Interview with Christina de Luca

As one of the leading supply chain professionals at BP, Christina De Luca has spent the past few years coping with extreme volatility of sales and purchases. She talks about the ongoing challenges of working in the oil industry and turning 10 per cent savings into 30 per cent.

It’s hard to imagine a worse year for a company than 2010 has been for BP. It began well enough, with the oil price recovering from the spectacular falls of a year before and BP going about its profitable business of exploring fields, producing oil and selling it to an energy-hungry world. But on 20 April, everything changed. The explosion at the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico killed 11 workers and caused the biggest marine oil spill in the industry’s history. Along with the damage in the water and to the surrounding coastline and economy, the spill triggered a collapse in BP’s share price and severely tarnished the company’s reputation,

Christina De Luca has been BP’s vice-president for procurement in refining and marketing since 2005. She has overseen a transformation in BP’s downstream procurement operation from one that barely existed as an organisation into one that is looking to put procurement at the heart of business decisions…

Read the full interview in CPO agenda »