Veteran procurement leader John Dickson has issued a compelling call for the profession’s fundamental transformation, challenging deep-seated industry conventions during his keynote address at the Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply’s Caribbean Conference and Awards 2025.
Addressing regional supply chain leaders at Port of Spain’s Hyatt Regency on December 10, Dickson argued that procurement stands at a critical inflection point, requiring a decisive move beyond its traditional cost-cutting obsession. He proposed a radical repositioning of the function as a strategic driver of organizational value, resilience, and long-term competitive advantage.
Dickson employed a powerful iceberg analogy to illustrate how most organizations perceive procurement: “The one-ninth that businesses see typically concerns cost reduction and cash generation,” he noted, emphasizing that “what drives this function runs much deeper than surface-level financial metrics.”
Drawing upon four decades of industry experience, Dickson traced procurement’s evolutionary trajectory from 1990s cost control through 2000s process efficiency reforms to the digital transformation era of the 2010s. The current phase, he asserted, represents “true intelligent integration” fueled by artificial intelligence, automation, and machine learning technologies.
However, Dickson delivered a crucial caveat against technological determinism: “Procurement needs to align intelligence with purpose. Technology alone cannot deliver meaningful change. The critical question becomes how digital tools mold into organizational direction and strategy.”
This technological integration directly connects to procurement’s strategic relevance. Dickson challenged professionals to examine whether their function remains deeply embedded within business ecosystems or merely influences spending patterns: “When discussing the broader business agenda, that’s where procurement sometimes underperforms,” he observed, referencing conversations with executives who question why procurement rarely features at board-level discussions.
The address gained particular resonance within the Caribbean context, where regional vulnerabilities including hurricane exposure, fuel price volatility, and global trade disruptions dominated earlier conference panels. Dickson emphasized that these realities demand procurement’s evolution from reactive problem-solving to predictive scenario planning, even when not all risks can be anticipated.
He illustrated this imperative with a compelling case study from AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine development, which achieved in eight months what typically requires six years. This breakthrough succeeded because “suppliers didn’t engage in usual trading off or negotiation—we lacked the time. The concept of shared purpose proved critical for ecosystem collaboration.”
This experience fundamentally shaped Dickson’s perspectives on sustainability, which he reframed not as competitive advantage but as potential disadvantage when ignored: “I perceive sustainability as competitive disadvantage when organizations fail to engage collectively, particularly in industries relying on shared supplier bases.”
While addressing growing cybersecurity concerns and resilience-building through supplier risk assessment, Dickson firmly rejected notions of human obsolescence: “Human-centric talent isn’t disappearing—it’s transforming. Leaders should remain curious and learn from younger, digitally-fluent colleagues rather than pretending to master every emerging technology.”
Returning to his central thesis, Dickson concluded that people remain the foundation of procurement performance: “Cultivate the soil. Care for your people. Know your people.” For a profession historically defined by savings targets, he asserted that future success hinges on deeper integration, shared purpose, and translating intelligence into consequential decisions—particularly in disruption-prone regions where theoretical concepts must yield practical resilience.
