RFP: Who is Writing Them and Who is Reading Them?

Speakers:

Merrilee Evans – Director of Strategic Sourcing, Scotiabank

In today’s ever-changing, always challenging, business environment companies find it difficult to keep, let alone increase, revenue and profitability. There is constant pressure to reduce costs across the supply chain while, at the same time, improve supplier performance and drive innovation.

As a highly experienced Strategic Sourcing professional Merrilee has helped companies improve their strategic sourcing and supply chain practice.  She provides leadership and advice to buy-side stakeholders, helping them optimize supplier relationships while maximizing budgets.

With Scotiabank Merrilee built a category management practice within Canadian Banking, contributed to the establishment of a new global procurement organization, and delivered major sourcing initiatives such as a full-scale review of the ABM supply chain reducing costs by by 25%.

Prior to Scotiabank, Merrilee was Head of Procurement for Direct Energy North America for five years with responsibility for building the procurement division from the ground up, instituting best practices and processes for sourcing, and delivering cost savings of nearly 43% across the supply chain.

While Director of Strategic Sourcing at CIBC Merrilee managed a sourcing team of 25 in Toronto and New York.   She was responsible for building the supplier contract management repository for the bank.  In addition, she was responsible for all non-construction procurement required for the building of a new CIBC World Markets’ office building at 300 Madison Ave. post 9/11.

Additional Speakers:

Corrie Bouw
Chief Operating Officer for UPLevel

UPLevel, formerly Credit Risk Management Canada, a group of companies named to the list of Canada’s Fastest Growing Companies by Profit Magazine and twice nominated for Canada’s 10 Most Admired Cultures.

Corrie joined the company not long after her Business Management course at college and over the past 23 years has held every position in the company as it grew from 6 employees to its current state of over 130 employees and rising.. Under her leadership, UPLevel has expanded to 3 locations across Canada, and experienced 500% growth over the past 7 years.

Karen McElroy
CEO of Boardroom Metrics.

Karen leads a team of six professional bid response writers across North America who help clients win competitive RFP proposals in almost every industry including financial, legal and professional services. This year alone, her clients have won over $100 million in contracts. Working virtually, Karen and her team provide outsource writing, RFP response evaluation and Client-specific bid-monitoring services. Karen pushes back on the idea that all RFP’s are the same. She believes that winning competitive bids depends on incorporating RFP responses into a proactive and well-developed business development strategy. Karen will talk about that in more detail at this special dinner meeting event.

Thank you to our sponsor for the April Dinner Meeting: