A Northerner’s Northern Narrative – Procurement Summit 2016

From Scarborough to Cheltenham to London, the Market Dojo team travelled from opposite ends of the UK to attend Manchester’s Procurement Summit. Here’s Peter’s story of the exciting trip.

Peter’s Story:

Monday Evening
As my family live in Scarborough and the Procurement Summit is held at the Midlands Hotel in Manchester, I decided I would visit the family over a long weekend and meet the rest of the team on Monday night at our arranged hotel. As the drive from our HQ in Cheltenham would be over 3 hours in morning traffic, we stayed at an Ibis Budget Hotel the night before. The keyword here is BUDGET. I met the team in the bar area of the hotel at around 10pm and we enjoyed a quick beer to discuss the logistics of the next day.

Tuesday Morning
After a lovely sleep that was only interrupted by the occasional siren, I headed down to meet the team at our arranged time. Afterwards, the team split up due to leaving it until the morning for some of us to iron our branded Market Dojo polo shirts.
Looking suave and fresh, myself, and Lewis headed down the hotel on foot. Although we were walking and left several minutes later than the team who drove the same journey. We arrived earlier. 1-0 to Team Ironed Shirts.

The Procurement Summit
Having arrived at the conference at 8:00am to prepare the stand ready for the delegates who would arrive at 9:00am for the first talk. Sponsors were treated and fueled by the lovely people at The Midlands Hotel. Having served up some coffee and bacon baps for everyone to enjoy.

Once our stand was fully erect and all four of us were set, we finally got the chance to take a look at the day’s agenda and decide which talks we would like to attend. Being a New Business Development Manager for Market Dojo, the talk that caught my eye was: “Procurement, the not so hard sell” by Jo Watson, Head of Procurement at Boohoo.
The talk was a great insight into how Jo grew the Procurement Team at Boohoo into one of the most influential departments in the business. It was a refreshing take on how procurement can assist in the growth of a company.

This year we invited Nick Ford to guest present with Nick Martin about the successful partnership between Market Dojo and Odesma with Aggreko. You can download the presentation here. The talk was a success with over 50 people attending and several approaching the stand after the talk to discuss in more detail.

As previous years, the calibre of delegates was very high. With job titles that included Head of Procurement, Procurement Director and Founding Director, the conversations we were having were with the exact people that Market Dojo is built for.

Before we left, we asked renowned Managing Director of Spend Matters Europe, Peter Smith, to draw the business card that would win a 1 month free Market Dojo licence. The winner was Andrea Clegg at Hermes, you can see the prize draw here.

The Afterparty
After a long day and after giving several product demos each, the Market Dojo team were treated to a Caribbean style dinner at Turtle Bay. For anyone who cares, I had curried goat with a coconut mocktail. After discussing the day’s events, it was then time to head to the cars and start our 2 ½ hour drive home.

A big thank you to everyone who came to our stand to chat. If you didn’t get a chance to attend the conference feel free to visit our website and sign up for free to learn more about what we do and find out how we could help you.

Market Dojo helps procurement professionals negotiate better with our on-demand eSourcing tools. If you’d like to find out more, get in touch or register for free and play around with our software for yourself!