Ivalua Tour: Callum Jolly, Smart DCC

Managing a £600m (US$789m) annual spend on spreadsheets and email is a high-wire act, especially for a heavily regulated organisation.

For Smart DCC, the entity responsible for the UK's smart meter infrastructure, digitising the procurement process wasn't just about efficiency; it was about survival and compliance.

Callum Jolly, Head of Strategic Supplier and Commercial Management at Smart DCC, looked at how moving to a unified digital platform provided a vital, auditable single source of truth.

Callum told us about how automated workflows are saving countless hours during audits and map out the organisation's next ambitious steps toward a fully integrated source-to-pay ecosystem.

Tell us a little about yourself and your organisation.

I'm Callum Jolly, and I head up a strategic supplier and commercial management organisation called Smart DCC. We are responsible for building, running and maintaining the energy smart meter infrastructure within the UK.

You brought in Ivalua in 2023, looking to digitise your source-to-requisition process. Tell me a little more about what it looked like before Ivalua, and what were you looking for them to fix for you?

Pre-Ivalua, we were running procurement from spreadsheets and email, so the baseline was pretty low.

For an organisation that spends the best part of £600 million a year, and we predominantly run an outsourced model, so that spend is largely with external suppliers, and being heavily regulated as well, it was really difficult to run a functioning procurement team on spreadsheets and emails, and be able to demonstrate to the regulator that we were governing that in a controlled manner, documenting our decision-making, and providing an auditable trail of results.

It was really difficult, and we were running around as a compliance team trying to ensure we could demonstrate that. The other element was that we had some really significant procurements on the horizon, and again, those are really difficult to execute well when you don't have a tool of any description.

We landed on Ivalua to give us that single source of truth, a platform for us to run that sourcing activity, capture decisions, manage workflows, govern it properly, and ensure we had an auditable trail of activity, as well as simply streamlining that procurement process end-to-end.

You've had Ivalua in place for a couple of years, what would you say is the most tangible benefit?

I think there are two, for my team personally, who, as I say, facilitate the audit piece and carry out a lot of the assurance and risk management activity. The time saved simply by being able to self-serve that information, whether to internal audit, external audit, or whoever we're providing it to, has saved countless hours.

Rather than having to look across disparate systems or chase individuals when information can't be found, we have those workflows. We have the single source of truth that we can dip into and draw from. A lot of the time now, our core procurement teams don't even see that work happening, it just follows a happy path and we can manage it for them, which they're delighted about.

You've undergone this transformation with Ivalua. If we were standing here again in a year's time, are there any goals or targets within your procurement process that you're working towards?

We're looking to go further in terms of the full source-to-pay journey. We spoke at the start about having aimed for source-to-requisition, where we are today is roughly source-to-pay. So there's definitely an ambition to look both upstream and downstream: how can we broaden that single source of truth, and where we can't, can we integrate with other tools?

We still have isolated systems here and there. The utopia is one single source-to-pay platform, but at the very least, integrating the planning element up front and the payment processes downstream would put us in a far better place.