Cris F Buningh

Bio: Cris Buningh, B-CEPS, Commercial Excellence in Professional Services,
Cris has built his profile as an all-round Global Commercial Executive and Thought Leader throughout a career revolving around commercial leadership, business consulting and change.
Starting with a degree in Physics and an MBA at Twente University, he spent the first 15 years of his career in line and program roles in Exxon. He honed his business skills in commercial line management as well as in program management roles redesigning and realizing new businesses and processes. As a high-potential he was privileged to assume a variety of management responsibilities contributing to his development and these were complemented by a number of global leadership programs. In all roles his energy, rapidly acquired content knowledge and leadership have delivered outstanding results. Around this time Cris also became non-executive director for a family-held industrial wholesale trading company.
Stimulated by the success in Esso business redesign programs, he made a switch to business consulting. He combined delivery of large change programs at international corporates like Philips, AkzoNobel and Shell with becoming a thought leader in e-commerce and consulting practice manager for strategic performance management.
Having the deep business knowledge in Oil & Gas and the commercial leadership he was asked to lead Atos Origins O&G industry sector and manage the Global Shell account. He successfully managed the business development, sales and delivery of IT Services in this market and for the “office of the chairman” Shell account. The success was noticed by CSC who poached him to lead the development of the global Shell account and several strategic large scale (>1B$) bids.
In the CSC role Cris helped Shell develop and test their Global Supplier management methodology. His knowledge of and passion for managing business relationships led Shell to offer him a role as Senior Supplier Manager and thought leader in their Supplier Management Center of Excellence. In this role he helped build a world class Supplier management practice and significantly enhanced the value Shell gets from Professional Services and IT suppliers and realized a turnaround of the relationship with SAP.
In the General Manager role Cris assumed early 2014, he became globally responsible for procurement of all Professional Services categories with a total annual value of ~5B$. In this role he leveraged all his skills and experience in Commercial Strategy and Management, Business Relationships, People Development and Organisational Change. He drove a step change in supplier value to Shell, realized a record ~1B$ savings and dramatically improved the way that Shell managed all External Workforce.
In 2017 Cris has founded consulting company B-CEPS. In this role Cris leverages all his acquired skills to help companies set and realize strategies and operating models to transform Sourcing for People, Services, IT and Technology.
Cris supported Vattenfall and KPN in developing and implementing sourcing, resourcing and supplier collaboration strategies. In 2019 Cris was program director at Unilever, designing and extending their global workforce program. In 2020/2021 he helped Novartis create a senior management business case and program set-up for a corporate journey towards Integrated Workforce management. As interim Head of Procurement for Rabobank in 2021, he advanced the category teams towards world class procurement. In 2022 and 2023 Cris supported a financial services company in redesigning and realizing a turnaround in their IT sourcing and external workforce strategy. Meanwhile Cris has been active in development of IT Sourcing and supplier collaboration methodologies and participates in several industry leading knowledge networks.
In 2019 he became strategic advisor and angel investor in an energy technology brokering start-up. In this role he leveraged both his business insights as well as his energy industry knowledge and network. Furthermore, Cris was an advisory board member to 2 global tech companies in External Workforce domain and is a non-executive board member to a Dutch industrial supplier company Imbema (chairman) and with Australia based HR Tech company LiveHire. (ASX:LVH).