Meaningful Lives For Powerful Results
Background
Kathleen was born in the Northeast of England within The United Kingdom. She spent her childhood in South Africa (The Orange Free State and Transvaal) at a time when apartheid was at its peak and this experience helped shape her passion for diversity and equality. On returning to the United Kingdom Kathleen earned a degree in chemistry from Leeds University.
Early Career
A role in industrial research, post University, allowed Kathleen to discover her passion for fast moving environments and teamwork, which resulted in operational procurement roles in both the Chemical and Electronics Industry. The search for strategic thinking in supply chain management took Kathleen down the path of management consulting in her thirties with Atos Consulting (formerly KPMG Consulting), specialising in procurement advisory services for large scale and diverse organisations, in Europe and USA, across many sectors (both public and private). She believed that Procurement was fundamental to an organisation and deserved a seat and voice at the top table, at a time when it was regarded as simply tactical and operational Function with no input into business strategy. Her drive and passion for the subject matter led her to the position of Programme Director in the firm and award winning successes with clients (awards from The Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply (CIPS) and The Management Consultancies Association (MCA) in 2002, 20004 and 2005).
Executive Roles
Kathleen became a Senior Partner for Atos Consulting UK in 2005, managing a team of over 100 consultants in the procurement practice, specialising in The Defence Sector. She also held the position of strategic procurement technical advisor for UK and Europe spanning bids, methodologies and accountability for programme delivery and P&L performance.
By 2009 Kathleen had decided she should deploy her skills to demonstrate that public sector procurement teams could achieve delivery excellence in policies, processes, practices, skills development and value improvement. She therefore took up an Executive role with The Royal Mail as Group Procurement Director and led a 100 strong team, responsible for direct and indirect spend management, spanning $2.3 billion, from 2009 – 2013. She was a Group Executive team member and sat on the Investment Committee and Joint Venture Committee.
She credits her team with exceptional courage and skills to support the transformational delivery of £650m cash and P&L savings over a 5-year period. 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.
This incredible transformation journey was recognised by The Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply (CIPS) Accreditation Programme and was awarded 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.
Kathleen also held the Group Facilities Management Director post (pro tem) from 2010 to 2011 which involved the successful renegotiation of a key Joint Venture with Balfour Beatty and fully compliant delivery of facility management services whilst reducing the budget by £28m over 18 months (7%).
