Chris Holmes

I help leadership teams improve margin, reduce cost and build the operating discipline needed to scale well. My background is as a senior procurement and transformation executive in global life sciences, with direct accountability for multi-billion-dollar spend, international teams and major performance programmes.

I have led significant transformation programmes that changed the way large organisations work, improved governance and delivered measurable commercial performance. At Avantor, I led Global Sourcing across $3.6bn of distributed products and $600m of direct materials spend, while also overseeing a customer-facing revenue team that grew to $0.5bn sales. At Novartis, I held global procurement strategy, transformation and innovation roles, including responsibility for reshaping a 1,300-person procurement function and building stronger supplier performance, governance and innovation disciplines.

My work is practical and operator-led. I am most useful when a business is scaling, when growth slows, or when established ways of working are no longer good enough. I support leaders who are figuring out how to do things differently, whether that means improving functional cost, strengthening decision-making, building better supplier partnerships, digitising sourcing processes or creating clearer accountability across complex organisations.

I currently support businesses in a NED and advisory capacity, alongside advisory work for start-ups, procurement functions and companies going through transformation. I also invest through angel syndicates and contribute to professional and voluntary organisations, including the Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply.

I bring experience across procurement, sourcing, supplier-enabled innovation, category management, governance, change and team development. I am interested in NED, board advisory, fractional CPO, fractional transformation, fractional innovation and selected full-time CPO opportunities where there is a clear need to improve performance, reduce complexity and build the capability to grow.