• CIPS Purchasing and Supply Management Professional of the Year

Tim Ussher (BSkyB)

Also on the shortlist:

Chris Browne (Environment Agency),

Tom Pearson (Telstra),

Ian Shepherd (Plymouth Hospitals NHS Trust)

Tim Ussher is not the sort of procurement director who likes to sit back and dream up grand strategies. He’s more of a doer than a thinker, a guy who loves nothing better than to roll up his sleeves and get stuck into a meaty project.

The winner of the inaugural CIPS Purchasing and Supply Management Professional of the Year award also prefers virgin territory to well-trodden ground. During his 20-year career, he has specialised in building purchasing departments from scratch, most recently in his current role as director of procurement for BSkyB. He thrives on a blank canvas and the opportunity to make a real difference.

"I’d much rather do that than step into someone else’s shoes and try to do a bit better," he says.

Ussher admits being impatient and expects to achieve quick results. He is proud of the fact that, since joining the satellite broadcaster in June 2001, he and his 15-strong team have "packed two years’ work into one", and even prouder that they won the "most improved purchasing operation" category at the Kelly’s CIPS Awards.

Key achievements include saving more than £60 million having reviewed just under half of Sky’s £1 billion annual spend, and implementing what Ussher claims is the first fully functioning purchase-to-pay Ariba e-procurement system in Europe.

From Sky’s headquarters on an industrial estate in Osterley, west London, the team - all but two of whom Ussher recruited himself - has also seized on e-auctions. Those put through one include the five suppliers of one of Sky’s single biggest and most critical contracts: the black boxes that sit on top of customers’ televisions.

Ussher prefers to call them "e-bidding events" rather than auctions, because he sees the latter as implying a final decision on price and hence passing up the chance to get further reductions. They are a ticket to the negotiating table rather than a deal clincher.

"In my experience, you can always get an extra 3 per cent off the price if you are almost at the point of signing a contract," he explains.

Not that he is driven purely by price. In the creative media environment at Sky, winning the support of key stakeholders in the business before taking decisions is essential, he says - and something of a departure from his experience at previous employers, which have included Booker, Dairy Crest, Hilton, British American Tobacco and the security firm Williams.

"My dictatorial buyer’s hat has well and truly been thrown in the bin here. Sky is not a company that would have respected that.

"Instead, I have taken a democratic approach, which is that if we can’t get everybody around the table to agree to a supplier, a proposal or the terms, we’re going to have to go away and do it better."

Naturally, some people have proved easier to convince than others. But he believes his task has been made easier by the fact he has no interest in grabbing a slice of savings made in the form of "overriders" or kickbacks. "If I save £5 million in marketing, whether they take it off their budget or spend it on an advertising campaign is between them and their finance director. It has nothing to do with me."

Looking ahead, plenty of challenges remain for Sky’s procurement team, Ussher says. For him, one of the main ones will be adjusting to his changing role. With the "big bang" phase over and a capable group of professionals in place, Ussher accepts that he needs to be less hands-on and spend more time on strategy, even if it runs counter to his instincts.

"I’m fairly keen to keep control," he confesses. "My downfall is I like to know everything. If the chief executive phoned me up and asked about some aspect of procurement, I would be mortified if I didn’t know the answer."