Paula Davila Martinez

Paula Martinez is a visionary and strategically driven Senior Executive with extensive international experience in diverse industries delivering excellence in Procurement and Supply Chain Management. Leading high performing teams to build strong partnerships, promotes a results driven culture delivering €mm cost savings and innovative solutions. She has proven successful at elevating procurement organizations from transactional to highly strategic using a transformational mind set and strong future orientation. She is an inspiring leader that positively impacts bottom line profitability and clearly brings an expertise in procurement and supply management, operational excellence, outsourcing/offshoring, turnaround and crisis management situations.

For the last 5 years Paula has been the Vice President and Chief Procurement Officer for UCB Biopharma in Brussels – a global biopharma company with operations in c38 countries, 8000 staff and global revenues of €3.9bn in 2015 – where she has transformed a decentralized procurement organization into a high performing strategic one. Through outsourcing of operational and transactional procurement activities, she has re-focused her procurement organization into delivering value beyond cost savings through supplier enabled innovation. Paula leads a highly engaged and motivated procurement organization with 85% engagement score measured through Towers Watson annual engagement survey (2015) and has achieved stakeholder engagement levels above 60% measured through NPS. She has also released a significant amount of operating cash flow through supplier payment term extensions and tight management of accounts payable processes.

Previously Paula was the Procurement Associate Director Indirect, EMEA for The Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Luxembourg – one of the world’s biggest Tire Manufacturers with 70,000+ staff in 23 countries and revenues of $18bn – leading indirect procurement categories across EMEA, including team management of 45 in a matrix organization. She achieved great things here, transforming the indirect procurement organization with a strategic, operational and transactional focus, reorganized regional strategic sourcing category management team to maximize synergies, and launched a supplier relationship management program to capture benefits with key suppliers.

Prior to this Paula was with Anheuser Busch InBev in Belgium -  the World’s 5th FMCG Company in Beverage Sector with 120,000+ staff in 30+ countries and $47bn revenue – where she performed well in a number of progressively more responsible roles culminating in Global Procurement Director Indirect. In this role Paula delivered savings and payment terms targets through global sourcing initiatives and category management, and identified pre/post-merger category synergies after the acquisition of Anheuser-Busch.

Paula started her career with DHL’s European Management Graduate Programme on graduation from her MSc in International Business. Paula has an MBA, Bachelor in Business Administration, and has recently graduated from the General Management Program at Harvard Business School in Boston. She is Advisory Board Member to Procurement Leaders and a Member of Procurement.