A Subway restaurant at lunch rush runs on a relatively short list of necessary ingredients: the bread in the proofer, the sliced meats in the cold well, the lettuce and the tomatoes, the sauces, the paper the sandwich gets wrapped in, the oven itself.
In Europe and Asia Pacific, almost none of that arrives because the restaurant owner picked up the phone. It arrives because someone, somewhere, negotiated a multiyear contract with a supplier.
That’s where IPC International fits in; the franchisee-owned buyer behind Subway’s supply chain across EMEA and Asia Pacific. Formed by bringing together IPC EMEA and IPC Asia Pacific, it sources the food, packaging and equipment for thousands of restaurants.
Until recently, the system holding all of that together was Excel.
When Michael Bailey joined IPC International as transformation and technology director in 2023, he found its entire procurement operation running on spreadsheets. Since then, the organization has moved contract sourcing onto a cloud-based platform, picked up a vendor award for the rollout and started asking what AI can do for a procurement team whose buyers touch the system only a few times a year.
The challenge
IPC International’s job is to source the products that end up in Subway restaurants across two major global regions, a task requiring meticulous coordination with suppliers around quality, standards and specifications.
Yet for all the complexity of that mission, the company’s technology infrastructure was not fit for purpose.
“We were very much playing catch-up,” Bailey says.
A particular issue was contract sourcing — the process of managing supplier tenders, negotiations and agreements. Without a dedicated platform, IPC lacked the visibility, efficiency and audit trail that modern procurement demands.
It also struggled to attract experienced procurement professionals who expect enterprise-grade tooling as standard.
The solution
In 2024, IPC launched a formal vendor selection process for a source-to-contract platform and landed on procurement technology provider Ivalua. Implementation began mid-year, with the first module going live in January 2025. By January 2026, the organization completed the full technical and operational deployment.
In March 2026, Ivalua named the rollout its Best New Deployment at the vendor’s annual customer awards in Paris.
The implementation was supported by IPC’s own internal team, Ivalua and TSM, a UK-based Ivalua implementation partner.
“Culturally, we were the right fit for each other. That kind of tripartite relationship worked well. All projects have their ups and downs, but to be honest, it’s been one of the smoother ones,” Bailey says.
“One of the cliché challenges is master data and data cleansing. We had a bit of that, but one advantage of being completely analog is you don’t have legacy systems to untangle,” he adds. “I’m from Marks & Spencer, so most of my career has been about transitioning from one legacy system to another. This was actually quite refreshing.”
What IPC learned
Despite having Microsoft Dynamics as its ERP system of record, IPC found that a significant amount of master data existed outside it — stored in filing cabinets and on personal devices.
“Rounding up the true extent of our data was an eye-opener,” Bailey says.
Plus, because IPC operates strategically rather than transactionally — signing multiyear supplier agreements rather than running frequent spot purchases — individual buyers may run only a handful of tenders per year. This low frequency made it difficult for some users to retain system proficiency after initial training.
“We did a fairly standard training program, but some people didn’t use the system regularly enough to retain it,” Bailey says. “Our change management approach had to adapt.”
IPC moved to a sustained support model with super users providing ongoing assistance. Bailey acknowledges there was room to have been “a bit smarter” in how that network was structured from the outset.
Adoption and business value
Despite those challenges, Bailey describes adoption as strong. A key driver was pull rather than push: procurement teams wanted better tools and asked for the initiative, rather than feeling it was imposed upon them.
Then there’s the recruiting argument. “If someone joins and asks, ‘Where’s the system?’ — that’s a problem. So providing this has been important,” says Bailey.
The platform has enabled more sourcing events to drive cost reduction, while also strengthening IPC’s proposition to both employees and the business it serves.
Subway is “very supportive” of the digitalization journey — not as an active sponsor, but as an informed stakeholder that recognizes the downstream benefits of faster, more efficient sourcing.
What’s next
Bailey is now weighing where AI fits. He sees a near-term opportunity, particularly for a team whose users interact with the system infrequently.
He envisions a future where mechanical tasks are handled by AI agents, freeing procurement professionals to focus on sourcing strategy — interrogating data, analyzing dashboards and making judgment calls. In recent months, Ivalua has launched agents that draft RFPs and monitor supplier performance, and IPC was among the customers presenting at the vendor’s London event this summer.
Because IPC has a relatively large legal team, Bailey also sees strong potential in AI-powered obligation checking — that is, automatically tracking whether suppliers are meeting the commitments written into their contracts.
And growing innovation activity in food is generating more tenders and compressing time-to-market requirements, an area where AI-assisted sourcing can help IPC keep pace.
None of that happens unless the current investment holds. “We haven’t got buyer’s remorse, which is good — but we’ve got to make this stick,” Bailey says. “The next few years are about making it sustainable.”
Back at the counter, none of this is visible. The bread is still in the proofer and the tomatoes are still sliced.