Five lessons from the University of Sussex on evolving finance and procurement together

On 18^th June 2026, I had the pleasure of asking two individuals with huge insight into the practical application of spend management automation and ERP – Ian McKee at the University of Sussex, and Ian Owen at Unit4. The conversation was meant to be about how the University extended its Unit4 ERP with Proactis to take control of indirect spend.

The session evolved into a discussion of what actually moves a Finance and Procurement function forward over a ten-year time span.

Five lessons stood out, and all are applicable beyond higher education.

Lesson 1: Procurement is a strategic enabler, not the spend police

Ian McKee joined Sussex ten and a half years ago. His brief was to build up the maturity of the Procurement function and the wider Finance division. The phrase that stuck with me from his answer is the one that has stuck with him as a guiding principle.

“Becoming more of a strategic enabler rather than the spend police. So it’s about helping the university to do the things they need to do rather than just asking them not to do things.” – Ian McKee, Deputy Director of Finance, University of Sussex

The policing of spend is a responsibility everybody should consider across an organisation, but what I believe Ian was really getting at here was that Procurement can be so much more than just policing spend. In fact, it has a far more strategic role to play in delivering even greater value to the organisation.

Lesson 2: "What good looks like" is unrecognisable from where you started

One of Ian’s most memorable answers was about how easy it is to forget how far you have come. He gave a concrete example:

 “10 years ago we were receiving so much post in our manual operation within accounts payable that we, although it wasn’t always the same person, we effectively had a full-time person just opening envelopes and getting invoices in the right order to then be able to be scanned and processed, all of that. So all of that’s gone now. Our entire source to pay function is paperless.” – Ian McKee

This is often an overlooked benefit of automation. The evolution from manual processing to automation carries with it many benefits, and as a result of the automation implemented and the outcomes being sought, the benefits of now operating in a paperless environment were significant, and now form a foundation for all the automation that will continue to follow into the future.

Lesson 3: Cloud migration is the gateway, not the destination

With a long-established history, many ERP systems have proven to be reliable, stalwart systems of record, in many cases delivered initially on the customer’s own infrastructure. Unit4 are clearly seeing the opportunity to unlock true cloud benefits by moving customers to the cloud, as Ian mentions, not just for IT modernisation but to unlock many further benefits around areas such as AI, while at the same time strategically pioneering a path towards “self-driving ERP”.

Lesson 4: The hardest part of an ERP project isn’t the IT

With decades of experience, Proactis has long held the belief that the success of spend management projects comes down to the combination of people, processes and technology, and it was interesting to hear Ian highlighting the importance of how teams work and the opportunity to behave differently as part of a project.

“We’ve got all of the systems, the IT bit of any sort of project. It’s not usually the difficult bit. The difficult bit is actually getting teams to work, maybe in a slightly different way to collaborate better, to maybe break down some issues.” – Ian Owen

The most quotable line of the webinar came moments later, on who you need in the project team:

The key challenge often facing organisations that are resource-constrained is asking those people to invest time in a project while continuing to do the things that are core to their roles and that they are really good at. This requires strong stakeholder management, and reflecting the benefits of the project across the short, medium and long term. Having those individuals working on the project at that moment in time enables the strongest outcomes following the automation.

Lesson 5: Most of what your function does is not as special as you think

Ian McKee’s closing reflection was the most honest line of the day, and one of the most useful for anyone in a sector that tends to think of itself as a special case.

“I think Higher Education, as well as various others, are guilty of actually thinking that we’re very different, and we are different in some really key areas. But in terms of a lot of our support operations, be it IT, HR, finance, we would do very well to standardize things more, simplify things more.”– Ian McKee

The lesson is agnostic to any industry sector looking at automation. The opportunity to drive greater standardisation to best practice, while at the same time simplifying things further, is a window of opportunity that automation itself brings – the chance to step back and consider how things are being done, and whether they could be done in a better, more simplified way.

The bit of your operation that needs sector depth is real. However, a large part of Spend Management in any mid-market organisation is a standardised set of processes - whether that be how invoices are handled, recorded, matched and paid, or the opportunity to unlock best value from within your existing supplier base.

Ian was just as honest about his own hindsight on pace:

 “There’s that temptation, and I’m certainly guilty of it, of having a rush to get to where you want to get to as quickly as possible. But being able to take that slower kind of planned sequential stage rather than the sort of the big bang approach, I think is really helpful.” – Ian McKee

This approach of planned stages, or evolution, is what spend management is all about: the opportunity to continuously evolve at a pace that is not disruptive to your organisation, but is simply part of a continuous improvement mantra. Of course, some organisations will choose to transform fully at a faster rate than others, but it is the ability to determine the right pace of evolution or transformation, with a partner you can trust, that is key.

And one to take with you:

On the role of information and KPIs, we closed on the point I keep finding myself making to customers in every sector we serve.

Clean, accurate records underneath your processes are the bedrock of every machine learning and AI workflow that is coming next. Maximising adoption, raising first-time electronic orders, getting accurate supplier records and giving everyone involved a single source of truth are not just good housekeeping. They are the prerequisites for whatever comes next. Without that bedrock, the future arrives at someone else’s organisation, not yours.

Huge thanks to Ian McKee and Ian Owen for the time and the honesty. 

The full on-demand version of the conversation is linked below and well worth 45 minutes of your week.