THE BUSINESS REVIEW FOR PROCUREMENT LEADERS
An interview with Kees Linse
In February 2003, Kees Linse became the first CPO of oil giant Shell. Since then the company has experienced the lows of its reserves scandal early last year and, more recently, the highs of record profitability.
In this interview, Linse explains that making mega-profits is a mixed blessing for procurement, because demand for contractors to build new capacity and prices for key raw materials such as steel have both rocketed. Security of supply has become the number one priority, to keep valuable production sites on stream.
Aside from current industry requirements, Linse has focused his efforts on four broad elements: people, process, systems and category management. The latter is still being embedded as a single business-wide approach and now covers three-quarters of Shell’s multi-billion dollar annual external spend.
As a relative newcomer to procurement, Linse has been impressed by the “very
focused, very sturdy” attitude of people in the profession, although
he believes they could be more “assertive” when confronted by difficult
stakeholders. And they need to be careful not to overstate their contribution
to value creation; concentrating their efforts on the value that suppliers
can bring to the business.
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