The SPS Executive Team

Rowena Ward

Rowena has wide experience in delivering procurement solutions, more recently in the local government, telecommunications and financial services sectors. She is an acknowledged expert in procurement business process re-engineering and systems in both public and private sectors. 

Rowena trained as a business analyst for United Biscuits and worked on the implementation of their outbound logistics solutions before joining QSP in 1992 to help design and project manage the development of its financial applications. She was responsible for developing and delivering e-Procurement solutions and 3rd party partner relationships within the Centre for Procurement Excellence at QSP under the one.stop e-Procurement brand before establishing SPS with Ken Cole in 2001.

More recent assignments for SPS include procurement healthchecks and benchmarks, business intelligence strategies, business case development, and procurement strategy development. Rowena has also developed and presented e-Procurement courses and seminars for the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply (CIPS) and other organisations including Understanding and Implementing e-Procurement, Successful Electronic Auctioning, Delivering Procurement Excellence and Buying IT.

Rowena is a recognised expert in expenditure analysis and has written several whitepapers and guidance papers on the subject having worked with dozens of councils and collaborative bodies to deliver strategic, systems and savings benefits through improved expenditure analysis including Capital Ambition and the Procurement Agency for Essex (PAE).  Rowena developed and now presents the highly acclaimed programme Making Expenditure Analysis Easy.

She is now Operations Director at SPS and has responsibility for product development and marketing.

Alison McCreath

Alison has over twenty years experience in senior management positions in companies servicing the Public Sector – amongst those are Sema Group, Radius, QSP and OLM. Her work has included consultancy roles and major bid management where she ran the bid team which secured a £120M IT contract in central government. In recent years she has worked with clients to develop and deliver market leading solutions in the areas of finance, purchasing and inventory management. She is now Managing Director at SPS.

Ken Cole

Ken has had a highly successful career spanning both the public and private sectors. He is an acknowledged authority and speaker on strategic procurement in the public sectorand has been the author of major white papers that have advanced thinking in areas as diverse as as supplier relationship development and classification and coding. He has instigated, led and delivered a wide range of projects and assignments while also undertaking high profile appointments such as Director of the London Centre of Excellence (LCE) from 2005 to 2008 and founding Director of the Procurement Agency for Essex (PAE) in 2004. He was Commercial and Procurement Advisor to Capital Ambition until March 2011 where he produced the report ‘Delivering for London – Modernising local authority procurement’ which was endorsed by the 33 London elected Leaders.

He worked in central government until 1995, serving in various senior project management and procurement roles at the MOD, Home Office, Cabinet Office and H M Treasury, before moving into the private sector in 1995 where he managed the public sector division for a major ICT provider.

 He is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply (CIPS), Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and is a Liveryman in the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists having received the Freedom of the City of London in 1994.

 He is now Projects and Practice Director of SPS Consultancy Services which he established with Rowena Ward in 2001.

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