments) and 11 languages using Machine Learning (Zycus), 50k+ business rules and look-up tables. Our Supply Chain Data Analytics team also ran two and supported one workstream to develop and utilise unique, innovative algorithms to identify/display suspicious transactions and companies. This enabled fraud detection, client savings and increased confidence in our global supply chain.”

The winners in all 19 categories are:

Individual awards:

The full event is available to watch on YouTube.

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