Freeing Procurement Capacity by Eliminating Repetitive Tasks and Duplication.
Efficiency, for most organisations, gets reduced to cutting costs and tightening controls, yet for Dario Kulić it means something far more human: giving people their time back so they can think clearly, decide wisely, and contribute with purpose. He has seen how quickly motivation fades when talented teams spend their day doing manual rework, chasing data, and waiting for repeated approvals, because work like that does not feel like progress, it feels like survival.
With 19 years of cross-industry experience across automotive, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, FMCG, chemicals, and manufacturing, Dario has learned to recognise a pattern that often stays hidden in plain sight. Highly capable professionals end up acting as human middleware, trying to connect systems that do not communicate and processes that pull people in opposite directions. When close to 60% of a workday disappears into duplication and avoidable checks, the cost is measured in more than money, because it slowly drains focus, trust, and energy from even the most dedicated teams.
That is where Dario provides the solution, by helping organisations break free from what he calls the invisible tax: the silent costs created by poor work design and decision-making that depends on constant manual effort. Today, based in Germany, he supports well-known clients, while also leading Kulic Advisory & Consulting, a step that gave him the freedom to raise standards, challenge inefficiencies, and guide transformation with clarity and precision.
His belief took form early in his career at Ford Motor Company, where disciplined procurement created measurable savings while still opening space for innovation. That experience became his compass, proving that well-designed efficiency does not restrict people, it strengthens them, because it creates room for judgement, creativity, and strategic impact.
In his advisory work, Dario regularly sees three pressures shaping modern procurement and transformation efforts: economic uncertainty demanding real efficiency rather than cosmetic savings, sustainability mandates requiring supply chain reinvention with integrity, and talent constraints where wasting skilled people on broken workflows is a risk no organisation can afford.
His work sits at the meeting point of performance and people, guided by one clear conviction: efficiency and humanity rise together when leaders choose to design work that respects time, talent, and trust.
Let us learn more about his journey:
Efficiency that Protects People
After 19 years across Strategic Procurement, Procure to Pay, and Source to Pay, Dario’s strongest lesson did not come from systems or dashboards. It came from watching what happens when efficiency is built around people, not at their expense.
For him, the most important lesson was clear: sustainable efficiency is always human centered.
Like many, he started out believing efficiency was mainly a technical sport: better systems, sharper processes, smarter analytics. All useful. All insufficient. He learned, sometimes painfully, that even the most brilliant technical solutions fail when they ignore how humans actually work and feel.
His turning point came during the Bayer Animal Health carve out and Elanco integration. In the middle of COVID, his team stabilized operations across 35+ countries, right-sized from 30 to 17 FTEs, delivered 300+ improvements, and built a global power user network of 130 people. On paper, it looked like a cost-cutting program. In reality, the secret was removing non value adding work, not squeezing people harder.
They removed tasks that consumed 60% of people’s time: manual reconciliations, chasing missing data, fighting system inconsistencies. Engagement rose to about 25% above industry average, not because of a motivational campaign, but because the work itself became more meaningful.
That experience formed the core principle behind Kulic Advisory: cost efficiency and human dignity are not enemies. When work is designed properly, they reinforce each other. When it is not, burnout follows, quiet resistance grows, and elegant slide decks never become reality.
Leadership Built on the Ground, Not in Titles
When Dario’s work moved across industries like Elanco, Bayer, and Toyota, he realized early that efficiency could not be led through authority alone. It had to be built through trust, presence, and real collaboration.
His leadership style and the philosophy behind Kulic Advisory could be summarized in three lines: trust over title, substance over showmanship, collaboration over command.
Dario had seen many transformations fail, not because the strategy was wrong, but because it was done to people instead of with them. He also knew traditional consulting had a reputation for this: beautiful frameworks, painful implementation.
At Elanco and Bayer, he rarely had formal authority, yet he was expected to coordinate global teams and large initiatives. That pushed him toward what he now calls “Gemba leadership”: going where the real work happens, listening before prescribing, and treating frontline experts as co-designers, not PowerPoint bullet points. That mindset was a defining learning he carried from Toyota Motor Europe.
Kulic Advisory carries the same practitioner DNA. They do not arrive with a 200-slide deck and disappear after the steering committee. They embed. They co-create. They build capability so that by the time they leave, the client no longer needs them.
A major part of how Dario leads is radical transparency. He openly shares where pilots failed, where automation broke something upstream, and where expectations were unrealistic. Admitting what did not work builds more trust than pretending everything was genius by design.
Clients who work with Kulic Advisory do not get a theoretical framework. They get a partner who has already made most of the mistakes on his own budget and is determined to spare them the same tuition.
Digital Transformation That Frees People for Real Work
For Dario, digital transformation is not about adding more tools. It is about using the tools already available to remove friction and create capacity for bigger, high-growth priorities like sustainability and market expansion.
One case that sits at the heart of his work and Kulic Advisory’s positioning involved conversational AI chatbots built on top of tools the client already owned: Microsoft Teams and an existing procurement platform.
The challenge was familiar: heavy investment in digital tools, low adoption, and highly qualified people buried under basic inquiries and manual follow-up. Dario and his team built a business case showing that chatbots could avoid $4M in operating costs, free up 40 FTEs, and save the equivalent of 26 years of work annually, without a single additional license.
But for him, the real story was never the savings. The real story was what they did with the freed capacity:
- Sustainability: shifting people to supplier carbon analysis, circular sourcing concepts, and ethical supply chain work that was always important but later
- Global expansion: enabling due diligence for new markets and localized compliance efforts
- Strategic supplier work: moving from firefighting and order chasing to value-creating partnerships
This is where Kulic Advisory repeatedly steps in: organizations are not short on technology, they are short on methodologies that turn technology into human liberation and strategic capacity.
When the results were presented, leaders from finance, HR, supply chain, and IT all recognized themselves in the story. That is when it became clear, even to Dario, that these principles were not just procurement ideas. They were a blueprint for how humans and systems can work together in any function.
300+ Improvements Through Cross-Functional Discipline
When Dario led cross-departmental task forces for AP stabilization, the work touched 4,000+ employees in 40+ countries. It was the perfect environment for everything that can go wrong in transformation. For him, the real challenge was not technology. It was orchestration.
Three pillars made the difference, and they now form the backbone of Kulic Advisory’s methodology:
1. The universal language of waste
Everyone understands wasted time, redundant effort, and avoidable errors. Finance talks margin and working capital. Operations talks throughput. Procurement talks about savings. Dario translated all of it into a language every function respected: where are we wasting human potential? Once people across functions saw they were losing hours to the same root cause, alignment stopped being a political battle.
2. Structured problem solving at scale
They used an eight-step approach inspired by Toyota: break down the problem, do root cause analysis, align stakeholders, co-create countermeasures, test, implement, measure, stabilize. No random heroics. No magic fixes. Just disciplined repetition of good problem solving, multiplied across teams.
3. Power user networks instead of passive change recipients
Instead of forcing change from the center, they built a network of 130 power users across 35+ countries. They were not local trainers, they were co-architects. They translated context, challenged unrealistic ideas, and became trusted references on the shop floor. That is how change scales in reality, not with another email campaign.
This is Kulic Advisory’s sweet spot: turning transformation from a top-down announcement into a distributed system of people who are both affected by the change and trusted to shape it.
Trust Earned Through Consistency
Across stakeholder relationships, Dario has seen one reality stay constant: trust decides whether transformation moves forward or collapses. And he knows the hard truth, a lot of consulting has spent that trust already.
To him, trust is the currency of transformation.
At Kulic Advisory, trust is earned through what he calls a boring but powerful formula:
- Show up prepared. Do not ask for data you could have found yourself.
- Lead with insight, not opinion. Bring benchmarks, scenarios, and trade-offs, not just what we have seen elsewhere.
- Be brutally honest about trade-offs. If a solution brings short-term pain, say it. Adults can handle the truth. Surprise kills momentum.
- Deliver what you promise. Always. Small promises kept beat big promises half delivered.
- Share credit, own blame. When things go right, it is the client’s win. When they go wrong, Kulic Advisory stands in front of them.
His entrepreneurial mindset supports this. He behaves like someone who has to live with the outcome, because in many cases, he does. Every recommendation is one he would be willing to implement and defend with his own team and budget.
Clients choose Kulic Advisory when they are tired of slide-heavy diagnostics and want someone who behaves like an internal partner with skin in the game, not a visiting commentator.
A Multi-Industry Advantage Without Ego
Working across automotive (Ford, Toyota), pharmaceuticals (Bayer, Elanco, Merck), healthcare (GSK), FMCG (Metro group, STRAX) and manufacturing (Oerlikon, Cooper Industries) gave Dario a skill that matters more than it sounds: pattern recognition without arrogance.
He has seen every industry insist its problems are uniquely complex and in the details, that is true. But he has also seen the same structural issues hiding under different jargon.
- In automotive, he learned cost engineering and scale.
- In pharma, he learned compliance, traceability, and what failure really means.
- In healthcare, he learned how to balance cost pressure with ethical and quality imperatives.
For Kulic Advisory clients, this translates into three advantages:
- Faster diagnosis: the team has likely seen a version of the problem before, even if the acronyms are different.
- Smarter adaptation: they do not copy-paste solutions, they adapt proven principles to local realities.
- Cross-functional credibility: when someone can say “This worked in a highly regulated environment” or “This is how automotive solved it at scale,” doors open.
Most importantly, this mix taught him humility. He has been wrong in enough contexts to understand the only universal truths are these: waste is real, people matter, and disciplined problem solving beats clever rhetoric every single time.
Global Standards Without Breaking Local Reality
During one global carve-out and integration, Dario ran into a classic tension: HQ wanted standardized global processes, while regions wanted to keep every local nuance they had ever created. Both sides had valid concerns. Neither side could win outright without breaking something.
So he changed the question. Instead of global standard vs local freedom, his team asked:
“What absolutely must be the same everywhere for compliance, control, and scale and where does local adaptation actually add value?”
They landed on a three-tier model:
- Tier 1 – Non negotiable: compliance, financial controls, data structures, approval thresholds
- Tier 2 – Standard with exceptions: process flows and system configs with a clear path for justified deviations
- Tier 3 – Local by design: UI language, training, supplier interaction patterns, local specifics
This approach delivered about 85% standardization and 15% meaningful flexibility, a ratio he has found healthy across many global programs.
On change management, Dario did not roll out a finished design. They co-created with regional power users who helped design, test, and refine the flows. By go-live, they were not victims of change, they were its sponsors.
That is the balancing act Kulic Advisory now helps orchestrate: just enough standardization to be efficient, not so much that the business gets suffocated.
The Next Generation: Built Through Real Work
Dario positions himself as a practitioner first and thought leader second. Even his keynote slides are built on projects, not the other way around.
For the next generation of procurement leaders, his core message remains:
“Stop seeing yourself as an order taker. You are a business architect and a change agent.”
To thrive in a world defined by AI, automation, and sustainability, he believes they need three muscles:
- Digital fluency not coding, but understanding how technology changes what is possible and what should no longer be done by humans
- Strategic thinking linking everyday decisions to working capital, risk, sustainability, and growth
- Emotional intelligence influencing without authority, reading the room, and navigating conflict without burning bridges
Through Kulic Advisory, his teams help companies build these muscles by embedding them into real projects. People do not become strategic by attending a two-day training. They become strategic when trusted with real problems and coached through solving them.
On sustainability, he is clear: procurement sits at the control panel. Supplier carbon footprint, circularity, ethical sourcing, resilient value chains none of it happens without procurement. But only if procurement stops saying “we just buy what the business wants” and starts acting like architects of the value chain.
Still Chasing the Gap Between Potential and Reality
Even at 43, after years of results, Dario is not driven by titles or org charts. He is driven by one problem he keeps seeing: the gap between what procurement could be, and what it is allowed to become.
He has seen too many organizations where:
- Supplier relationships stay transactional when they could be innovation partnerships
- Category management becomes a yearly savings exercise, not a value strategy
- Capital projects treat procurement as a late-stage box to tick instead of a design partner
That gap is where Kulic Advisory plays.
They help organizations:
- Turn suppliers from adversaries into co-innovators who help them compete differently
- Redesign category strategies that reduce cost and improve resilience and sustainability
- Set up capital project procurement to accelerate time to value instead of delaying it
At this stage of his career, Dario is interested in impact that outlives his systems, capabilities, and mindsets that keep creating value after he is gone.
Partnerships that Start With One Question
Dario has built strong procurement partnerships by changing the opening question. Most teams ask how they can get what they need. He starts somewhere else:
“How can I make you more successful?”
not
“How do I get what I need from you?”
He has seen procurement undermine its own strategic role by leading with no compliance, policy, process instead of enabling growth, speed, and innovation safely.
Kulic Advisory helps teams reframe themselves as value enablers by:
- Deeply understanding stakeholder realities before proposing solutions
- Bringing options, not ultimatums: “Here are three paths, with pros and cons”
- Delivering quick, visible wins alongside long-term transformation
- Speaking multiple languages: finance, operations, IT, sustainability
That is when procurement stops being the function you have to go through and becomes the partner you want in the room early.
Where Procurement is Headed Next
Looking forward, Dario sees three trends shaping the next decade of procurement and they sit at the center of Kulic Advisory’s work.
1. Human centered automation
AI, RPA, and workflow tools are ready. The real question is whether they will be used to remove frustration or remove people. Dario is clear: he is not interested in lights-out procurement. He is interested in lights-on humans doing better work because systems finally handle the repetitive parts.
2. Sustainability as strategy, not PR
Procurement will move from ticking the ESG box to designing value chains that are lower carbon, more circular, and more resilient. Done right, sustainability becomes a competitive advantage, not just cost.
3. Data as a practical weapon
Procurement holds some of the richest enterprise data, but many teams are still stuck in the phase of a nice dashboard, now what. The future belongs to teams that turn data into decisions, and decisions into measurable outcomes.
Across all three trends, Dario’s core principle stays the same:
- Efficiency and humanity are not opposites.
- Design works well, and they strengthen each other.
He sees the future of procurement not as technology replacing people, but as technology finally letting people do what only humans can: decide, connect, create, and lead.
And in that direction, Kulic Advisory & Consulting holds one intention: to be a role model, especially for upcoming young generations who need more true and trustful leadership and leaders than ever.
Testimonials:
VP of Alliances Finance & Spend Management – Middle & Eastern Europe – SAP
“I had the pleasure of working with Dario Kulić in his former role as General Manager DACH at our SAP Partner SapienceS2P and was consistently impressed by his strategic approach and ability to secure mutually beneficial deals. His strong negotiation skills and deep industry knowledge made him a valuable asset to our partnership. I highly recommend Dario for any future Sales & Business Management role according to his track record.”
Head of Operations – Iberia – Elanco Animal Health
Dario is a great professional that combines a deep knowledge and skills in his area of expertise and a wonderful teamwork attitude. Since the integration of Bayer, Dario has had to work in a very challenging and changing environment implementing the new system and processes, while facing multiple hurdles and tasks, which were managed with excellence. During this period, the progress that Elanco has made is evident and Dario was a big contributor to this success.
Head of Vaccine Site Operations – Belgium – Glaxo Smithe Kline
I had the pleasure of working with Dario for a few months on a challenging Real Estate project he, as our lead Procurement partner, helped us achieve very tough timing and cost targets.
He not only brought his negotiation skills but also some unconventional approaches to the table, simplifying drastically the decision-making process. I was very impressed by his engagement and maturity in dealing with this project! In conclusion, I would say that Dario is mostly typified by amazing efficiency and determination.
Head of European OEM Customer Service Center – Yazaki Europe
“I worked with Dario in the past while he was our main Purchasing contact at Toyota Europe.
Our cooperation spirit could be described best by the following sentence: “Don’t tell me what is not possible but focus on what is possible!”.”
HR Strategic Business Partner – Global – Elanco Animal Health
“I had the opportunity to partner with Dario through the integration with Bayer Animal Health and Elanco. While Dario is extremely knowledgeable, patient with understanding, and a great partner across functions, I appreciate his kindness and willingness to help more than anything!!”
Procurement Manager – Global R&D – Elanco Animal Health
“Dario Kulic is an expert in automation and process improvement. I have had the pleasure of working with Dario on several projects and have been consistently impressed with Dario’s knowledge and expertise in this field. Dario is a highly skilled leader who has a proven track record of delivering results. He has a deep understanding of process improvement methodologies and can apply this knowledge to drive efficiency and productivity in any organization. Dario is also an excellent communicator and collaborator. He can work effectively with stakeholders at all levels of an organization and is always willing to go above and beyond to ensure that projects are completed successfully. Dario is a great leader, even if I was not reporting to him. I have seen great work happening in his team.”
Board Vice-President – Australia – Zambia Business Council Inc
“It was a privilege to attend Dario Kulic’s keynote, “The Viral Equation: Decoding The Science Of Online Fame,” at the Marketing 2.0 Conference in Dubai. Dario masterfully unraveled the complexities of online virality, providing actionable insights into creating content that resonates with audiences globally. His analytical approach, combined with a deep understanding of social media dynamics, left a lasting impression. I highly recommend Dario for his expertise in Marketing and his ability to convey intricate concepts with clarity and enthusiasm. His speech was not only informative but also inspiring, making him a standout speaker and thought leader in the marketing industry.”
Executive in Finance, GBS, M&A, Process Improvement – US – Elanco Animal Health
“I strongly recommend Dario as a person who can jump in to solve large process problems in an organization. Dario has a willingness to drill across many different organizations to get to root causes and to put solutions in place that work for all parties. He’s fair and balanced in his style and is willing to speak up even if what he’s saying challenges other leaders. We worked together to change processes and take the organization to the next level, and it was a pleasure to work with him.”
