As Group Procurement Director Kath led a team responsible for direct and indirect spend management for the Royal Mail from 2009 – 2013. She was a Group Executive team member and sat on the Investment Committee and Joint Venture Committee.

She led the transformational delivery of £650m cash and P&L savings over a 5-year period on a cost base of £2.2bn (direct and indirect spend). These savings were audited independently by Royal Mail’s Finance Team – equating to circa 8% of addressable spend, yielding an ROI of between x9.5 – x17.3 every year

Kath believes in a rapid assessment and a quick win profile to engage stakeholders at all levels in a business. The team was refocused to upgrade their savings pipeline within 16 weeks of her arrival and delivered £24m P&L savings. This gave the procurement team more confidence to mine more savings and build stronger more credible relationships with internal customers.

Moya Greene’s arrival in 2010 catalysed a rapid Group wide cost improvement programme which Kath led for the business. It spanned a wide range of cash and cost reduction projects and delivered £304m on an addressable spend base of £1.4bn over 6 months with 100% compliance performance. The key to success was close involvement with the business stakeholders and suppliers.

Kath also held the Group Facilities Management Director post pro tem from 2010 to 2011 which involved the successful renegotiation of the Joint Venture with Balfour Beatty and fully compliant delivery of facility management services whilst reducing the budget by £28m over 18 months (7%).

Kath was determined to show that public sector procurement teams could achieve delivery excellence in policies, processes, practices, skills development and value improvement for the business.

The team was successful during its 3 year transformation journey from 2008-2010. It benchmarked itself with the AT Kearney AEP benchmarking programme during this time and achieved upper quartile by 2010.

Keen to continue the transformation journey Kath embarked on the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply (CIPS) Accreditation Programme with the team and was successful in achieving Gold Accreditation in 2012 (1 of 15 companies worldwide to have this status at the time) and then went on to Platinum Accreditation in 2013 (currently the only business worldwide to hold this status at the time).

This transformation journey was also short listed for the CIPS 2011 awards in two major categories and won Best International Project in the CIPS 2012 awards.

Kath was a Senior Partner and Programme Director for Atos Consulting UK from 2000 – 2009. She also held the position of strategic procurement technical advisor for UK and Europe.

Kath led and delivered an award winning procurement transformation programme for The Boots Group – resulting in CIPS Kelly award and the MCA Award in 2002 and CIPS overall winner award 2004.

Kath designed and delivered the technical content of the Defence Logistics Organisation reform programme which spanned £6 billion spend across 45 project teams (3 year programme). This programme delivered over £200 million cost reduction and was self- funding within the first year of activity. The programme delivered award winning training resulting in MCA and CIPS awards in 2005.

Kath also facilitated the senior strategic relationship between the nuclear submarine division of DE&S and Rolls Royce resulting in the redesign and relaunch of the cost model supporting the multi mullion10 year plus Astute submarine contract – focusing on sustainable profit, innovation and programme delivery dates. Clear stakeholder roles and responsibilities at all levels within both organisations were successfully assigned and enabled.

Kath led a worldwide assessment for a portfolio of well-known Diageo brands and their global, national regional and local costs eg glass, corks, labels. This led to the design and facilitation of a multinational collaboration processes for this decentralised procurement organisation saving millions of pounds whilst preserving the local decision making processes and governance. The Diageo teams earned the prestigious Internal Annual Supply Chain Director Award as a result of the intervention.