When it comes to driving rapid procurement transformation, few are better equipped than Sean Park.
Today, Park serves as Vice President, Procurement, AP and Transformation, at Arm and has reinvented the organisation’s procurement function since he joined the company in August 2023.
But the path to Arm has been an interesting and varied one for Park who has enjoyed a storied career. Having grown up in New York City, Park’s education led him to Arizona State University where he took part in a semester abroad to Germany. This move marked the beginning of a lifelong drive to experience life and work abroad, and he later spent significant time in Czechia, the Netherlands, Germany, Brazil and Japan.
It was only after returning to the United States after his first international stints that Park first got involved with procurement and was even nicknamed ‘the procurement guy’ at a consulting firm. Later, Park created his own consulting brand to help biotech/pharma, retail, computing and e-commerce clients develop and deliver a number of procurement transformations. Next, roles as the SVP & Procurement Practice Lead at Acquis Consulting Group and CPO at Splunk followed before Park joined Arm in the summer of 2023.
Arm procurement
Upon Park’s arrival at Arm, the company’s procurement function had undertaken some budget rightsizing the year before in 2022, which meant the function had become more transactional.
“It was a fairly drastic change, causing many programmes to be put on the back shelf for some time,” Park tells us. “There had been minimal investment in procurement technology and much of the work being done was manual and was not great for the procurement team, but also for stakeholders because the systems were not providing even an adequate user experience. In fact, we had exactly two systems, one for transaction intake and the other being the core procurement system, which was integrated with our ERP. It was functional, but created some angst particularly for new and infrequent purchasers in the business.
“Organisationally, the sourcing function was generalist in nature. Operationally, there were few KPIs and metrics being tracked and reported. The tech stack needed attention as the company was growing at roughly 20% per year. The manual way of working was already suboptimal, but was going to hinder the ability for the company to scale in an efficient and effective way.”
Read the full story in the latest edition of CPOstrategy here.