We speak to Kiran Menghnani, Director, Tipico Services Ltd to see how he and his team have transformed procurement…
Kiran Menghnani, Director Tipico Services Ltd – part of the online iGaming and Sports Betting brand Tipico Group – stumbled into procurement by accident.
As the Malta Head-Officed enterprise Tipico Group started to experience rapid growth midway through the 2010s, the maturity of the Group realised the tangible need for a dedicated procurement function. Then, in 2016, Gibraltar-based Kiran was asked to look into creating a future-ready procurement hub that could deliver a more strategic and agile business-facing function.
A new dawn
Tipico had a somewhat disjointed procurement approach to purchasing, prior to its transformation, a situation that resulted in a lack of transparency and an antiquated siloed approach. It was clear to Kiran that as the company continued to grow at pace, that this casual approach to procurement needed to change.
“We were still a young but rapidly growing company. We needed to work fast to get the tasks done while finding our way when dealing with our suppliers. Now the responsibility was on me to better understand the pain points being faced. So I went about asking the basic questions challenging any purchasing requests. Has the contract been reviewed internally? Is there any data processing by the supplier? Has the price been benched with the market? How can I access past/existing contracts?”
“SoonI started to realise that I wasn’t getting the answers to comfort me as Director, and that this humble piece of paper called a contract needed more attention. And so I needed to protect both myself and the company as regulatory requirements had evolved. And that’s how this journey really started: someone questioning as to what we were doing and accepting that there were obvious gaps and opportunities.”
Centralisation
Of course, Sports Betting and iGaming is a heavily regulated and audited sector and so Tipico has to be agile whenever it is asked to provide requested information. “There are always particular questions auditors ask, and to be in a position where we couldn’t answer, or couldn’t find the answer, was not an option. I didn’t want to be running around looking for answers, it should be readily available… but wasn’t,” he laughs. “And so, this was the acknowledgement needed to start centralising documentation and the move towards a contract life cycle management process.”
