Judging

The CIPS Supply Management Awards judging panel consist of representatives from CIPS and Supply Management in addition to other respected procurement leaders across the public, private and not-for-profit sectors.

How we select our judges

We are confident that our awards stand out from others in the industry for being highly transparent, robust and ethical. Our standards are incredibly high and we carefully select judges based on this.

We invite judges from a selection of backgrounds, sectors and professions to ensure we have a wide range of knowledge and experience that reflects the range of entries we receive. We invite representatives from the previous winning organisations as well as senior procurement leaders. We do not allow consultants to join our panel and we limit non-CIPS judges to just two terms on the panel. Judges are allowed to enter the Awards and have to sign a confidentiality agreement with us, as well as declaring any conflicts of entry regarding the entries. Judges do not score categories which their organisations have entered and are not privy to scores or discussions on the judging days.

Judging system

Commerce Decisions – Official Technology Supplier to the CIPS Awards.

The CIPS awards judging process has been supported by Commerce Decisions’ AWARD® evaluation solution. AWARD® enabled the evaluation of submissions in a robust, controlled and objective manner; without bias and ensuring the integrity of the judging activities. With a geographically dispersed judging team, tight timescales and a large number of documents to manage, AWARD® assured an efficient, robust, transparent and auditable competition process.

Commerce Decisions is focused on supporting complex, high risk evaluations – a niche area that may represent only 20% of procurement transactions, but often account for 50% of annual spend and 90% of procurement risk. AWARD® has been developed specifically to support these strategic procurements with a structured, robust and transparent approach. The solution offers a unique focus and depth of functionality, with innovative modules to support the development of effective criteria and assure value for money decisions.

Together with our best practice knowledge and expert services, AWARD® provides project teams with the confidence that they are dealing with procurement challenges efficiently, meeting the demands of shareholders/procurement regulations and delivering robust decisions that are open to external scrutiny. AWARD® has been proven to deliver time and cost savings, confidence, efficiency and defensibility. With proven success on $400 billion of projects over 15 years, Commerce Decisions has a strong client base across many sectors including construction, transport, education, FM, utilities, health and defence.

Head Judge

Julia Brown, Chief Procurement Officer, Carnival Corporation

Julia Brown is CPO of Carnival Corporation & Plc overseeing strategic sourcing and supplier relationship management. She assumed this newly created role in April 2015 and is accountable for working closely with the company's 10 brands and their leadership teams to strategically procure goods and services to further strengthen the company's supplier relationships and leverage its global scale across ~ $9Bn spend.