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Swapping a vast City office with 80,000 employees to one with just over 250 and a European HQ in a Somerset town is a big enough jump, but Karen Hutchings went farther than that. She also took a leap of faith from the safe protective circle of the buying fraternity to the very competitive world of suppliers, specifically an HBA.

Having enjoyed spells during her career at an airline – Swissair – and also with a large TMC – HRG – perhaps the move to BSI wasn’t so dramatic. However, the new role did offer a potential board position and took her back to her West Country roots.

Crucially, being a buyer-turned-supplier gives her a perfect perspective on buyer/supplier relationships. Says Hutchings: “Customers were engaging with us in a different and positive way. You do need someone with buyer and TMC experience in my opinion; someone who has a view on what a client goes through. For example, BSI has great technology but the driver within a customer may not necessarily be online adoption and you do therefore need to understand what the objectives of your customer are so that you can be aligned.

“Every company should have a mix of experience,” she says, but she also knows that it is cost that prevents more suppliers from employing buyers. “It’s cheaper to bring someone up through the ranks,” she explains. Hutchings is in no doubt that any client relationships would undoubtedly benefit from having a buyer in any customer-facing role within a supplier company. “It would bring new thought processes,” she says.

She believes corporates are willing to pay for better account management as long as they can demonstrate the value and worth they’re being charged for.

Hutchings believes that the problem is that some account managers are just relationship managers: “old school types and they’re not what it’s about. Clients want their account managers to show initiative, to be proactive and instigate change, which is what the BSI account management team are all about,” she explains.

For example, BSI stages quarterly business planning reviews to make sure it is aligned with the customers’ goals. However, Hutchings believes that ”some customers are reluctant to say what their objectives are. There are still buyers out there who treat suppliers as a supplier rather than as a partner so there is an inferior thought process going on.”

Hutchings is also of the opinion that travel is an exception to all other procurement categories and believes that, in the future, it will be outsourced more and more. She is passionate about building long-term relationships with suppliers. ”You benefit more when you know more about each other, but suppliers look too short-term and resist change,” she says.

Sadly for BSI, Hutchings left the company’s Taunton HQ after only seven months as personal reasons took her back to London. In February this year she took her seat in a Canary Wharf skyscraper and joined another bank as regional head of travel for EMEA and APAC.

Has she left an indelible impression on the folk in Somerset? “Trevor [managing director Trevor Elswood] feels I’m leaving a legacy,” she says. The account managers will certainly miss her. “BSI regard service, being cost effective and demonstrating value as key, and they certainly weren’t far off,” she says of them. “They must have the confidence to put a price on value delivery and showing a return on investment to their customers.”

And as far as Hutchings is concerned, she too learnt a lot in the seven months on the other side of the fence. “The job was the right choice. It’s taught me different ways of buying and it’s taught me more about M&E so I have an enriched body of knowledge.

“I never had an understanding of what the capability of an HBA was and I had never touched on M&E before and that was attractive to me. What it’s taught me is there is an absolute need for a hotel booking agency in the marketplace because of the ability to collect commission on behalf of our customers,” she says.

It’s unlikely that an HBA will be suitable for her new company’s hotel spend but Hutchings is keen to put her newly-found experience in M&E to the test and will be expecting to accrue massive savings. Watch this space.

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