Mariam Saad, a Senior Global Procurement Executive based in Montreal, has built a distinguished career by combining technology, commercial strategy, and procurement leadership. With more than two decades of experience, she has worked across complex and highly regulated industries, leading large-scale transformations, managing multi-billion-dollar spend portfolios, and supporting major mergers and acquisitions.
Mariam Saad | Director, CPO, IT, Technology Services, Professional Services, Contingent Labour | TELUS Health
Her career reflects a clear belief that procurement is no longer simply a support function. When managed strategically, it can become a powerful driver of business growth, resilience, and innovation.
EliteX proudly features Mariam Saad in this edition, recognizing a distinguished journey of leadership, innovation, and meaningful impact.
Mariam’s professional journey began in an area that may seem different from traditional procurement. She started her career on the sales side of the IT industry, selling enterprise resource planning solutions. This experience gave her an early understanding of enterprise technology, commercial negotiations, vendor relationships, and the challenges organizations face when implementing complex systems. Working directly with clients also helped her understand the operational problems that businesses experience behind the scenes.
Automation creates space for strategic value.
Moving from technology sales into procurement was a natural progression for Mariam. It allowed her to bring together her understanding of technology and commercial relationships with a broader view of enterprise operations. Procurement gave her the opportunity to take a more direct role in business transformation and influence decisions that affect an organization’s financial performance and long-term resilience.
Over the years, Mariam has led significant procurement initiatives across global organizations. At Rio Tinto, she was involved in standardizing global mobility across 120 countries, an experience that demonstrated the importance of consistency, governance, and adaptability across large international operations. In her current role as Senior Global Director of Procurement at TELUS, she leads a team of more than 50 professionals and oversees a portfolio exceeding $3 billion. Her experience across both technology and procurement has helped her approach complex business challenges from multiple perspectives.
For Mariam, one of the most important strengths of supply chain and procurement management is its direct connection to business performance. She sees procurement as a space where commercial negotiations, digital transformation, risk management, and operational efficiency come together. Her focus is not simply on reducing costs but on creating an organization that can respond quickly to changing market conditions while protecting financial and operational value.
Modern procurement, in her view, requires leaders to manage several challenges at the same time. Third-party risk, inflation, vendor compliance, fragmented contracts, and outdated systems can all slow an organization down. These challenges become even more complex during mergers and acquisitions, when different processes, technologies, contracts, and cultures must be brought together. Mariam believes successful leaders must find the right balance between speed and governance rather than allowing excessive controls to create operational gridlock.
Clean data drives smarter procurement.
Technology plays a major role in this approach. Mariam focuses on modernizing the end-to-end Source-to-Pay lifecycle and removing unnecessary administrative work. She has championed enterprise technology integrations such as S/4HANA to automate purchase order workflows and reduce invoice exceptions. By adjusting governance thresholds and simplifying processes, her teams have reduced contract cycle times by 40 percent. For her, the objective of automation is not simply to make processes faster. It is to free professionals from repetitive administrative tasks so they can focus on negotiations, strategy, supplier relationships, and business value.
Mariam also believes that resilience must be built before disruption occurs. Instead of relying on rigid, one-size-fits-all processes, she supports category-focused playbooks based on vendor criticality. Strong service-level agreements, flexible commercial protections, and modular governance structures allow procurement teams to respond quickly when market conditions change or unexpected challenges arise.
Data and artificial intelligence are becoming increasingly important in this transformation. Mariam believes clean, reliable data is the foundation for effective digital procurement. With real-time information and AI-driven insights, procurement teams can move beyond reacting to market changes and begin identifying opportunities proactively. Better data can support stronger negotiations, improve working capital management, and help organizations make more informed decisions.
One of Mariam’s proudest professional achievements was directing the procurement integration for TELUS’s $2.3 billion acquisition of LifeWorks. During the six-month integration, her team worked toward creating a unified Source-to-Pay ecosystem while managing complex cross-functional requirements. The initiative generated $15 million in savings, but Mariam considers the development of her team an equally important achievement. She believes leadership is about creating opportunities for people to grow, removing obstacles, and giving talented professionals the confidence to take on challenging responsibilities.
Her leadership approach is built around commercial pragmatism, empathy, and decisive execution. Having worked on both sides of commercial negotiations, she understands the priorities of enterprise leaders as well as the motivations of vendors. This perspective helps her connect strategic goals with operational realities. She places strong emphasis on coaching, diversity, collaboration, and building high-performing global teams.
For young professionals entering supply chain and procurement, Mariam recommends developing a strong understanding of technology, data, and enterprise finances. She encourages emerging professionals to look beyond rules and processes and learn how their decisions affect the wider organization. Understanding how money moves through a business, how technology supports operations, and how risk can be managed practically can create a strong foundation for long-term success.
Looking ahead, Mariam envisions a future built around highly automated and fully digitized Source-to-Pay ecosystems supported by flexible governance. She believes procurement must continue moving beyond its traditional image as a back-office cost center. In the future, it can serve as an agile engine for growth, innovation, financial discipline, and enterprise resilience. Her own career demonstrates what is possible when procurement is viewed not simply as a function that manages spending, but as a strategic force that helps organizations perform better and adapt with confidence.
Procurement is a strategic engine for growth.