Ivalua NOW 2026: Michael Bailey, IPC International
In an era where digital agility defines market leaders, IPC International - the supply chain partner supporting Subway Franchisees - is undergoing a significant procurement evolution.
Michael Bailey, Transformation and Technology Director, explains how the membership-based organisation has moved away from antiquated processes to embrace a modern, integrated tech stack.
By partnering with Ivalua to roll out core modules, from sourcing to contract management, IPC is not only streamlining its supply chain and reducing costs for its members, but also ensuring it attracts top-tier talent.
Speaking to Procurement Magazine at Ivalua NOW 2025, Michael discusses the journey of embedding these tools and the strategic goal of scaling operations without inflating headcount.
How have you come together, and what is that partnership?
We partnered with Ivalua right back in 2024. We purchased a number of their core modules, meaning the Source and the Contracts space. We started implementing the back end around about summer of 2025. We have progressively rolled out those core modules, which are Supplier Relationship Management, the core Sourcing module, and the Contracts module. We finished the last of those, the Contracts module, just in January this year. So, we're now very much in the embedding space.
We've got full adoption with our supplier base, which is fantastic. Our goal for this year is to make sure that the benefits that we're expecting to get, which is primarily in, reducing COGS (Cost of Goods Sold ), to get that back, which obviously we get that to our customers.
IPC is a membership organisation. We are owned by our customers. Every bit of saving we can get out of the supply chain is to the benefit of our members and our customers. There are the benefits, the cost is the main one and efficiency benefits.
What are the benefits you see with this collaboration?
IPC are relatively late to digitisation. I would say I’m quite new. Part of my time here is about launching digitisation programs, of which the contract is a big one. But we are doing other things. So you’re absolutely right. Beyond the very hard metric of COGS, it’s about recognising that all our buyers and our colleagues just expect a professional procurement organisation to have our tools to make life easier for them; for the system to do the heavy lifting.
We have a lot of people coming from other organisations that join us, and they think we were in Stonehenge. We have to attract and retain the best talent in procurement. So, there is definitely a sense of benefits. We have growth ambitions, particularly in that region.
So our goal really is to use tools like Ivalua, whereby we can grow our procurement spend, but without growing our headcount in proportion. So it's not about removing headcount. It's about being able to grow, but with keeping our costs contained.
