P&SC LIVE Q&A: Jarrod Glover, Leading Santander Procurement

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Jarrod Glover, Director of Procurement at Santander UK, at Procurement and Supply Chain LIVE London, 2024
Procurement Magazine spoke with Jarrod Glover, Santander UK’s Director of Procurement, on Day Two of Procurement and Supply Chain LIVE

Jarrod Glover, Director of Procurement at Santander UK, spoke on the P&SC LIVE London panel on supplier relationship management, sponsored by Coupa.

Before this he shared with Procurement Magazine how he ended up in the industry and what he was hoping to get out of the day.

Since stepping into his current role in December 2022, Jarrod has drawn on a wealth of experience gained since joining Santander in 2014.

His previous roles include leading the bank's Procurement Transformation, Third Party Risk Management, and a combined Cost Management and Procurement function.

Throughout his tenure, Jarrod has pioneered key initiatives in procurement digitalisation, third-party risk management, responsible procurement, and commercial capability transformation — all of which are central to his current responsibilities.

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What inspired you to get involved in the procurement/supply chain space and how has your perspective evolved over time?

It was a complete accident. I was in my placement year at university, I was working for various different companies. I got told that the commercial world was for me and they thought I was really strong commercially.

What commercial meant in their world was business development and marketing. I applied for a load of commercial jobs, what commercial meant in the world that I ended up in, which was construction and business services, was, supply chain, legal, procurement, finance.

So, a complete accident, but then I found out that I was quite good at that and I quite enjoyed it, so I stuck with it.

What innovations or trends in the space are you most excited about?

I think everyone will talk about AI as we go through the conference and where that looks to go. What I'm really excited about is how we can remove negative friction in the activity we do. By negative friction I mean people spending a lot of time looking at data, working on the process flows, that doesn't really add any value to our end user. I don't want my team to spend any time doing that.

I believe AI can really transform that and spending all that time on the positive friction, challenging people looking at business cases, looking at bottom up costing, that's really what I want my team to be spending their time on doing.

Jarrod Glover, Director of Procurement at Santander UK, at Procurement and Supply Chain LIVE London, 2024

What are you hoping to get out of Procurement and Supply Chain LIVE, London?

I want to spend time with the suppliers in the hall outside. There's a good group of people across there. There's some suppliers we already use. There's one supplier we don't use, but there's some real good groundswell about what they can do to aid in that kind of process flow and friction removal.

Plus, every day is a school day. I want to go and learn from people here, what they're doing, what's different to what I'm doing and why they're doing that differently.

Is it industry or is it actually that they're better at their jobs than me? I hope it's industry, but we'll go see and learn from those people.

How do you see events like procurement and supply chain live contributing to the broader industry movement?

Anytime where you get to spend time with your peers and colleagues, but also the key suppliers that are out there making a change, is incredibly important. 

I say to my team that they have to spend time, as well as in their day-to-day, getting out and learning from others.

So that's why this event is ideal. Getting and seeing those kinds of key suppliers, who could be suppliers for us in the future or coming into conversations with our current suppliers from a different lens. 

Spending time with those peers and colleagues, learning from them is both really important for me in my role and for everyone across my team.

Jarrod Glover, Director of Procurement at Santander UK, at Procurement and Supply Chain LIVE London, 2024

How do you anticipate the supply chain practice within your organisation to evolve in the next five years?

I'm talking to my team about moving from being viewed as procurement people to being value engineers. Looking end to end in everything we buy, everything we do for the customer, starting the customer journey, removing waste and looking at how to make our customer journeys better. 

They've got to have the time to do that. So per the comment on AI earlier, we need to remove the time that they're spending managing process and managing flow. We need to spend time on really getting in depth and understanding the business that we're in. 

I think that's really underestimated how much time you should spend learning your business and not just your supply chain. That's really where I wanted to go for our side.

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