I’ll wager more than a few of the people reading this will have been in creative presentations or pitches where there was an elephant in the room, in the shape of a member of the client team who was “someone from procurement”, there to evaluate the creative agency, the creative work, and the creative people. What dark art and algorithm, exactly, they used to do this will forever be a mystery. 

However, the creative industry is not the only one that fears someone from procurement and expects them to be nothing more than bean counters out to spoil the parade.

At Novartis, the brief here was to reframe what procurement does, and to encourage internal teams – working in everything from scientific research to learning and drug development – to look at these vital components of the commercial endeavour in a new light.