HICX CEO, Dafydd Llewellyn on Sustainable Procurement Policy

Dafydd Llewellyn is the Chief Executive Officer at HICX, a leading global platform for enterprise supplier data management. An accomplished SaaS industry veteran, Dafydd brings decades of experience scaling high-growth software organisations.

Before taking the helm at HICX to steer its next chapter of global expansion and product innovation, he held prominent international leadership positions, serving as General Manager of EMEA at insightsoftware and Managing Director of EMEA for SAP Concur.

Known for his keen go-to-market acumen and strategic leadership, he is dedicated to helping enterprises master complex supplier data and leverage AI to drive supply chain efficiency.

In this Q&A, we sit down with Dafydd to discuss sustainable procurement policy.

How is your procurement strategy evolving to build a supply chain that is simultaneously resilient and sustainable, rather than sacrificing one for the other? 

The framing of resilience versus sustainability as a trade-off is understandable, but I'd argue it's a false dichotomy. And increasingly, it's an operationally dangerous one too. The same capability that makes a supply chain resilient is the same capability that makes it sustainable: you have to know who is in your supply base.

When a geopolitical event closes a trade route, or a regulation like the German Supply Chain Due Diligence Act or France's Devoir de Vigilance lands on your desk, the first question is the same: who are my suppliers, what do they do and where are they?

If your supplier data is fragmented across six ERPs, a procurement suite and a risk platform bolted on in 2021, you cannot answer that question quickly or confidently. And the enterprises that can't answer it can end up exposed.

What we see with large manufacturers and FMCG businesses is a real drive to boost visibility and demand for real-time monitoring is skyrocketing. 

Many forward-thinking organisations are moving past basic carbon neutrality toward 'regenerative' procurement. Is that on your strategic roadmap, and what does that look like in practice for your supply base? 

We absolutely see regenerative procurement as the direction the market is heading in, and we think it’s the right ambition. For many enterprises, the intent is there and that is an extremely encouraging start. To leave a community better off requires knowing that community exists in your supply chain at all. 

For a global manufacturer with operations spanning Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, tier 2 and tier 3 supplier visibility is often low. Supplier records are incomplete and maintained inconsistently across regions. You cannot drive positive impact into a supplier base you haven't accurately mapped.

The work we do with large enterprises, including businesses operating at the scale of global FMCG, is precisely about building that map to enable more sustainable procurement practices. That is the precondition for regenerative goals to be anything other than a mission statement. Once you genuinely know who you're buying from across every tier and geography, you can make active choices about where investment and improvement efforts go, and measure them effectively. 

As autonomous AI procurement agents begin handling routine negotiations and spot-buying, how does that change your strategic oversight? 

It changes considerably and raises the stakes for procurement teams. There is a real efficiency promise associated with autonomous procurement agents, but there is also enormous risk. If an agent is making decisions at machine speed, it can also embed errors at machine speed.

This means procurement leaders are laser-focused on improving governance of supplier data, establishing the guardrails that define acceptable commercial and ESG outcomes, and the exception paths where humans must intervene. Procurement leaders move from approving transactions to orchestrating policies, tolerances, and supplier experiences, ensuring that even autonomous buying remains transparent, auditable and fully aligned with corporate strategy.

How do you hard-code sustainability boundaries into an autonomous sourcing system so it doesn't default to unethical options to save a dollar?

For starters, you must hard-code sustainability as a veto-level gate rather than just another variable in a cost-optimisation formula. If a vendor fails these non-negotiable boundaries, the system must flag and escalate the concern. 

For best practice now every compliance attribute, certification and risk flag needs to be part of a continuously governed, authoritative supplier record that the AI queries in real time. 

If we look ahead to 2030, what will be the biggest differentiator between a procurement function that is thriving and one that is facing regulatory or reputational obsolescence?

By 2030, the regulatory environment will have tightened considerably. The EU's Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive will be in full effect, traceability obligations will extend deep into sub-tiers and investors will expect demonstrated governance capability, not just reported metrics. 

The enterprises that build an authoritative, continuously governed view of their full supply chain and make procurement the engine of their business will have a compounding advantage: faster compliance response, more confident AI deployment, better risk visibility and lower cost-to-serve.