About
I've spent twenty years in procurement, commercial contracts and bid management, roughly half of it buying and half selling.
On the buying side I worked in procurement and vendor management at Telstra, nbn co, MLC Life Insurance and the Australian Taxation Office, and managed vendors as a project management consultant for WSP on major rail programmes. That meant tenders, evaluations, renegotiations, and holding suppliers to what they'd signed.
On the selling side I was a commercial manager at Nokia, Amdocs and Unisys. There I priced bids, negotiated with customers' procurement teams, and turned around government contracts that were losing money.
Each side understands the other less well than it thinks. Suppliers concede terms buyers would have dropped if asked. Buyers sign agreements and never use the price and performance mechanisms they negotiated. Much of my work is pointing out where that's happening.
I work with Australian businesses remotely. My focus is mid-sized companies: the kind that sign contracts with large organisations without a commercial team of their own.