About
Buying, and building the web apps buyers use. I can do both today, with two fields that complement each other.
I spent 18 years buying, 12 of them on oil and gas EPC projects, and I have spent the last four building the system that corporate supply chain runs on. Same problems, different instrument. Below, the buying years first and what I build now second, then how I ended up in Norway and the motto I work by.
My procurement background and my computer science degree work together directly, and the degree came first. My 2003 dissertation was an information system for managing and controlling material resources at a university, the same intersection of procurement and software I work at now, twenty-three years on.
CIPS-qualified buyer
I have been a buyer since April 2004. Six years of it was on site with international groups and local companies, then twelve years as Package Responsible Buyer on oil and gas EPC projects with Kvaerner and Aker Solutions, under NORSOK standards and NIB2016 conditions. Package Responsible Buyer means I owned my packages end to end, from requirements with engineering through to close-out.
Five projects: Sakhalin-1, Edvard Grieg, Nyhamna, Njord A and Northern Lights, 103 commodity packages in all. Nyhamna and Njord A were my two largest scopes. On Nyhamna I held a mid eight-figure bulk procurement budget across 35 packages, and Njord A ran 36 packages from fabrication through hook-up. I stayed to close-out on three of the five and was among the last of the team on each, and in EPC close-out is where the difficult commercial work sits. I took the CIPS Diploma in Procurement and Supply in 2014.
I have also built tools to run my own buying since my first procurement job: an orders and suppliers application in Visual Basic and Access, a multi-user version giving my group live order status on Sakhalin-1, and Excel macros controlling discrepancies across thousands of line items on Nyhamna. The CV has every project, figure and category group.
Buyer who builds web apps for buyers
Optimising the process has been the constant. Every job I have held, I have worked on the flow as well as inside it: the tools above were built to close gaps I could see from the buyer's desk, and nobody was going to close them for me. A large part of the buying job was fighting systems that do not talk to each other. I had to remember what was located where, and ask colleagues where to find this and that about a supplier. So I moved into building when the need was there.
Since September 2022 this has been the full-time job. I was the sole developer of the supplier management portal at Aker Solutions and owned it end to end: architecture, deployment, support. It held supplier master data, qualification data, performance evaluations with the supplier's own response recorded alongside, quality records and frame agreements. It had 1,300+ registered users across the organisation's locations worldwide, 100+ of them daily, and ran four years in production. It was an internal system, reached only from the corporate network and never exposed to the public internet. It was retired in September 2026, when the company centralised its digital platforms, and the new solution was built directly on it. Its processes are written into corporate SCM procedure. I am now moving the corporate contracts repository, the second system I built in this role, to .NET and Angular, and building agentic capability into the product itself. I am learning that part as I go and adding it in stages.
I start by finding where the current process creates the most friction, talk to the people who deal with that friction daily, and go from there: fix what is broken, adjust, repeat.
Nobody has to explain the domain to me. No requirements workshops, no variation orders, no six months between what a buyer described and what a developer built. I work agentically with AI tooling, which is what lets one person with domain knowledge and pre-AI development experience cover ground that used to need a team.
The point is not that the data looks better in one place. It is that a buyer sees what he would never have known to search for. Nobody goes looking for a welding non-conformance raised three years ago on another project by a colleague he has never met. It was there when he opened the supplier. The CV has the integrations, the security and the current Azure migration.
Norway since 2012
Sakhalin-1 is how I got to Norway. At the end of the project, in 2012, I was offered a move to the Norwegian head office, and I have lived here since. Since 2021 I have been raising a son. Outside work I take long walks, usually somewhere I have not been before.
Nulla Dies Sine Linea
The logo says Nulla Dies Sine Linea - no day without a line. Pliny the Elder wrote that the painter Apelles never let a day go by without drawing at least one line. I adopted it as my motto. Your inner self is either developing or degrading. There is no status quo. Skip enough days and you slide back without noticing. Therefore something gets written, built or learned each day.
The discipline is only half of it. André Maurois described the other half, and it is my attitude to work exactly:
The man who truly loves his work returns to it after the briefest rest with a curious kind of voluptuousness. When he is completely absorbed in his job, the end of work seems like the end of life.