Anna Barej

Anna Barej’s journey with Best Buy began during the pandemic when the company approached her with an opportunity she found compelling: to be at the heart of transforming its procurement organisation.

Working for McDonald’s at the time, Anna found the project too intriguing to ignore: “I was very much interested in joining a large organisation with a strategy of fully transforming the procurement function to enable greater value at enterprise level."

Anna’s professional career began in 1992 and, over the ensuing years, she has worked for CPG leaders including Kraft Foods and Procter & Gamble. 

She credits them with shaping her approach to procurement: "I have been very lucky in my professional career to work for large, complex, global companies.

"All of them equally influenced me. They challenged me, they presented a very different approach to strategic sourcing and procurement and enabled me to learn and grow."

Driving transformation

Now four years into her tenure as Vice President of Procurement at Best Buy, Anna identifies overseeing the company's procurement transformation program — named ‘Propel’ — as her most significant achievement.

"The best thing about procurement is providing unexpected value to the business," she enthuses. “Most of our stakeholders view procurement in a very traditional way. We are here to help them deliver deals and partnerships that enable them to perform their roles.

"What many often don't expect is the surprises that we can unlock through innovation, through insights, through introductions. That, to me, is the greatest thrill – opening their eyes to possibilities they hadn’t considered."

Despite her successes, Anna acknowledges that change management presents the greatest challenge to achieving functional ambitions.

"It's always driving change," she admits, when asked about the biggest challenge she faces in her role. “In general, people are comfortable flexing new muscles, so everybody naturally wants to revert back to the traditional way."

The Propel transformation required fundamental shifts in stakeholder engagement, as Anna explains: "This wasn’t just a procurement transformation; it required our stakeholders to work differently; it required our business partners to engage with us differently. To do so effectively with collaboration was challenging – it was both an art and a science."

Future evolution

Looking ahead, Anna sees the successful transformation as a platform to create new opportunities.

"What we're experiencing right now is remit expansion for procurement,” she says. “We are leaning into new territory for traditional cost focused peers in the industry."

Of course, such an expansion results in significant new responsibility: "We have recently been tapped to facilitate and lead governance for operating income optimisation efforts across the enterprise, which combines procurement commercial work, with operational efficiency activity owned by the business."

This positions Anna's team at a “central point in the company to facilitate all that work across the enterprise"— representing a profound evolution of procurement's organisational role at Best Buy.

To read the full article in the magazine, click HERE.