Reviewed and fixed Honda's internal digital services procurement process, reducing lead times and building a reusable framework that shaped later tool procurements.
→ Process improvements adopted for FY25/26. Digital procurement lead times reduced.
Problem
Honda's internal procurement process for digital services was causing delays and friction, slowing the team's ability to act on new requirements when they came up.
Context
This sat alongside my day-to-day platform ownership, where slow procurement was directly limiting how quickly the team could respond to genuine business need.
Business objective
Review the end-to-end procurement process for digital services, find the root causes of the delay, and come back with a set of prioritised improvements.
Customer/user objective
The team needed a procurement process that matched the pace digital platform work actually moves at, rather than one built for a different kind of purchasing.
Constraints
The review had to cover the full journey from need identification to contract sign-off, since looking only at the parts people complained about most risked missing the actual root cause.
Stakeholders
Legal, InfoSec, Finance, and Procurement, each of whom experienced the friction differently, plus the wider digital team waiting on faster access to new tools and suppliers.
Research and discovery
I mapped the existing procurement journey end to end and engaged stakeholders across Legal, InfoSec, Finance, and Procurement to understand where the friction actually sat and what was driving it, since it looked different depending on which function you asked.
Options considered
I considered recommending function-specific fixes for each team's individual complaint versus a structured, cross-functional analysis. I chose the structured analysis, since isolated fixes risked solving symptoms without addressing where the process broke down between functions.
Prioritisation
I prioritised the friction points that were common across multiple functions, since those were most likely to be structural rather than specific to one team's way of working.
Delivery
I produced a structured analysis with prioritised recommendations, presented it to senior stakeholders, then worked with the procurement function to implement the key ones.
Decisions made
Presenting prioritised recommendations rather than a single fix was the decision that mattered most, it let stakeholders see the full picture and back the changes with the most impact rather than the loudest complaint.
Trade-offs
A full end-to-end review took longer than fixing the most visible complaint would have. I judged that worthwhile, since a narrower fix risked leaving the real bottleneck untouched.
Business outcome
The process improvements were adopted for FY25/26, procurement lead times for digital services came down, and the work fed directly into how later tool procurements were run, including AB Tasty and Crownpeak.
Customer outcome
The digital team could act on new requirements faster, without procurement friction slowing delivery down.
Lessons learned
Friction in a cross-functional process looks different depending on who you ask, so a fix based on only one function's complaint would likely have missed the actual bottleneck.
What I'd improve today
I'd build a lighter version of this review into procurement's regular process, so friction gets caught incrementally rather than needing a full structured review to surface it.
