Deliveroo Procurement Transformation Drives Business Value

Hello, everyone. This is Techstrong TV. I'm Colleen Coll, and we're at Coupa Inspire 2026.

A lot more conversations on day two, and with me right now is Rob Turner. Rob is Deliveroo's customer, a very reputable customer for Coupa, and he's the chief procurement officer. Rob, thank you for joining us.

My pleasure. So Rob, we're going to talk about the procurement, your job with procurement as chief procurement officer and how successful you've been with using Coupa. So before we get into that, any insights from the show floor or hallway conversations that you've seen so far?

I think actually the very first opening session with Lee and Salva was, to my mind, almost a highlight. And you always worry about a highlight being right at the very beginning- Yeah ... and then what happens to the rest.

But I've known for some time, and I've talked to Coupa a lot, and I've known some time what's coming and what's being built and the capabilities. But actually, it's not often you get to see that presented in such a holistic way. Hmm.

And get a sense of the pace of development as well. So, it's an exciting time with a number of different developments that are coming through. Hmm.

So to be able to sit there and listen to that all in one go, that was a highlight. But certainly the ability to get around and have a look at different parts within the expo hall and have a look at specific parts of development that are coming through and go and talk about those individually is great. And some excitement that you'll take back to your team back at home.

Well, there's a number of different problems that we're trying to solve at the moment, both from a delivery brand, but also thinking about the wider family that we sit within, and an amount of work we've got to do that is showing up a bunch of problems that need solving that actually historically would be really challenging to do. But now, with the development of some of the agentic parts of what Coupa's building allows us to move at a pace. I push things at a pace quite hard.

I go quickly with things, but I can go even faster now, and that's going to be interesting to watch and learn and play with. So getting procurement right for a company like Deliveroo, how big a deal is this? Walk us through.

It is a big deal because we're talking about a business that we see us and lots of others that are doing a similar thing. We're a consumer tech organization. We sit in the heart of a marketplace, really, that we're coordinating that has got customers and restaurants and merchants and vendors and then delivery agents, and you're coordinating across all of that.

So really what we're talking about here is a high volume, relatively low margin business. So when you're working in an environment like that, and you're part of an organization that likes to experiment and try things and fail fast- Fail fast ... if your procurement organization is not set up well- Mm-hmm ...

then actually you hamper that. You can get in the way of that. Hmm.

And that is not a great place to be because if you do that, then people go around you, and you have problems with compliance, and you find that your costs start to go up. And so if you don't organize procurement and set procurement up in the right way with the right processes, the right governance, the right technology to support you- Mm-hmm ... then actually you get in the way.

And what I want is for us to be real value drivers for the business. I want them to come to us and for us to be able to deliver real value. So thinking about how you enable a business to do more for itself in a safe way, thinking about how you move your skills and experience sourcing people into a place where they're not just administering contracts at the bottom end of a sort of contract process, and actually they're involved in helping to lay out the requirements and work with the business to think about other ways of optimizing what they're doing is really, really important.

Yeah. And so that kind of set up that operating model in that kind of environment is absolutely critical. But I think you described a few, but what was broken for Deliveroo that made you start this journey?

What was broken before you started? So Deliveroo IPO'd in 2021, and a lot of work had gone into developing out all the kind of controls framework that you would need to be financially compliant to go IPO. I think the problem was thatThat had potentially been a bit overthought, and also that the business didn't have lots and lots of money at the time to spend on some of the most advanced technology at the time.

They were trying to do too many things at once. So, I actually ended up with some convoluted processes, some platform systems for purchase pay and sourcing and contracting that didn't really talk to each other, so half the time they weren't used. Interesting.

Yeah. Well, exactly. And overly complex approval processes.

So actually, the general position of that meant that it was actually really, really hard to work with procurement. Mm-hmm. So procurement wasn't particularly trusted.

The other thing is that the compelling need really was about, come 2023 when I joined, we weren't hitting the sorts of returns that those investors that had bought into the IPO- Yeah ... were expecting or that we had promised. So there was a real compelling need to adjust that position and step change the performance, the financial performance.

Mm-hmm. And a big part of that is around what your cost base is. So there were a number of programs that were about helping to manage that cost and help drive margin.

Procurement was one of those- Yeah ... because something in the order of 40-odd percent of all of our operating costs was being spent on suppliers. Mm-hmm.

So you get control of that, you're releasing cash that can either be invested in your EBITDA or can be used to invest in generating and stimulating new growth. Yeah. So we had to almost rethink the way procurement was set up to be able to actually go and drive a real meaningful impact on taking the cost down, but also then not just taking the cost down but actually sustaining it down.

Mm-hmm. Because it's all very well going and doing normal sorts of sourcing processes and running those, but if you haven't got a means, good systems, and good governance to be able to manage that spend, then all that cost will start creeping back in. Is that why you decided to partner instead of build because of cost or any other...

I mean, you laid out some really compelling reasons why. Yeah. Look, we toyed with a number of different things.

I'm going to be brutally honest. I was a Coupa customer previously in a previous role, and actually, it would've been very easy to just try and go, "Well, here's Coupa. " But I was new in the business, and there were a lot of people there that had been involved in building things.

And so we went through a proper process of reviewing what the right options might be. So do you build in-house? Now, we're a tech company, so everybody likes to build things, but I don't think we're quite the source to pay type- Mm-hmm ...

builders of things at the moment, and our resources are probably better off spent somewhere else. Yeah. Also then, do you look at individual sourcing tools and contracting tools and purchasing tools and try and knit them together?

And there was a frame of mind that people were looking at that. Mm-hmm. But we are thin in terms of resource, and the more you start to do things like that, then the more human resource is spent in managing systems and system connectivity than actually- Yeah ...

driving any of the value out of the back end of it. So very quickly landed on, well, we need to be on a single platform, and we've got to do this end to end because about half the value is coming from upstream, so we've got to do it end to end. And so, with the normal kind of go-to-market requirements testing, Coupa shone through that process.

And so that's how we ended up in that place. Real proper assessment of what's the right way to go. Sounds like it, yeah.

It's fantastic. 100% supplier adoption across 10 countries is an extraordinary number. I mean, most deployments, what, they hit 60 or struggle with 60.

So how did you get there? Well, there was no other way to train it with us. That's a good answer.

We went about cut over in an extremely brutal way. Yeah. Not many people would choose to do it the way we did it.

We were advised that probably the best thing for us to be doing would be to wind down old systems and process country by country by country- Mm-hmm ... and ramp up in others. But our view was, look, you can't work like that in our kind of environment.

It's too slow. We haven't got the resources that can run multiple ERP systems to do that. We were worried about how data was going to flow.

And so actually we said, we're not going to do that. We're going to turn our old system offOn one day across all the business, and we're going to turn the new one on the next. And that's what we did.

So, in reality, if we hadn't had supplier adoption... Now, don't get me wrong, there was data correction errors and things like that that we had to do to remediate. But if we didn't have full adoption, then suppliers wouldn't get paid, business wouldn't be able to buy things, and that was the compelling reason.

You don't give anybody a choice. But you prepare them for it. You make sure that you're going into these things, and you make sure that people understand that this is what we're going to do and why.

Well, it seems like a lot of work and a lot of smarts went into this decision to you, a partner, and- Well, I think the key thing here is always, it's all very well someone like me saying, "This is how I want the process to work. " Actually, the thing that you need to be really clear about is how you're adapting your business around it, and you're preparing your business to receive it, and that is half the battle. So, we started with one steer co when we started the project, and it was all about design, and it was all about technical engineering, and it was all about that kind of resource that was making sure that it was actually a viable product that we were going to launch.

But actually, once we got about halfway through, and that design's all signed off and it's all being built, we switched- Yeah ... the balance of the steer co to be all about change management. And we brought in senior members of the end user community, so directors and VPs whose teams were high users of it.

So how do we prepare your teams to receive this? So we switched the whole focus, and I think that actually, I'd never done that before. It was something new to try, and I think it was extremely successful.

I would do that again. Okay. One last question.

Fantastic explanation, by the way. If you had to do this again, what would you do differently? God, what would I do differently?

I'm not sure that there's that much I would do differently. And that's okay. Given the spend, given the time that we had to do it in, given the scale of it, I don't think that we could've done much more.

Ideally, I would've had a little bit longer, and we would've built more content into systems and we'd have been a bit more prepared rather than launching an empty shell. Yeah. But you pay your money, you make your choices, right?

Definitely. Based on what you've got to deliver. Yeah.

That's true. Fantastic. Okay.

Rob, thank you for joining us. Learned a lot. And thank you for tuning in.

We have more coming up, so stay tuned.