DPW Amsterdam: Jabil’s Jeff Austin on Procurement Solutions

DPW Amsterdam has established itself as one of Europe's premier gatherings for procurement and supply chain professionals, blending face-to-face connections with digital participation in one of the continent's most vibrant business hubs.

The event features multiple presentation venues, private meeting spaces and purpose-built networking zones where global industry leaders and key decision makers converge to discuss the sector's evolution. Beyond examining breakthrough technologies, participants explore how to harmonise digital transformation with the human element – the professionals and teams operating throughout organisations and international supply networks.

Staged at the historic Beurs van Berlage in the heart of Amsterdam, this year's programme focused on the practical applications and revolutionary impact of AI in procurement and supply chain. 

During the event, Procurement Magazine spoke to Jeff Austin, Global VP of Supply Chain Services at Jabil, who has contributed to optimising complex global supply chain systems and fostering international business relationships with a global client base.

Jeff discussed how the company is leveraging six decades of manufacturing expertise to deliver standalone procurement solutions for clients worldwide.

Tell us about Jabil's procurement and supply chain services business

Jabil has been in business for almost 60 years as a critical path of revenue for our clients in the manufacturing space.

Jabil manufactures for 500 of the largest brands in the world and eight of the largest vertical markets in the world. Through that, we've become very disciplined and have a great process and great people around procurement, sourcing and supply chain management. That leads to the production of various products for our customers.

What Jabil has done is taken that 60 years of experience and really focused on just the procurement and supply chain services business, where we can offer that service to customers, instead of also having a bolt-on to manufacturing.

That 60 years of experience, the different volatility in the markets we've seen over the last 50 years, we get to use every single day to avoid and mitigate risk, to avoid longer lead time stretches, to avoid changes in any type of supply that could impact our clients' manufacturing process and their revenue stream.

How else is Jabil helping procurement and supply chain teams?

The majority of our business is based around manufacturing – the engineering manufacturing processes of some of the world's most cutting-edge products for 500 of the leading brands in the world.

They've trusted us with being able to source, supply, manage the inventory levels and basically manage their entire supply chain related to that production. In that, we've developed some of the world's best processes. We've developed some of the world's deepest subject matter expertise in procurement and supply chain to deliver to our factories, to be able to build for those clients.

The innovation that Jabil has made over the past few years is to offer a procurement and supply chain service business. That does not have to be tied to a manufacturing contract. So now, we can help clients from market intelligence, developing of solutions with our native AI company ID8, we can flow that into procurement consulting, so that we can understand the problem statements, define and map where the customer is today, the goals that the customer wants to reach in a few years and then manage that procurement as an outsourced partner and be trusted in that aspect.

We can also be trusted with the flow of materials and goods as well. That includes logistics support, warehousing support, managing those things off balance sheet for clients to improve cash flows and other metrics that they might be interested in, their financial statements. Then all the way to the final delivery to their locations, and all the various complexities from kitting services to other things that the client needs done with their physical goods.

That service alone is the business that I run for Jabil and it's really encouraging that we've been able to use that expertise we have to now offer the clients that exact service that we give to our manufacturing clients but without the need to manufacture goods at scale the way we do for the majority of our business.

How might recent award wins – including at BizClik's Global Procurement & Supply Chain Awards 2025 – raise the company's profile?

It was a great show that BizClik hosted in London. An event like that is important because the leaders of any procurement department around the world are bombarded with information. Who do they turn to? 

Jabil is very well known in the circles that we have produced for, in those market segments for years. Those companies know us. We get to see their bill of materials, quote on that material, give costs around how to manage that supply and build things for those customers. But that is 500 customers in the world, right? We drive a large revenue from a small customer base.

If you think about the other thousands and thousands of companies that could use the same type of support, but maybe not have a large manufacturing footprint that we need to contribute to, now we can help those clients as well to bring that scale, that value proposition, that subject matter expertise to these types of roles.

Your event in London really puts that on display and let it be known that we are associated with these types of services. That's a great way to get your brand out there, but also that we are doing it at a high level. We're doing it at a level that achieves the standard we've set for our manufacturing clients and it's really important that we maintain the service levels and the quality of service that Jabil has always had. But now in a service environment.

The BizClik event and winning three awards really got to show that off. Not only are we doing this business, but we're doing it at a high level and clients are achieving the goals that we set out.

Could you talk us through an instance where you delivered exceptional results for a client?

If we look at the three awards, one was related to our market intelligence product and our subscriptions there, trying to help our suppliers and our customers understand the way we look at the market.

We analyse billions of data points per quarter and being able to summarise that and share that, we feel like it rises the tide of the harbour so all boats can rise. We feel like we improve our supply base, which improves our ability to support our manufacturing clients.

We won an award in procurement consulting project. So, if you look at services starting with a consultation, where we're coming in and really trying to deeply analyse problems the customer's stating to us. Winning an award in procurement consulting shows our dedication to that type of business and it's a little different than the market perceives the consulting world to be. It's very specific to the Jabil way of consulting. Winning an award I think demonstrates that we add value for those clients.

The final award in logistics services shows our capability of managing physical goods in the world. So there could be companies that are good at just market intelligence, there could be companies that are just good at consulting, could be companies that are just good at shipping goods. I'm really proud of the fact we were able to win an award in all three of those categories. 

Why are companies coming to you for consulting services?

It usually relates to change of some type, like a volatile change in the market. So, they built their procurement to function a certain way. And when there's shocks to the market – either to the supply, pricing, compliance, where they can ship to – they need help quickly.

Deploying a partner that has a global understanding and global scale can get them to a solution much quicker. That consultation piece could be something deep and analytical, or it could be, "we just got a huge demand put on us and our team isn't big enough to manage the extra X per cent growth we have. We need to augment some extra procurement outsource partnerships here" – and we're able to do that as well.

What does 2026 have in store for Jabil?

I think if all goes well, more of the same. We have client projects scheduled and hopefully we get introduced and get to win some more jobs and see that grow exponentially.

I think we'll keep that service level growing for Jabil, keep the Jabil name associated with being able to deliver, do what we say we're going to do for clients, not overextend ourselves as far as making promises that we can't keep and really being a great partner to our customers.

We're 60 years of being a great brand to support other brands. A lot of companies we meet in the service business have never heard of us because they don't build anything. So, when they learn our dedication to being the brand behind the brand and really a pillar of partners that our clients stand upon, it gives a lot of credibility to the jobs they would like us to do for them. I really just hope we get to do more of that. It is really rewarding work to be able to be trusted by our clients and deliver.