P&SC LIVE Q&A: Florian Tue, Carrefour

In his keynote speech at Procurement & Supply Chain LIVE London, Florian Tue outlined Carrefour's journey towards a concrete digital procurement transformation.

He explored the practical steps and strategies that have enabled Carrefour to modernise its procurement processes, enhance efficiency and drive significant business value.

Florian also discussed the challenges faced, technologies adopted and key lessons learned along the way.

Procurement Magazine caught up with Florian after his session came to an end. 

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

I was inspired by how planes were assembled and the role of each and every supplier into that role, as well as really understanding the number of tiers and the number of steps to assemble a plane and the role of procurement into negotiating with every supplier.

What innovations or trends in the procurement and supply chain space are you most excited about?

At Carrefour, what really excites me is design to cost. For private label, for example, we work with suppliers who are original design manufacturers who stamp the brand of Carrefour, and we realised that raw materials have a strong impact on the final price of our products for our customers.

In fact, the new trends of data intelligence, generative AI (Gen AI) – all these new technology that everyone talks about – can make it really concrete thanks to design to cost, design to value and can help us with data to understand if the value of the product at which we purchase it, and at which we sell it to customers, is the right one or not. 

What's your biggest takeaway or highlight from Procurement and Supply Chain LIVE so far? 

Last year, I did a lot of events and everyone started talking about Gen AI.

I feel that Gen AI is still the topic, but what's interesting today was hearing about HI – human intelligence – remaining more important than AI. 

Why do you feel it's important to stage events like Procurement and Supply Chain LIVE?

I think it's a great initiative. It's great to have a specialised magazine because it can help us as a procurement professional to really be humble and benchmark with our peers and really identify all the best practices throughout the market.

Also, to challenge us and to say, ‘why are we so late on that trend?’. Or maybe, 'okay, this firm is doing it at the moment, but we've been doing it for four years, so we are not late'.

How do you expect procurement and supply chain practices at your organisation to evolve over the next five years? 

I think digitisation will continue to get broader and broader.

I think full suite tools will continue to fully digitise the source-to-pay process. I hope Gen AI will really help these S2P tools – which have been here for decades – to really challenge themselves and to propose new functionalities that are really interesting and can really help the daily life of buyers – such as chatbots, help for negotiations, external trends.

I believe these new technologies that are being developed thanks to old tools will help us in our daily lives as buyers.

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