We speak with Dean Bennett, VP of Procurement, and Mike Cowling, VP of Global IT at BeiGene, about the benefits of a strong collaboration between procurement and technology, and what makes the company so special.
It’s always fascinating to dive behind-the-scenes of an organization that’s genuinely making the world a better place. BeiGene is an 11-year-old global biotech company with employees on five continents and currently its largest employee footprint is in China.
The company specializes in the development of cancer treatment medicines. As one might expect, there are a lot of complexities to a business like this – but one thing that’s not complicated at all is the way in which this rapidly-growing organisation cares about its people and its global impact.
Dean Bennett is the VP of Procurement at BeiGene. Fairly new to the team, he joined in January 2021, with 30+ years of procurement and supply chain experience.
As such, he was perfectly placed to take procurement at BeiGene to the next level, and one of his first ports of call was to join forces with the IT side of the business, knowing that a collaboration between procurement and technology would be a necessity.
Enter Mike Cowling, VP of Global IT. He’s been with BeiGene for around four years supporting a multitude of functions, with much of his career having focused on deep software engineering. Initially working in the banking sphere, he later moved into the pharma space and quickly found that doing the kind of work that creates genuine, lasting benefits for innovative medical treatments across the globe gave him a real sense of purpose.
This was also the case for Bennett when he moved into pharma – for both men, they realized that they were going home at the end of each day feeling good about what they were doing.
