Opella: Procurement built on innovation and strategic partnerships
This month’s exclusive cover story features a fascinating interview with Opella CPO Marie-Pierre Goyenetche and her team who discuss building better supplier relationships, promoting innovation, and developing a more agile, efficient, value-driven procurement function.
2025 promises to be a pivotal year for Opella — currently the consumer healthcare division of French healthcare giant Sanofi; soon to be carved-out into an independent entity backed by private equity — as the organisation finds its way in a sector where major large-scale traditional pharma organisations have increasingly refocused their business models on Life Sciences, whilst creating space for their former consumer-focused divisions to compete and succeed in the fast-moving consumer health (FMCH) arena.
A new outlook
Adjusting to this new environment requires a change in outlook for Opella, as the challenges facing the company, as well as the strategies that will see it capitalise on new opportunities, are very different to the ones that worked before. “We are undergoing one of the most significant separations the industry has seen in recent years, and perhaps for years to come,” says Marie-Pierre Goyenetche, Chief Procurement Officer at Opella.
Technology Innovation Institute (TII) – building an innovation-driven procurement function
Elsewhere, we also feature a compelling insight into the procurement function at Abu Dhabi’s TII (Technology Innovation Institute), which sees how procurement leaders are enabling technological innovation at scale and pace.
In the business world, it has been impossible to ignore procurement’s functional evolution since the turn of the century. As new tools emerge to support the more strategic, value-unlocking role of procurement, we are growing used to constant change and transformation. Witnessing a modern progressive procurement function created from scratch, with no legacy systems and established processes, is fascinating. While procurement at TII has evolved in recent years, much of the team’s work has been focused on its genesis.
The Abu Dhabi-based Technology Innovation Institute (TII) is a leading global research institution ‘dedicated to pushing the frontiers of knowledge’. Its teams of scientists, researchers and engineers work in an open, flexible and agile environment to deliver new and disruptive breakthroughs in the fields of advanced materials, directed energy, AI and digital science, propulsion and space, autonomous robotics, quantum technology, biotechnology, renewable and sustainable energy, cryptography, and secure systems.
Pioneering procurement
As a brand-new research institute in 2020 at the cutting edge of technology and science, TII had to build a procurement function to support its pioneering work from the ground up. Buying decisions were being made on the fly, with no centralised function in the modern sense. It would be two years before the senior leadership team could develop a robust, progressive procurement function.
Juan Pelayo leads this development as Head of Procurement, bringing experience as an industrial engineer and providing essential expertise and organisational know-how during rapid growth. “The growth has been tremendously fast,” he says.
And that’s not all. We also have a raft of ‘hot topic’ deep dives from leading global procurement practitioners plus all the latest news and events…
Read the latest issue here!
