Cuong Nguyen

Got a continuing conundrum you just can’t get your head around? Here’s your chance to get to the bottom of it. Join forces with your fellow peers and pick the brains of market leaders to explore practical solutions, test ideas and collaboratively crack the code! An exceptional way to really get a handle on your key challenges. Our Roundtable Hosts will share the top three takeaways from each Roundtable so you can get an insight into all the discussions.

Roundtable 1: Planning for the End: How To Transition Out and Unwind Supplier Agreements

Hosted By: Abel Forrester, Global Category Manager, Takeda Pharmaceuticals

• When supplier relationships sour, or need to be ended for political, regulatory, or other purposes, procurement takes on a very different role – how do you manage this part of the sourcing process?

• Assessing your capability for pulling back or ending agreements – how has this been set up from the beginning in the contract?

• Dealing with exit penalties, and how to end the relationship gracefully with minimal business disruption

Roundtable 2: Controlling The Cloud: Enable Business Innovation While Ensuring Cost Management

Hosted By: Ron Vermeulen, Manager Cloud Solutions, Comparex

• How to choose the right cloud for the right workloads, security, productivity without losing control? Are you aware of the cloud broker approach?

• Share your experiences and approaches for dealing with cloud based solutions – where have you had success and what are your pain points?

• How do you approach IT and data security issues? Have vendors been open to compromise? And can you actually get security by obscurity through hiding in the cloud?

• When does it not make sense to move to the cloud – where have you decided this is not the way to go and why?

• What are the risks of moving everything to the cloud, and how do you get back from the cloud if necessary, is it reversible?

Roundtable 3: How to Create A More Collaborative Culture Across Country And Business Units

Hosted By: Eric Verschut, Global Lead Procurement Monitoring & Control, Aegon

• How do you share knowledge and collaborate on projects across your country and business units? Sharing success stories and pain points

• Engaging with local offices who are used to working independently – how do you encourage them to collaborate?

• Creating a procurement advisory council – how does this work and who should be involved?

• Contracting for agile software development is fundamentally different from traditional project contracting – why, and in what ways?
• Using traditional contracts for an agile development project can endanger the project execution and cause a company to fail to get the potential benefits of agile development, so how can organisations change their contracting models, reduce risk and get more benefits out of adopting agile development?
• Is the problem deciding when something is finished? What do you pay at what milestones? How does payment work, and how do you ensure a secure process for your company?

Roundtable 5: Financial Services Sector Roundtable

Hosted By: Cuong Nguyen, Head of IT Procurement, Danske Bank

An opportunity to discuss with your sector peers on the challenges and opportunities specific to IT procurement in the Financial Services sector

• What can we do to ensure regulatory compliance when buying and contracting with Cloud solutions?

• How to overcome internal business inhibitors to sourcing and contracting with start-ups or niche providers, as the dynamic changes to working with more nimble players

• How should procurement as a function interface with digital teams?

Roundtable 6: Creating An IT Procurement Category Management Strategy That Fits Your Needs

Hosted By: Michael Bell, Manager Corporate Procurement – IT, KPN

• IT is often considered a Category on its own, but within IT several different categories can be found (Hardware, Software, Staffing, Professional Resources, Outsourcing, Cloud, etc.) – how do you structure this in your company? How has this changed over time, and what are your future plans?

• What are the different skillsets and resources you need for each category of spend? What category tends to be your biggest focus and area of spend, and why?

• How do you tailor your procurement strategy for each category, and how is this changing with ever-changing technology and business needs?

Roundtable 7: How Do You Structurally Embed Digital In Your Sourcing Organisation?

Hosted By: Sven Kaesser, HO Information & Communication Technology Procurement, Airbus Group

• How do we as IT Procurement need to reorganize to fully embrace digital and all its implications? How do we restructure commodities?

• What are the best strategies to develop the speed and agility necessary to prosper in a digital world?

• How do you work effectively with all the new types of suppliers in the digital space? Sharing success stories and pain points.

Roundtable 8: Winning the Day - Negotiating Better Software License Agreements

Hosted By: Laurence James, Senior Solution Architect, Flexera Software

• Lead vendor negotiations - move beyond a discount-only approach
• Drive license optimization and cost avoidance
• Increase budget predictability and reduce spend

Roundtable 9: Insourcing – The Challenges And Benefits Of Transitioning From An Outsourced Model

Hosted By: Neal Summers, Global Category Lead – IT Procurement, AstraZeneca

• Organisations are starting to bring outsourced services back in-house. What drives the “Make-or-Buy” decision?
• How does IT Procurement add maximum value to the process?
• What is the impact on supplier relationship management?

• How does your organization’s experience in cloud procurement compare with the findings of the recent Forrester study?
• Can an ISO cloud agreement standard (simplified version in checklist format) help make cloud procurement more consistent?
• How to use the standard? (see instruction

• Taking a fresh look at procurement systems and designing an ideal picture for future growth – what do you want your internal systems and processes to look like, what will be the major changes?
• How is the open source community changing and how will it continue to change the data centres of the future? What are the impacts on hardware and software procurement – is it a true game changer?
• What are the other key technology disruptors now and on the horizon that are changing the hardware, software, services and telecomms landscape?
• Are we heading into a bright new age for IT procurement, where instead of negotiating percentage points of discount with suppliers you can move into the driver’s seat and bring innovation into your data centres?
• Big data – How can IT procurement enable ITs use of big data, and how can procurement use big data themselves?