Success Story | Mediaset Group - Luca Poloni, CPO

My name is Luca Poloni and I am Group Chief Procurement Officer at Mediaset Group. I am in charge of coordinating the purchasing processes for all companies of the group and subsidiaries. In Mediaset, we mainly work with 4 areas of purchases. In addition to television productions, which is our core business, I also coordinate the purchases of software/hardware, business services such as call center services for our Pay TV service, market researches, consulting services and support to special projects. Finally, we have a last category: indirect purchases. It includes general services and all purchases related to the operations of our production sites and offices.

I have been in Mediaset for about 18 months. I have been chosen to support the modernization and transformation of Mediaset procurement organisation, creating a transition from a traditional purchasing view to a procurement one. This transformation started, as we said, in September 2015 and the essential element was the implementation of a digital and innovative tool that could enable a series of changes in our company.

We had several challenges when we started about 18 months ago and many of these have been required by Mediaset itself in order to strengthen the behavior and the compliance within the procurement department. There was an organizational challenge around responsibilities centralization and spending categories within the group’s companies. But there was also another organizational challenge, from a professionalization point of view: The aim was to transform our organisation from a service for internal customers into a more proactive organisation that looks for opportunities of efficiency. On that purpose, we had to adopt an innovative and digital tool, like the one we chose, which could help us in this change. So we had to redesign the processes, create new ways of working. And on the other hand, it is also the possibility to achieve information transparency, and generate a continuous improvement.

The main benefits that we expect are, as I said, supporting a different working method, because the implementation of this new system made us think about how we used to work and how we wanted to do this. Surely there is productivity development and strengthening topics. Another benefit that we expect is to have a higher understanding of our spending categories and a higher transparency on our purchasing activities. Finally, I would like to underline the ability to measure the behaviors and therefore track a purchase process at each step along with the capability to measure our performance. This allows us to really understand the added value brought by the Procurement departments to the company.

Firstly, my advice is to be very organized and order the procedures. Take the opportunity to standardize the processes, draw them in an effective and modern logic, which helps to cut the bureaucracy.

Absolutely yes, because the complexity in the world and in the business are ever growing and the necessity to have a tool that helps the management and the understanding of the complexity is very important. Today I couldn’t imagine having a deep understanding and transparency both on processes and Procurement economic elements without a tool that provides data intelligence, like they are able to do today.