Richard Beaumont has had an interesting career, to say the least. He served as a British army officer for over a decade, then worked in general management roles for various businesses, and spent time at McKinsey, before pivoting to be a procurement leader in firms including Rolls Royce and the Co-operative Bank. He now works as a consultant and qualified coach, and is also an excellent conference chair, as many will know having seen him in action at Procurecon and other major events.
His is now also a genuine entrepreneur, and his latest venture, SecureCert, caught my attention as it is very much in the purposeful and sustainable procurement space. It is also interesting because he is pursuing it as the central pillar of the MBA that he is currently pursuing. I haven’t come across this “oneday MBA” before, but it works on the basis that you actually develop and progress a start-up and all your MBA learning is structured around that. This has obvious benefits and according to Beaumont is working well in practice.
But SecureCert is a serious business, not just an academic exercise. It aims to address a problem that we’ve seen in the procurement world for some time. There is a greater and greater need for buyers to be able to demonstrate compliance in the supply chain in terms of human rights, environmental issues and more – think of the new German Supply Chain Act for instance. Buyers must be able to verify and certify their suppliers in terms of these issues and this is becoming a major legislative imperative - and a bit of nightmare really. Organisations have to show that they conduct appropriate due diligence on their supply base, and yet it is impossible for even large firms to check even every significant supplier in detail.
Part of good due diligence is actual physical visits and checks on production and manufacturing sites – that could be a factory, a mine or even a farm. But carrying out inspections is very expensive, whilst simply relying on surveys and suppliers filling in forms has obvious problems. There are also issues for the suppliers. They are being bombarded by customers asking similar but probably slightly different questions – Beaumont says he knows firms that are using ChatGPT to complete these forms because the work is so tedious and extensive! So the aim of SecureCert is to set up a collaborative platform that enables buyers and suppliers to share the results of inspections and audits.
When a member organisation conducts some sort of inspection or audit visit, they complete their review and load it into the platform. It is signed off by the “inspector” and verified with a “timestamp”, and then other member organisations can then access it and see what has been said about the supplier. The supplier might take the initiative even and suggest which customer(s) should do the inspection, choosing those that will have the most credibility with others.
There are other collaborative organisations who share the burden of this type of work such as Electronics Watch, which I featured in the Procurement with Purpose book. But their work is targeted at just one industry sector and does not make use of this platform concept. And solution providers such as Ecovadis do help organisations manage their supply chain compliance, but the information within that platform is in the main not based on a detailed inspection by one of your peers, which would be the case if SecureCert takes off.
Won’t there be a temptation for firms to avoid doing the hard work themselves and just rely on others, I asked? Beaumont doesn’t think so. “Buyers will still want to look at certain key suppliers themselves, I’m sure”, he says. “That is human nature”. If a CPO is presenting to their Board on supply chain risk, for instance, they will want to be able to say that they aren’t totally relying on others. There will also be peer pressure I guess if someone is seen to be exploiting the system.
This does seem to be an interesting and potentially useful idea and it is also currently priced at a very competitive level to build interest and sign-up. Beaumont certainly understands procurement as well as anyone, and maybe he has identified a real winner here – not just for his MBA, but for longer-term success. And you can find out more about SecureCert here.
Late news – Beaumont is running a 45 minute invite-only launch event via Teams on Friday 1 March at 1200UK/1300CET. Please contact him via LinkedIn if you would like to participate.