Stacy McTavish

Head of Supply Chain Centre of Excellence, Dimension Data
  • With a career spanning more than 27 years, Stacy has held numerous positions in an array of roles and industries, both in the public and private sectors.
  • Starting in Customer Service in an insurance company, she then went on to be promoted to the Head of Communications after 18 months in her role. Stacy was ‘poached’ in 1997 to start up a new business function/product offering, Call Centres, for a niche consulting house. With the owner passing away suddenly in 1998, she then moved on to join McKinsey & Co, a global consulting house, with her specialisation being communication and change management for projects across an array of industries. This included projects ranging from a petrochemical client, implementing their multi-company Strategic Sourcing Initiative, a merger of two major beverage companies, an online travel portal for South Africa’s then biggest airline and a total organisation cost reduction for a major steelworks client.
  • In 2000 she joined an investment bank. Her role was to set up basic Client Relationship Management principles, changing processes and people before implementing a CRM platform. With the closure of the core business by the main external shareholder, Stacy found herself looking for a new challenge and took a role as a project manager for a consulting company. She led teams for major clients with full business process overhauls, resulting in significant savings as well as innovative new ways of working.
  • In 2005 Stacy decided on a complete change and worked in Leadership Development, designing and facilitating modules for both Standard Bank and Transnet’s Leadership Development programmes. These included Process Improvement (Lean 6 Sigma), communication and change management.
  • In 2007, Stacy joined Eskom as a Commodity Manager for Line Hardware and Insulators. Leading a cross functional team, she developed and implemented a new sourcing strategy that achieved savings of R800m over five years. She was then moved to Power Transformers. Stacy took a multi-pronged approach to revisiting existing the contracts halfway through their duration, scrutinising pricing activity schedules, getting engineers to consolidate specifications as well as reviewing and revising the demand forecast. Using a clause in the contracts that spoke to continuous improvement, she entered into new negotiations with the vendors. The combination of factors above led to an audited saving of R1,4 billion over 4 years. 
  • First as Category Manager for ICT and then within Group IT as Business Enablement head, Stacy drove the implementation of the IT sourcing strategy and setting up a Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) function. The overall result was a savings of R2,5 billion over five years.
  • Stacy joined Dimension Data, an NTT Data Inc company, in 2015, initially to set up a strategic sourcing function within the business, but nine months later appointed as Head of Procurement. Working with a very small team, they implemented various sourcing strategies to drive down costs as well as show non-tangible benefits. Key to their success was governance, and Stacy implemented process and policies to ensure there was no value leakage or business risk further down the line. Vendor vetting and onboarding was subsequently incorporated into her portfolio.
  • In 2016, rebate and certification management resources also joined the team to broaden reach across more vendor programmes. Discounts and rebates, which impact Gross- and Operating Profit, depend on these programmes being managed centrally and efficiently to optimise returns.
  • As the team showed more business value, the portfolio grew to include warehousing and logistics, where Stacy implemented a new operating model nationally, moved warehouses and instilled a culture of continuous improvement in the team. This was followed by bringing the Services Spares team across as part of the establishment of the Supply Chain Centre of Excellence. 
  • Finally, in 2020, the Facilities function was incorporated into Dimension Data Pty, Ltd and Stacy took that over, implementing new ways of work, process improvements and a cost saving mindset.