GEP Europe Tour 2025, London: Q&A with Bob O'Leary
The GEP Europe Tour 2025 landed in London with all the energy of a city that never stops evolving.
At St Ermin’s Hotel, a venue steeped in espionage history, procurement professionals gathered to explore the latest AI-driven innovations shaping their industry.
The irony wasn’t lost—just as MI6 once thrived on intelligence, today’s procurement leaders are harnessing data to stay ahead.
The agenda was packed, from keynotes on digital payments to the ever-important question of procurement’s future. The Procurement Leaders Panel, where experts tackled everything from frictionless buying to the growing need for data security, was a particular highlight, whilst voices such as Simon Hannak from Costa Coffee, Phil Singleton from Swiss Re and Sarah Willmott from Nationwide kept the conversation engaging until the very end.
Supply Chain Digital caught up with Bob O’Leary, RVP for Software Sales in Europe at GEP, who shared exactly why this tour matters for the industry.
Tell us a bit about you and your role with GEP
I'm Bob O'Leary. I lead our European software team here at GEP. I've been with the company for about 18 months and I'm really excited about some of the things that we're doing.
Prior to being with GEP, I worked for Salesforce for 13 years, so digital transformation is nothing new to me.
I'm really excited about the opportunity that AI presents in working with GEP as well.
The GEP Europe Tour is growing at an impressive pace. Why is it so important to bring industry professionals together in one place?
We're really excited about the EU roadshow. It's an opportunity to bring our clients, our customers and our partners together in one place like we never have before.
This is our biggest European get-together that we've ever had and it's the second biggest company event outside our GEP Innovate Conference.
Why do GEP solutions stand out when it comes to driving value for businesses?
I guess it's the changes that we've seen in the market and the industry. About 24 months ago, we completely rebuilt our platform from the ground up, implementing our GEP Quantum Platform.
It's a platform that's been built by procurement practitioners for procurement practitioners, and that's a little bit different.
Many, many other applications and systems in organisations like ours have bolted on technologies over many, many years. Whereas at GEP, we've built it from the ground up and that really differentiates us.
What does GEP hope to achieve from today's event?
We're a 25-year-old company, but we look at so many things that we do with that beginner's mind.
We consider ourselves a start-up in so many ways, in terms of the way in which that we approach the market. So for us it's about getting our customers together, talking.
We're not trying to sell anything at this event. It's really about best practices, bringing customers together so that we can all uplift the world of procurement.
It's been a forgotten space of technology for so long. Many of the more front-end applications are considered sexier in this space, but there is nothing sexier to a CFO than cost savings. That's one of the things that we're looking to speak to about CPOs today.
Why should companies join GEP in the era of enterprise AI?
Well, we're a global leader in procurement and supply chain transformation.
So, I suppose our software allows customers to bring the best of both together in one place.
We've got everything from our hero product GEP Smart, which brings STP procurements together. We've got GEP NEXXE, which is for supply chain transformation, GEP Green, which is at the top of our minds at the moment for all things to do with sustainability and ESG. Then finally, with the most recent acquisition of OpusCapita, we're now able to really automate financial processes as well from invoicing and payments.
When you put all of those together on one native platform, it becomes really powerful and we're really excited about it.
Remaining tour dates
- Munich, 11 February 2025
- Zurich, 25 February 2025
- Paris, 5 March 2025
- Geneva, 6 March 2025
- Copenhagen, 11 March 2025
- Stockholm, 12 March 2025
- Helsinki, 13 March 2025
- Lisbon, 19 March 2025
- Madrid, 20 March 2025
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