Milind Phulse is the Chief Procurement Officer at Linde + Wiemann, a global automotive supplier that manufactures structural metal components and crash-relevant car body assemblies. Not only that, but Phulse is also responsible for Supply Chain Management and IT and Integration Management. A passionate leader and team-builder, he has spent the last three decades leading procurement, supply chain, operations, IT, and business transformation initiatives across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. He’s worked with some of the world’s biggest brands to manage complex international teams and procurement portfolios, with annual spend responsibilities exceeding €2bn.
For Phulse, the excitement that comes with leading a procurement transformation never wanes, because of the position the procurement function holds. This is something he brought with him to Linde + Wiemann in early 2025. “What has always fascinated me is the ability of procurement to influence far more than cost,” he explains. “Procurement sits at the intersection of competitiveness, innovation, sustainability, risk management, and business growth. When positioned correctly, it becomes a strategic enabler of enterprise value rather than simply a transactional function.”
Making sense of the landscape
When Milind Phulse joined Linde + Wiemann, the landscape was very different. Procurement was largely operating in silos back then, meaning his main challenge was to transform the function into one global procurement organisation. Fortunately, that issue was with fragmentation, not capability. In fact, Phulse found the function to be extremely capable, with strong local expertise and committed teams. The only problem was that those teams were focused on their own locations, suppliers, and priorities. That limited the ability to leverage the collective strength of the organisation.
“My first priority was to listen,” says Phulse. “Before defining solutions, it was essential to understand regional differences, business needs, and existing strengths. We created transparency around spend, supplier relationships, processes, and responsibilities to establish a common fact base across the organisation.
“From there, we developed a shared ambition: to become one global procurement family while preserving the agility, market knowledge and customer proximity of our local teams.”
Identifying quick wins
When it comes to transformations, Phulse knows better than most that people need to see progress early. When organisations spend too much time designing future-state models without demonstrating the actual, tangible benefits, large-scale transformations are likely to lose momentum.
“At Linde + Wiemann, we deliberately focused on opportunities where fragmentation was preventing us from leveraging our collective strength,” Milind Phulse explains. “These included duplicate supplier interactions, limited visibility of global spend, inconsistent sourcing approaches, and situations where multiple teams were independently engaging the same suppliers.
“Rather than launching a major organisational redesign, we started with practical initiatives that could quickly demonstrate value. We created greater transparency around supplier relationships and spend, aligned negotiation activities across locations, and established regular knowledge-sharing forums between procurement teams.”