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Speakers
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CHAIRMAN
– Neil Jones,
Central Buying Consortium Chair |
Neil
is Head of Business Services at Hampshire County Council
and has been a member of the Central Buying Consortium
Management Board since 1997. He is known to suppliers
and local government alike as an active supporter of
initiatives to obtain greater value for money through
aggregation of purchasing for the public and voluntary
sectors. Neil took over as CBC Chair from Ros Aird in
September 2007. |
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Stephen
Ashcroft BEng, MSc,
Brian Farrington Ltd |
Stephen
is a management consultant with Brian Farrington
Ltd and an Associate of the National School of Government,
specialising in roles within procurement, supplier
management, commercial negotiation and, increasingly
e-procurement. He is the BFL lead presenter on the
CIPS-examined Certificate of Competence in Purchasing
and Supply. Consultancy and training clients include
London Borough of Waltham Forest, London Borough
of Southwark, Southend Borough Council, Bolton Metropolitan
Council, St Helens LEGI, the Office of Government
Commerce, DCMS, DFID, Rolls-Royce, AstraZeneca,
Scottish Power, the Home Office and the Forensic
Science Service. Stephen holds a Masters Degree
in which his dissertation looked at ‘barriers
to the implementation of e-procurement in local
government’.
He is co-author of the CIPS course book, ‘Contracting
for the Public Sector’, and has published peer-reviewed
articles on commercial negotiation skills. He is
also a visiting lecturer at the University of Manchester.
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Richard
Ellis,
Bedfordshire County Council |
Richard
spent the first 15 years of his career in the private
sector, working for organisations such as Carlsberg,
Whitbread and Adnams. A marketing and customer services
specialist, he championed the development of a more
customer-centric strategy for these organisations, not
only through process re-engineering, but also major
culture change programmes. The shifting focus within
the public ector towards a more customer-orientated
model attracted him into local government, and he joined
Colchester Borough Council as Executive Director. After
only a year at Colchester, he was invited to join Bedfordshire
County Council as Director of Customer Engagement and
Corporate Services, responsible for customer and democratic
services, as well as property, procurement and IT. Bedfordshire
County Council has seen a remarkable turnaround in performance
over the last two years. It has moved from zero stars
on it’s Comprehensive Performance Assessment in
2005, to three stars in 2007 – just one off the
top national rating – making it one of the fastest
improvement stories in local government history. |
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Stuart
Gray,
SGA Stuart Gray Associates |
Stuart
is an organisation and management development specialist.
His background includes teaching to post graduate
level, research and corporate business life. He has
trained, consulted and researched in the fields of
leadership, organisation and management development
for over 20 years. This includes significant time
with large organisations in both the public and private
sectors, moving from a traditional top down culture
to a more customer-focused team working culture.At
a strategic level he works with directors and senior
managers to develop and translate mission, vision
and values into practical outcomes. At an operational
level he develops and trains organisation members
to deliver bottom line improvements using business
process improvement techniques. Stuart is an advisory
board member of Sir John Adair’s
Leadership Foundation, a visiting speaker on leadership
to various academic institutions and a member of the
skills policy group of the West Midlands Business Forum.
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Rebecca
Howard,
ADR International |
Rebecca
is a supply chain consultant at ADR International. She
started her career at British Airways and worked in
IT procurement and at KPMG Consulting prior to joining
ADR in 2003. She has ten years’ experience in
purchasing and supply chain management and received
her CIPS graduate diploma in 2000. Rebecca currently
works with global organisations to deliver purchasing
solutions that focus on process improvement, category
savings and skills transfer. Her recent assignments
include delivering category management training at Disney,
supporting organisational change at American Express
Services Europe and designing and delivering training/e-Learning
for Nokia’s indirect sourcing team. She leads
ADR’s practice in capability change, using ADR’s
Development Needs Analysis tool to assess procurement
skills, and has worked to address the challenge of process
change and maverick procurement expenditure with organisations
such as ntl, American Express and the Metropolitan Police
Service. |
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Ross
Page, TOM Leadership and Communication |
Ross
is a motivational business speaker and creator of the
TOM Leadership and Communication programmes. Using the
latest brain research he combines powerful experiential
learning techniques with what he has called ‘En-Lightning
Training’ to deliver highly motivating and extremely
memorable sessions. |
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