Joel Walker is a co-founder of the disruptive sourcing firm The Knowledge Group, also known as tkg, which has recently merged with digital procurement platform Maistro. Prior to joining tkg, Joel was the Global Head of Indirect Services Procurement at Vodafone, covering a huge array of spend areas, including fleet, travel, legal, HR, and consulting, with a spend responsibility in excess of £1.5 billion across 23 countries.
Joel is passionate about supporting businesses to find smart digital solutions for their procurement challenges and offers the detail into the synergies that tkg and Maistro can offer.
Hi Joel, who are tkg and Maistro & why did you merge?
The Knowledge Group (tkg) is a fresh thinking and disruptive sourcing firm, delivering next generation outsourcing services. We ensure organisations can source and manage their business services quickly, without compromising on quality, with a combination of digital tools, a global marketplace and industry-leading business process outsourcing services.
Maistro is a procurement technology service provider that streamlines the way businesses buy services through powerful spend analytics, an intuitive on-demand platform and a pre-vetted, curated supplier network.
Together, The Knowledge Group (tkg) and Maistro deliver smart sourcing solutions to our clients. With tkg’s unparalleled knowledge of the sector and Maistro’s digital procurement platform housing a growing marketplace of pre-vetted suppliers, we can offer buyers lower cost, lower risk and greater return.
What issues do your solutions solve?
We buy
We shortlist skilled vendors that suit our clients’ needs from an approved supply chain of innovative suppliers. As a disruptive procurement business different from the rest, we use a digital procurement platform that allows buyers to either self-service or be guided with support from us to run sourcing events, commercial modelling, business case design and contract development supplier selection. The buy solution speaks to pre-sales implementation on a one-off, fixed fee basis, and includes:
• RFP compilation
• Supplier evaluation criteria
• Financial due diligence as required
• Procurement as a Service or Software as a Service capabilities
We build
From creation to design and implementation, we empower teams with the tools and suppliers they need to get the job done. By choosing our build solution, we will support buyers in engaging the best suppliers and implementing them in a way that suits them – whether that’s engaging one supplier or creating a supplier eco-system. Creating fresh thinking solutions with our combination of agility, flexibility and risk management, guarantees effective quality implementation and programme oversight.
• Onboarding and contracting suppliers
• Capacity planning implementation
• Commercial and contract support
• Programme governance, project and change management
We operate
From supplier management to operational performance and beyond, we can take care of clients’ projects and suppliers in a way that works for them. Our operate outsourcing services offer a range of tested solutions, including vendor management, commercial oversight, and more. The operate stage speaks to post-implementation, maintenance and management. We offer a variety of managed services dependent on clients’ needs. With an eco-system in place, we can ensure service quality and consistency, risk mitigation, tail spend compliance and successful operational delivery. This includes:
• Programme and change management
• Operational assurance
• Demand and capacity management
• Vendor management
• Commercial assurance
Our services
Our procurement as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) solutions enable clients to manage their service spend in one place. We streamline the procurement process for our clients, offering them our end-to-end buy, build and operate services. Our digital platform orchestrates the Request for Proposal (RFP) sourcing process and the ongoing maintenance of the contractual agreement. With access to a growing marketplace of pre-vetted suppliers, buyers can use the platform either self-service or be guided with support from us to run sourcing events, commercial modelling, business case design and contract development supplier selection.
Why should your solutions be considered above others?
We are experts in category spend analytics. We use buyers’ spend data to build interactive visual dashboards, from which we can ascertain areas of addressable spend and the health of their supply chain across a single or group of businesses. Our analytics uses £39 billion of comparable spend, allowing us to create a sourcing strategy with tangible savings and a detailed return on investment business case.
We support with spend management. Our solution allows buyers to manage the procurement strategy themselves using our platform or engage our CIPS-qualified experts through our managed service offering. We can assist your internal team with specific spend category expertise or simply help accelerate cashable savings. We offer our services on a “payment on outcomes’’ basis, which means there are no costs to businesses unless we can deliver our clients savings.
We use AI-generated insights, deep expertise and easy-to-use technology to simplify the sourcing process, enabling businesses to unlock significant cost and time savings, whilst mitigating risk.
Our platform lets users easily manage their sourcing event — a quick quote or a full tender — with compliance rooted in every transaction. Clients can use their existing suppliers or expand their options with our large diverse network. Whether deployed as self-service, managed service or a hybrid of the two, our smart digital platform delivers all the efficiency and autonomy that users want, with all the control finance and procurement teams need.
Who is your solution aimed at?
We connect buyers with suppliers across a number of spend categories, including the BPO, facilities management, marketing, professional services, health and safety, IT services and security sectors. We predominantly support clients without procurement systems in place, or those who lack control of their own data or have an inconsistent procurement operating model. Ideally, our digital solution and expertise serve those organisations with a procurement spend of between £1 million and £50 million. However, we are always open to find ways that we can support organisations of different sizes.