Look at what procurement technology companies are actually building. Raising and processing POs. Three-way matching and invoice queries. Chasing approvals. Supplier onboarding paperwork. RFQ admin. Contract admin. Tail spend buying. Savings reports. Every one of them is a task procurement should never have been known for in the first place.

Tom Mills named the uncomfortable consequence recently. By letting the category define itself this way, the profession has effectively broadcast the message: that is what procurement did, AI is here, we can be replaced.

His counter-argument is that procurement was never meant to be a processing function. It was meant to fight for the business, help it take innovative risks safely, be the sensible one in the room when things got hard. Spend strategists. Value architects. Which leads to the question nobody in the vendor pitch is asking. Once AI takes the admin, what is left, and what capability is your team actually building?

The responses came from buyers, suppliers, founders and former CPOs. What emerged was broad agreement on the diagnosis and one serious disagreement about whether AI can even do the work it is being sold for.

What Actually Went, and What Stayed

The most valuable contribution came from someone whose entire job was on the list. Jenson G Sam, a supply chain analyst working RFQ and sourcing for a US client, described the split with precision.

“RFQ admin was my whole job, so I will take that one. AI did take a real piece of it off me. From a part number alone it could tell me the manufacturer, pull specifications out of datasheets, and check the number against several distributor listings at once.”

Then the part that matters. “What it never touched was the judgment. Whether the cheaper sea freight option was right depended on whether anything was actually waiting on the part. Why a price had moved since the last quote was a question I had to go back and ask a human. The admin went. The judgment stayed where it was.”

That is the cleanest first-hand account of the boundary anyone has offered. Lookup, extraction and cross-checking are gone. Knowing whether a lead time matters this week, and finding out why a price moved, remain conversations.

Cengiz Gezer, who has spent 25 years placing global buyers inside Chinese factories, confirmed it from the other side of the transaction. “On the supplier side, the work that saves a buyer money is what no system captures: whether the quoted material grade matches the mill certificate, or whether the factory’s real capacity is already booked by someone else. Those calls take judgment and a conversation with the floor, and they decide the margin long after the PO is raised.”

Two different continents, two different roles, the same conclusion. The margin is decided by information that does not exist in any system.

The Dissent: AI Is Weakest Exactly Where Procurement Lives

Mike Wynn, a partner at Advanced Purchasing Dynamics, offered the sharpest challenge in the thread, and it cuts at the premise rather than the ambition.

“AI is unreliable when judgement is required, information needed spans multiple systems, data is incomplete or messy, and exceptions are common. I’d say that’s a good description of most procurement activities.”

That list deserves to be printed and taped to the wall of every procurement transformation steering committee. The four conditions under which AI underperforms are the four defining conditions of procurement work. Which means the admin automation being sold may deliver less than the business case assumes, because even PO processing and three-way matching run into exceptions, missing master data and cross-system lookups constantly.

The implication is awkward for both camps. The optimists assume the admin disappears cleanly and frees capacity. The pessimists assume the function gets automated away. Wynn’s reading suggests a messier third outcome: partial automation that handles the clean cases and dumps every exception on a team that has been cut on the assumption the work was gone.

Steam Engines and Horses

Arjen Van Berkum, an entrepreneur in contract and supplier management, supplied the analogy that frames the whole problem.

“AI is a steam engine and the work we do today is replacing the horse with a steam engine. What we are not doing is opening the new opportunities. Which is a shame.”

Mike Lander, a former group CEO and procurement director, said the same thing in business terms. “Unfortunately the easiest thing to point AI at is all the tactical stuff. We know real business results come from system level re-design focused on improved outcomes, not making the existing processes more efficient.”

Robin Say, a product leader with two decades in fintech, closed the loop. “Making an inefficient process faster doesn’t fix the underlying problem. The real value comes from rethinking how decisions get made, where value is created and what the team should focus on once the admin is gone.”

The steam engine point is worth sitting with. Replacing a horse with an engine gets you a faster cart. The economic transformation came from redesigning everything around what an engine made possible. Procurement is currently buying faster carts and calling it transformation.

Delegate, Don’t Just Automate

Max Francks, a senior solution strategist, proposed the most practical distinction in the discussion.

“The key to using AI well is to delegate to it, not just automate with it. Automation runs a fixed process end to end. Delegation is how you’d hand work to a capable team member: you give clear context and a goal, let them do the groundwork, then review what comes back before it goes anywhere.”

His point about where the saved hours go is the one most transformation plans get wrong. “The hours freed from PO admin, RFQ prep and savings reports shouldn’t just disappear into a cost target. They should go into reviewing and challenging the output, and into building relationships with stakeholders and suppliers. Agents can do the analysis behind a category strategy, but a person still has to have the conversations that turn it into something the business acts on.”

Esther Ho, an AI operations architect with fifteen years in supply chain, named the capabilities that have to be built deliberately. “Procurement teams need to deliberately build the skills that were previously crowded out: stakeholder influence, supplier strategy, commercial judgment, risk sensing, and cross-functional decision-making. Removing the admin only creates value if that capacity is redirected.”

The Perception Problem Nobody Has Solved

Matthias Svetic, a negotiation advisor, raised the obstacle that sits outside procurement’s control. “The biggest challenge might be actually changing how stakeholders perceive procurement. Even with better technology, old expectations might keep teams focused on transactional work.”

Denis Seliun, a sales and purchase manager, explained how the industry created the problem. “Tech companies started by automating POs, approvals, and three-way matching simply because transactional tasks were the easiest to turn into software, but that accidentally cemented the outdated stereotype of procurement as a back-office gatekeeper.”

Clarice Camacho, a global energy procurement and risk leader, set the standard for what replaces it. “Real procurement requires commercial understanding, experience, sound judgement and the ability to align strategies with business objectives, manage complexity and anticipate future risks. AI can support the function but it cannot replace practical experience.”

And one addition to the original list, from Chandrika Konathala, a procurement leader with EPC and energy project experience: “You missed the endless loop of status updates. It is the most daunting task I’d happily hand over to AI any given day.”

Takeaways for Procurement Leaders

Three lessons run through the discussion. First, test the automation case against Wynn’s four conditions. If the process involves judgement, multiple systems, messy data or frequent exceptions, model partial automation plus exception handling, not clean replacement.

Second, delegate rather than automate. Give context and a goal, review the output, then act. Automation that runs end to end without review is where confident errors enter the business.

Third, decide where the freed hours go before you free them. If the capacity is not explicitly redirected into supplier strategy, stakeholder influence and commercial judgement, it will be absorbed into a cost target and nothing about the function will change.

If AI took every item on that admin list from your team tomorrow, what would they do on Monday?

GSCC members access events, replays, reports, learning tracks, AI tools and the prompt library. See the full benefits at https://gscc.co/benefits and the event calendar at https://www.chain.net/c/events/.

Continue the discussion on Chain.NET, the global supply chain community, at https://www.chain.net/c/ask.

Procurement spent two decades buying platforms to simplify itself. Now AI has arrived and much of the industry is doing the same thing again, adding copilots, prompts and agents on top of processes everyone already knows are cumbersome. That is useful automation. Whether it amounts to transformation is a different matter.

Dr Salisu Uba, founder of NatQuest and a commercial and procurement transformation leader working across EMEA, argued the profession is asking the wrong question entirely. Not “how can AI make procurement faster,” but “if we designed procurement today, with AI available from the beginning, what would we stop doing altogether?”

The examples he raised are uncomfortable because none of them is hypothetical. Would we still produce annual category strategies when market intelligence can be continuous? Would sourcing always begin with a requisition when demand can increasingly be anticipated? Would professionals spend hours comparing documents when machines do it in seconds? Would we buy separate tools for sourcing, contracts, suppliers and risk if intelligence connected those decisions?

His framing of the work ahead was three verbs. Automate what should remain. Remove what should not. Reinvent what procurement can become. The next significant procurement company, he suggested, may not build a better procurement platform at all. It may build a different way of making commercial decisions.

The responses split between those who found the question liberating and one who explained, in detail, why the market will not answer it.

Why Vendors Will Keep Selling Task Agents

The most substantive challenge came from Kris Kosmala, who works on digital and AI transformation in shipping operations, and it is worth reading closely because it explains the behaviour rather than just criticising it.

“Software companies wanting or breaking into this information technology space will be pitching task oriented AI agents, because they see it as the fastest way to monetize their development effort. They also know those agents have no moats to speak of. They are not inherently different from each other, their value is comparable to competitors, and the solution is easily copiable. So cashing in as rapidly as possible is the only way to make return for the original investment.”

That is the structural reason the reinvention conversation struggles to start. A vendor who redesigns the commercial decision model has a long sales cycle, a hard integration story and an uncertain return. A vendor who ships a contract-comparison agent can sell it next quarter.

His point about workflow risk is equally practical. “The legacy solutions are designed from scratch for that end-to-end followed by another end-to-end. Rip and replace of one workflow destabilizes the well honed process.”

Then he named the part the industry avoids. Buyers will save money on these projects, he argued, but not by freeing people for higher-value work, “the stand-in AI fantasy pitch,” but by freeing those people completely.

His follow-up went further, and it challenges the premise of transformation itself. “Thanks to ERP we track the economics of procurement well. Those can only change if somehow we rethink why a business needs to procure anything. And that’s rather not on the horizon. In fact, the AI agents cement and reinforce the procurement economics as we know them today. What they allow is to think that suddenly a company like Gap can go from 500 people in sourcing to 50. And maybe they do, and they will definitely change the economics of this space, but not the business model execution.”

That distinction deserves to sit in every transformation deck. Changing the economics of a function and changing what the function does are not the same achievement, and the first one is far easier to sell as the second.

The Integration Tax

Edward Buntoro, a technology product owner with experience across SAP Ariba, S/4HANA, Anaplan and ServiceNow, located the problem one layer below the AI debate.

“The fact that organizations have fragmented technologies and do more on technology alignment instead of maximizing the technology functions, mostly driven by cost benefit and project owner. We should see it more on the integration and value instead of cost, and NOT all processes need to be automated.”

His example of what should stay human is well chosen. “Vendor evaluation is required more judgement despite of technology input.”

That is a useful boundary. Document comparison is mechanical and should go. Deciding which supplier your organisation can actually work with carries commercial, technical and ethical weight that does not reduce to a score.

Uba agreed and named the trap. “Technology fragmentation often means organisations spend more time connecting systems than improving commercial outcomes. Integration matters, but it must serve a clear purpose beyond cost savings.”

He also drew the line on what AI should be doing. “AI should support professional judgement, not replace it, particularly where commercial, technical and ethical considerations are involved. The objective should be better commercial decisions, not automation for its own sake.”

Faster Is the Wrong Benchmark

Chinmay Agarwal, co-founder and CEO of Negotiations.Ai and formerly at Kearney, pushed back on how AI tools are being positioned in his own category.

“It is not about just being faster, it is also about being smarter and more informed going into a negotiation.”

That is a small correction with large implications. Speed is the metric vendors can demonstrate in a demo. Preparation quality is the metric that changes the outcome, and it is almost impossible to show in a fifteen-minute sales call. The industry defaults to the measurable one.

Umar Shaikh, working across facilities and vendor management, drew the same conclusion about process. “AI shouldn’t just make existing procurement processes faster. It should challenge whether some of those processes are still necessary. The real value comes from redesigning the decision-making process, not simply automating the old one.”

Fabio Marcucci, founder of a B2B trade infrastructure business, isolated the sentence that does the work. “The question about what we would stop doing is the most interesting part here. AI shouldn’t just make existing procurement processes faster if some of those processes don’t need to exist in the first place.”

The Question Procurement Should Actually Run

There is an exercise buried in this discussion that any procurement leader could run without buying anything. Take your current process map. Mark each step as one of three things: this creates commercial value, this exists to feed a system, or this exists because somebody once asked for it.

The third category is usually larger than anyone expects, and no amount of AI applied to it produces anything but faster waste. The second category is where integration spend goes to die. Only the first deserves a copilot.

Uba’s reply to Shaikh set the ambition. “If AI can sense demand earlier, continuously read markets, predict risk and support decisions in real time, then we should be questioning why some procurement processes exist in their current form at all.”

Takeaways for Procurement Leaders

Three lessons run through the discussion. First, run the stop-doing audit before the automation business case. Annual category strategies, requisition-triggered sourcing and manual document comparison are candidates for removal, not acceleration.

Second, be honest about where the savings come from. If the ROI model rests on headcount, say so internally rather than selling the board on freed-up strategic capacity that never materialises.

Third, protect judgement explicitly. Vendor evaluation, ethical screening and relationship calls carry weight that does not reduce to a score, and the tools being sold today are not built to carry it.

Which procurement process in your organisation would you not create if you were starting today with AI already in the room?

GSCC members access events, replays, reports, learning tracks, AI tools and the prompt library. See the full benefits at https://gscc.co/benefits and the event calendar at https://www.chain.net/c/events/.

Continue the discussion on Chain.NET, the global supply chain community, at https://www.chain.net/c/ask.

The challenge usually arrives from outside procurement, and it sounds reasonable. The framework agreement is performing. Quality is being met, technical specifications hold, deliveries arrive on time, the commercial terms are competitive. Then someone in a review meeting asks the question anyway: why are we still dealing with the same supplier, and where is the value if we are not bringing new suppliers to the table?

Ayah Adel Abu Hashish, a procurement engineer and category lead at Group AMANA, described exactly that situation and gave the answer most procurement professionals would give. The market had already been scanned before the agreement was signed. Potential suppliers had been assessed. For that particular item, only a small number could consistently meet the technical and quality standards. Introducing a new supplier for the sake of having more suppliers, or defaulting to the lowest price, is not a strategy. Some categories have to be managed on quality and technical compliance, reliability, capacity and lead time, commercial competitiveness, supply risk and long-term value together.

Read more

Tom Mills, a procurement writer who left corporate life to focus on helping practitioners, made a claim that reliably angers part of his profession: MCIPS, degrees, MBAs and technical qualifications are overrated leadership barriers in procurement. He was careful about what he meant. CIPS provides a useful foundation, he said, and he has funded team members through to MCIPS himself. Degrees are brilliant for critical thinking. An MBA is a serious commitment and achievement. His point is that none of them define your impact in a business. Influence, communication and the ability to be brought into decisions early do that work, and no exam room teaches it.

The responses were more interesting than the usual two camps. What emerged was agreement that qualifications matter at the start and fade later, discomfort about what replaces them in hiring, and one observation that deserves more attention than it got: the content itself is ageing faster than the profession is willing to admit.

“Oh How I Wish It Moved Faster With Better Content”

Mills slipped that line into his own argument and nobody picked it up hard enough. Michael Shields, VP of Procurement at Tropic, came closest. “It only takes you so far and there are diminishing returns. More importantly with things evolving so quickly, a curriculum can quickly become outdated. Once you have the foundation, I’ve found it better to build a networking group that meets regularly and has good conversation about relevant topics.”

That is the structural problem, and it is worth stating plainly. A professional body curriculum takes years to write, approve and roll out. Agentic AI moved from novelty to procurement roadmap item in under eighteen months. Tariff regimes rewrote sourcing economics in a quarter. A syllabus designed to be stable is, by definition, designed to lag.

Philip Hicks, an FCIPS-qualified commercial and procurement leader, pointed at a related consequence. “I fear we’ve swung too far since the abolishment of NVQ and experience-based routes. I’ve seen many absolutely brilliant procurement professionals, with all the successful experience and complexity delivery, still grinding through layers of exams deep into mid career.”

Martin Satchwell, a Head of Procurement, described what actually survives. “Few people remember the specific definitions you get made to learn, all the models, or the full set of Incoterms. Learning the models did help train my thinking though.”

That is an honest summary of what a qualification delivers: thinking frameworks, not current knowledge. Nobody should pay for current knowledge on a three-year refresh cycle.

Where the Current Knowledge Now Lives

If a curriculum cannot keep pace, something has to. The answer practitioners are finding is continuous, peer-led and cross-border rather than examined.

This is the gap GSCC built Chain.NET around. The platform runs daily and weekly discussions and live sessions on the topics moving fastest, AI in procurement, tariffs, supplier risk, agentic workflows, with practitioners from different industries and different countries in the same room. The value is not a certificate at the end. It is hearing how a manufacturer in Vietnam, a pharma buyer in Europe and a logistics lead in the Gulf are each handling the same problem this month, alongside a library of replays, reports and tools that updates as the topic does.

GSCC has also recently launched its Supply Chain Value Creation Executive Program, built deliberately against what the market currently offers. The traditional executive education model assumes a fixed body of knowledge delivered in a block and valid for years. The program instead teaches value creation, commercial judgement and the application of AI to supply chain work, with content that moves at the speed of the discipline rather than the speed of an accreditation committee.

Neither replaces a degree. Both address the thing a degree structurally cannot: what changed since the syllabus was written.

What Replaces the Gate

The sharpest challenge to Mills came from Matthias Svetic, a negotiation advisor, and it is the question the influence-over-letters camp has not answered. “The overlooked question is what replaces the qualification gate. Without structured work samples, judging influence can quietly reward confidence or similarity instead of capability.”

That risk is real. A qualification is a flawed signal, but it is a signal that does not care who you went to school with. Remove it and replace it with nothing, and hiring drifts toward whoever interviews well and looks familiar.

Dr. Keld Jensen, a negotiation professor and author, made the case for standards from the other side. “In the world of negotiation it’s the Wild West. Everyone claims to be a negotiation expert, and based on what? Conducting negotiations for 20 years. Experience doesn’t make you an expert without the framework.” He added later that “too many people are causing disruption because they lack a framework and may be dangerously unaware of their limitations.”

Mark Strange, a procurement and supply chain advisor, resolved the tension in one line. “The qualification is rarely the barrier. Treating it as a proxy for judgement is.”

The Passport Argument

Bishowjuti Bhattacharjee, a senior category buyer at Victrex, supplied the counterexample that the no-letters camp cannot easily dismiss. “When I transitioned to the UK after 14 successful years in Bangladesh with a Swiss MNC, my MSc and MCIPS served as a passport I needed to unlock new doors. It didn’t replace my stakeholder management skills or commercial acumen. It gave recruiters a recognised benchmark to validate my capability in a new region.”

His conclusion deserves weight. “Qualifications don’t define how well you deliver, but for global professionals, they ensure we get the chance to do so.”

Colin Linton, an academic and consultant, added the career-stage nuance. “Qualifications play a much more important role at the earlier stages of a person’s career, when they don’t have sufficient evidence of workplace achievements. But eventually experience and achievements will become more important over time.”

Oliver Bishop, founder of ProcureScape, compressed it into the line the thread kept circling. “Hard skills get you to the door, soft skills open it.”

The Cost Nobody Should Dismiss

Julie Cobb, MCIPS-qualified, pushed back on the tone rather than the argument. “Be aware the tone of this post belittles the time, commitment and sacrifice people make to achieve these qualifications. I spent 4 years as a single Mum with a full time job to achieve MCIPS and seeing you completely devalue something I am proud to have achieved at the cost of more quality time with my son, really makes me sad.”

Mills apologised directly. The exchange matters because it names the real stake. Four years of evenings is a serious investment, and the question practitioners should be asking is not whether it was worth it, but whether the content earned those evenings and whether it still does three years later.

John Kill, a fractional supply chain executive, set the test. “If I have the whole alphabet behind my name, but haven’t survived a supplier shutdown, negotiated a contract with a major vendor, and built a lasting program, those qualifications aren’t worth their paper.”

Hugo Li, who sits on the manufacturing side of the table, offered the supplier’s view of what distinguishes a strong buyer. “What separates the strong ones is rarely the letters. It is whether they can read a process capability sheet and push back on it. That is learned by being wrong a few times, not by studying for it. A qualification is a useful floor. The risk is treating it as a ceiling.”

Takeaways for Supply Chain and Procurement Leaders

Three lessons run through the discussion. First, separate the foundation from the currency. A qualification teaches structured thinking that lasts. It does not teach what changed this quarter, and nobody should expect it to.

Second, build the continuous layer deliberately. Peer sessions, cross-industry discussion and live practitioner exchange are where current knowledge circulates now. That is a budget line and a calendar commitment, not an accident.

Third, if you drop the qualification gate in hiring, replace it with something. Structured work samples and evidence of impact, or you will simply be selecting for confidence.

What did you last learn that your qualification could not have taught you, and where did you learn it?

GSCC members access daily and weekly sessions, replays, reports, learning tracks, AI tools and the Supply Chain Value Creation Executive Program. See the full benefits at https://gscc.co/benefits and the event calendar at https://www.chain.net/c/events/.

Continue the discussion on Chain.NET, the global supply chain community, at https://www.chain.net/c/ask.

Two numbers published this month should stop every chief procurement officer mid-budget cycle.

Sixty-three percent of senior procurement leaders expect AI to significantly improve procurement performance over the next three years. Only 25% have undertaken job and role redesign as a direct result of AI implementation.

The figures come from two Gartner surveys covering 213 senior procurement leaders and 134 procurement respondents within a broader C-suite study. They describe a function that believes in the technology and has not yet touched the organization chart.

That gap has a name. Job chaos. It happens when AI hollows out standardized, middle-skilled work while responsibilities, workflows and required skills shift underneath people who were never told the shift was coming.

Where the pressure lands first

Picture your category management team. Somewhere in the middle of that structure sits a cluster of roles built around standardized output. Running the RFQ process. Normalizing supplier responses into a comparison grid. Updating the spend cube. Chasing contract renewal dates. Preparing the quarterly business review deck.

None of that work is trivial. All of it is structured, repetitive and well documented, which makes it exactly what AI absorbs first.

The demand curve is shifting in two directions at once. Toward lower-skilled roles that are heavily AI-augmented, where a less experienced person supported by good tooling produces what used to require years of category familiarity. And toward higher-skilled positions requiring creativity and complex problem solving, the work of negotiating a difficult supplier relationship or restructuring a category strategy under tariff pressure.

The middle is where the squeeze happens. And the middle is where most procurement organizations have concentrated their headcount for twenty years.

What redesign actually means

Fareen Mehrzai, Senior Director Analyst in the research firm’s supply chain practice, frames the core issue plainly. Successful AI implementation at the functional level is fundamentally a role redesign challenge. Responsibilities and skills across procurement are already changing, and CPOs who delay redesigning roles risk leaving employees without a clear path forward and their organizations without the talent needed to capture the full value from AI.

The practical starting point is an audit conducted with employees, not about them. Take each role and separate the responsibilities that should stay with people from those that should move to AI.

Run this on a sourcing manager and the split becomes obvious quickly. Drafting the initial RFQ document, moves. Deciding which suppliers to invite, stays. Consolidating bid responses, moves. Reading the room when a strategic supplier signals capacity constraints, stays. Monitoring contract compliance against agreed terms, moves. Deciding whether to enforce a penalty clause with a supplier you need next quarter, stays.

Michelin offers a useful proof point from the adjacent planning function. For its automotive division, roughly 50% of forecast volumes now run without human intervention, which freed planners to concentrate on new product launches and the references the model consistently handles badly. The organization did not shrink its planning team. It moved people up the value chain and documented what they were now responsible for.

That documentation step is the one most procurement functions will skip, and it is the one that prevents chaos.

The skills that appreciate

As routine work automates, the premium shifts to capabilities AI cannot readily replicate. Creativity. Influence. Agility. Ethical judgment.

These sound soft until you attach them to procurement situations. Influence is what gets an internal stakeholder to accept a supplier they did not choose. Ethical judgment is what stops a cost-saving sourcing decision that would expose the company to forced labor risk in a tier-three supplier. Agility is what reorganizes a category strategy in six weeks when a tariff announcement invalidates the assumptions underneath it.

The uncomfortable truth is that these capabilities erode when they go unused, and many procurement professionals have spent years in roles that exercised process discipline rather than judgment. Assessing them honestly, then building targeted development before the erosion sets in, is a different exercise from sending the team on a generative AI training course.

Experimentation as operating model

The third move is structural rather than individual. Create a workforce sandbox, a defined space where employees can test AI tools and workflows safely, learn continuously, and treat failed experiments as part of development rather than as mistakes on a performance record.

This works only with transparency about the AI agenda. If your team suspects the real objective is a headcount reduction nobody has announced, no sandbox will produce honest experimentation. People do not volunteer the automation of their own job to a leader they do not trust.

Communities of practice and peer networks accelerate the learning considerably, because the useful discoveries in procurement AI are specific. The prompt that reliably extracts obligations from a contract in your template format. The workflow that handles supplier onboarding exceptions without breaking. These travel between colleagues faster than they travel through formal training.

Mehrzai is clear that this is not a project with an end date. CPOs must give employees agency in shaping how their roles evolve, and role redesign cannot be a one-time exercise. It needs continuous adjustment as AI advances and as employees learn what actually works.

The question has changed

Most procurement leadership teams are still asking how they can use AI. That question produces a list of use cases, a pilot, and a slow fade.

The more useful question is how procurement should be redesigned to create more value in an AI-enabled world. That question produces an organization design, a skills plan and a conversation with HR.

It is a significantly larger conversation. It is also the one that determines whether the 63% who expect performance gains actually get them.

Two takeaways

First, run the responsibility audit this quarter, with your team in the room. Take your three largest role types and split every responsibility into stays with people or moves to AI. The exercise takes two workshops. It gives every person in the function a documented view of where their job is heading, which is the single most effective defense against the morale collapse that follows uncertainty. Doing it with employees rather than to them also surfaces the undocumented exceptions that would have broken your automation anyway.

Second, rewrite your hiring profile before your next requisition. If you are still screening primarily for ERP fluency and process execution, you are recruiting into the part of the function that is contracting. Screen instead for negotiation under ambiguity, stakeholder influence and the ability to reason about a supplier decision with incomplete information. Those capabilities take years to build and will be scarce precisely when everyone wants them.

The technology question in procurement is largely settled. The organization question has barely started.

Which responsibilities in your team would you move to AI tomorrow, and which would you refuse to move at any price? And has anyone in your function been told honestly what their role is expected to look like in three years?

Continue the discussion on Chain.NET, the global supply chain community, https://www.chain.net/c/ask. Ask your questions, join events and debates, and see the full member benefits at https://gscc.co/benefits.

Ask most procurement leaders why maverick spend keeps landing on their desk and you get a list of other people’s failings. Stakeholders ignore the policy. The business does not plan. Finance signed off without asking. Tom Mills, a procurement trainer recently discussed it and offered a less comfortable answer: the function is hiding behind forms, templates and chatbots.

The intake form asks the questions that should be a conversation. The policy link gets sent instead of someone picking up the phone. The chatbot logs the exception and nobody talks it through. His fix was four questions rather than four controls. Ask straight whether the request really needs to bypass the process or whether it is just easier. Talk through the risk together rather than assuming the requester knows what “low value” means when they have never seen the contract. Spell out what saying yes exposes, for the business and for the individual. And ask what happened upstream, because most one-off exceptions are a planning conversation that never took place.

The responses came from CPOs, category leads, consultants and operators across manufacturing, energy, oil and gas, and retail. The agreement was broad. The sharpest contributions were the ones that pushed back.

Spend Is Like Water

The reframing that stuck came from Michael Shields, VP of Procurement at Tropic. “Spend is like water. It will take the path of least resistance in most situations. Instead of asking why is there so much maverick spend, I try to ask how can I change my process to be a better experience.”

That shifts the problem from behaviour to design. Water does not break the rules. It finds the gap.

Clarice Camacho, a global energy procurement and risk leader, extended the logic to its conclusion. “If the compliant route is slow, complicated, restrictive, or doesn’t meet the business need, people will find another way. That’s not simply a compliance problem. It’s a user experience problem.”

Her closing line is the standard the function should hold itself to. “The goal isn’t to catch maverick spend. The goal is to make it unnecessary.”

Georgia Giannia, a senior IT procurement professional, added the fifth step the original list was missing and grounded it in experience. “Make the compliant route genuinely faster than the workaround. People do not bypass process because they enjoy the risk, they bypass it because they have watched it take three weeks before.”

Veera Baskar K, a supply chain consultant to mid-sized manufacturers, proposed the measurement that proves which problem you actually have. “When the compliant buying route takes longer than the business can tolerate, people create their own route. Tracking exception reasons and procurement cycle time together can show whether it’s really a compliance issue or a process design issue.”

That is a diagnostic any function can run this quarter. If cycle time and exception volume move together, the process is the cause.

The Honest Dissent on Time

Mills listed “I don’t have time to talk everyone through it” among the excuses. Hamilton Lindley, VP of Procurement, Compliance and Risk, declined to accept that.

“Sometimes it is just true. Save the conversations for the exceptions that keep repeating, and make the rest of the route fast enough that nobody needs a workaround.”

That correction matters. A procurement team of six covering a thousand requisitions cannot talk every requester through the risk, and pretending otherwise produces guilt rather than change. The conversation is a scarce resource. Spend it on the repeat patterns and engineer the rest away.

Mills accepted the point. The reconciliation is that conversation and process design are not alternatives. Conversation diagnoses. Design fixes at scale.

Exceptions Are Data, Not Incidents

The most useful operational shift came from treating each bypass as information rather than misconduct.

Aleksandr Bondarenko, a manufacturing procurement manager, put it most clearly. “Every exception is telling us something: poor planning, gaps in supplier coverage, a process that’s too slow or rigid, or sometimes simply behaviour that needs to change. The conversation is important, but the real win is spotting the pattern behind the exceptions and fixing the system. Otherwise, we’re just getting better at managing the same problem.”

Mark Strange, a transformation leader, drew the line between symptom and cause. “If capable people repeatedly find ways around a process, I would want to understand what the process is making unnecessarily difficult before adding another control. Otherwise we risk treating the symptom while preserving the cause.”

Rob Colletti, a packaging specialist, delivered the line that exposes how rarely this happens: “The one-off exception that somehow happens 37 times a year.”

Sahil Pabbewar reframed the opening question itself. “The most effective procurement teams don’t just ask, why did you bypass the process? They ask, what happened that made bypassing the process feel like the easiest option? That shift from policing to understanding can uncover the root cause.”

The Case for Enforcement

Not everyone accepted the make-it-easier framing. John Kill, a fractional supply chain executive, argued for the blunt instrument.

“The fastest way to cure rogue spend is strictly enforce no PO, no pay. When a couple vendors get burned providing goods and services without Procurement’s authorization, they’ll stop doing favors for their buddies. When a couple employees get held accountable for violating the process, they’ll work within the system. I agree explaining the system is critical, but enforcement is key. The fastest way to get someone’s attention is the pocketbook.”

Mills conceded partially, calling it a blunt tool. Both are right in different conditions. No PO, no pay stops casual bypassing quickly. It does nothing about the requester who genuinely could not wait three weeks, and in that case it converts a visible exception into a hidden one.

Bright Afeikhe named the variable that decides whether enforcement works at all. “The singular most challenging issue is the will power of top management to enforce policies.”

Would You Hire Without HR?

The most quotable argument came from Elvire Regnier, a former CPO now advising on procurement transformation. “I always had this question in my mind: would someone recruit without HR? No, and no need for a policy, that’s obvious. So why would that same person commit the company fund without procurement?”

The analogy is uncomfortable because the answer is obvious. Nobody bypasses HR to hire, not because the policy is stronger, but because the involvement is assumed. Procurement has not reached that status in most organisations, and no amount of policy enforcement creates it.

Tianrong C., a procurement director at adidas, explained how the function loses that standing. “From time to time procurement professionals tend to stick to the playbook way too much which loses sight of how business operates and how fast a response it might request. If we try to walk in business’s shoes and think the other way round and work as a problem solver, then business will keep coming back for your help instead.”

Warren D’Cruz, a procurement strategy director, framed it as trust rather than compliance. “When stakeholders feel procurement is slowing them down, they’ll find ways around the process. The best procurement teams don’t just enforce policy, they influence decisions before spend occurs.”

Takeaways for Procurement Leaders

Three lessons run through the discussion. First, measure cycle time alongside exception volume. If the two move together, you have a process design problem wearing a compliance problem’s clothes, and another control will make it worse.

Second, ration the conversation deliberately. Nobody can talk every requester through the risk. Reserve the dialogue for repeating exceptions, then engineer the rest of the route fast enough that no workaround is needed.

Third, treat every bypass as a data point about the system. One exception is an incident. Thirty-seven of them in a year is a design specification nobody wrote down.

If your compliant route took three days instead of three weeks, how many of last year’s exceptions would still have happened?

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Supplier Performance Management and Supplier Relationship Management are not the same discipline, and confusing the two costs companies more than they realise. SPM measures whether a supplier is meeting contractual obligations: OTIF, quality defects, compliance. It runs on a three-to-twelve-month horizon, involves procurement and operations, and applies to many suppliers at once. SRM builds strategic relationships with a handful of key suppliers, over one to five years or more, with two-way metrics, cross-functional involvement from R&D through leadership, and joint business planning.

Simon Frost, a procurement trainer specialising in sustainable sourcing and category management, laid out the distinction and named what SRM is not: a trophy at year end for the nicest supplier, a paid meal once a year, a published league table, or pillaging suppliers for innovation while pretending both sides win. The post drew procurement directors, category leads, and one specialist who has run more than 800 quarterly business reviews inside Nestlé, Danone, PepsiCo and Zurich. Almost nobody disputed the distinction. What they added was sharper than the framework.

When Good Performance Data Makes Partnership Impossible

The most striking contribution came from Celia Sgar, who has spent sixteen years running QBRs at large consumer goods companies. She rejected the assumption that SPM simply feeds SRM.

“I’ve also seen SPM make SRM impossible. If the scorecard exists only to trigger penalties, the vendor works the scorecard. I had a supplier closing tickets at 3h59 against a 4 hour SLA. Then, reopened two days later, same problem, new ticket number. Never breached once all year. The users hated them.”

Her closing line is the one every procurement leader should sit with. “If you look only at the data, you won’t find anything. I found out because a project manager mentioned it over lunch.”

That is Goodhart’s law arriving in supplier management. A metric that becomes a penalty trigger stops measuring performance and starts measuring compliance theatre. The scorecard was green for twelve months while the service deteriorated.

Joseph Dolan, a packaging cost specialist, described the same pattern from the operational side. “A supplier can technically hit the KPI while creating extra handling, delays, workarounds or cost elsewhere. The numbers tell you what happened, the conversation helps uncover why.”

The Meeting That Says SRM and Does SPM

Sgar identified a structural failure that explains why most SRM programmes never mature. “The other pattern I see is QBRs that spend the full hour on last quarter, then somebody says we’re out of time for the roadmap bit. So the invite says SRM and the meeting does SPM.”

Her fix is worth copying. “I split them now. Numbers monthly with the delivery team at the operational meeting. Quick quarterly overview in the QBR and more focused on the forward conversation and blockers.”

Nueso Group, working on the industrial side, confirmed the mechanism. “The structure usually exists on paper. What fails is the governance meeting itself. A quarterly review that opens with the OTIF and quality dashboard has already become SPM again, whatever the framework says.”

Their prescription reverses the agenda. “The reviews that build something start from the supplier’s roadmap, capacity constraints and where cost can come out of the part, and treat performance as the entry ticket rather than the agenda.”

They added a warning about ownership. “On direct materials the internal owner usually has to include engineering. If procurement owns the relationship alone, the conversation drifts back to price and the structure collapses.”

Duration Is the Wrong Dividing Line

The sharpest challenge to the framework came from Sebastian Schaan, a lead buyer in wine and spirits, who questioned the time horizon as a separator.

“A supplier can be managed for years without ever becoming strategic, while a relatively new relationship can require SRM from day one if dependency, innovation or business risk justify it. For me the better dividing line is not months versus years, but the level of mutual dependence and joint decision-making.”

That correction matters operationally. Length of relationship is easy to measure and tells you almost nothing. A twenty-year commodity supplier may warrant nothing beyond a scorecard. A six-month-old sole-source partner with proprietary technology warrants executive sponsorship immediately.

Juan F. P., a procurement transformation executive, developed the same logic under challenge. His initial position was that SPM data helps decide where SRM investment is worth making. He then refined it. “A supplier can perform perfectly and still require very little relationship investment because the category is highly substitutable. Equally, a poorly performing supplier may deserve significant attention precisely because its capability is difficult to replace.”

His conclusion elevates SPM rather than subordinating it. “SPM provides one important layer of evidence for the SRM decision, but it needs to be combined with criticality, substitutability, dependency and strategic potential. That’s probably an even stronger argument for treating SPM as a discipline in its own right.”

The Question Nobody Answered Easily

Arturo Torres, head of operations at a composites manufacturer, added a dimension most SRM programmes ignore entirely. “A third one we often forget: how the supplier sees us. If we’re a marginal account, no governance committee will build a partnership.”

He then asked the question that produced the most valuable exchange in the thread. “How are you measuring relationship health on the SRM side? That’s the part I find hardest to make objective.”

Sgar’s answer came with an example that should unsettle anyone running a supplier scorecard. “We had a supplier with a big turnover in one of our projects. Three left in a few months. We marked them down on the scorecard for turnover, quarter after quarter. Then I sat with them and asked why. They told me straight. One of our product managers treated their team badly, and people were leaving because of us. My scorecard was punishing them for our own behaviour.”

Her methodological point followed. “A survey would never have got it out of them. The trust comes first, then it’s honesty.”

And her practical solution measures the buyer. “Since then I also started measuring our side too. How many days to pay, days to sign off, meetings we moved. Use this data also to evaluate you as customer if you don’t want to ask them directly.”

That is the most actionable idea in the entire discussion. Days to pay, days to sign off, and meetings cancelled are internal data any procurement function already holds. They require no supplier cooperation and they measure exactly what the supplier experiences.

Give Something Back

Deepak Thiru, a procurement and sourcing manager, named the consequence of scorecard-only management. “Organizations obsessed with SPM metrics and vendor scorecards, then scratching their heads when suppliers stop innovating or share intelligence only with their competitors. SRM requires you to actually give something back, not just grade suppliers on a spreadsheet.”

Artur Kochuev, a senior procurement specialist in oil and gas, described what the upgrade requires. “True SRM starts with deliberate supplier segmentation and focuses deeper engagement on the suppliers that are critical to capacity, technology, resilience, project delivery, or future growth. Performance data creates accountability, while shared objectives, transparent risk discussions, joint improvement plans, and executive sponsorship turn the relationship into long-term mutual value.”

Frederick Magana, a CIPS Fellow, added a timing distinction. “Supplier performance becomes relevant after the contract has been awarded, whereas supplier relationship management is applicable both before and after the contract award phases.”

Vats Kaustubh, a CPO managing over $400 million in spend, made the case for SPM as a value lever rather than a compliance function. “Complex provisions are factored in pricing when agreement is formalised but we stick to plain vanilla deliverables and accept it, thus losing the value we are paying for. SPM is a great way to secure contractual values.”

Takeaways for Procurement Leaders

Three lessons run through the discussion. First, check whether your scorecard is measuring performance or producing gaming. A supplier who never breaches an SLA while users complain constantly is working the metric, and the data will never show it.

Second, split the meetings. Operational performance monthly with the delivery team. The quarterly review opens with the supplier’s roadmap and constraints, not the OTIF dashboard, or it silently becomes SPM again.

Third, measure your own behaviour. Days to pay, days to sign off, meetings you moved. It is the only relationship-health data you can gather without asking a supplier to criticise the customer.

Would your best supplier tell you the truth about your team, and if not, what is your scorecard actually measuring?

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AI is already rewriting procurement work. Spend analytics, supplier discovery, contract review, risk monitoring, and negotiation preparation are all being reshaped. Yet across enterprises, the same pattern keeps showing up. Teams buy the tool, run the pilot, and discover that AI did not solve the problem. It exposed one.

That gap framed a GSCC Executive Roundtable with procurement and supply chain leaders from HSBC, ACWA Power, Dell Technologies, GE HealthCare, and Domino’s. Their conclusion was consistent. The bottleneck is not the technology. It is the operating discipline underneath it.

AI does not fix fragmentation. It accelerates it.

Ankit Kulkarni, Head of Inventory Systems and Supply Chain Performance at ACWA Power, put it plainly. Procurement is not primarily behind on AI. It is behind on the operating discipline needed to use AI reliably.

No model compensates for fragmented supplier records, inconsistent taxonomies, or unclear process ownership. He has seen the gaps directly in master data, commodity mappings, specifications, and critical spare planning. AI can interpret language and find patterns at a scale humans cannot match manually. But if the source is incomplete and nobody owns the exceptions, it simply produces a faster version of existing uncertainty.

Ujjwala Mishra, OM Leader for India and South Asia at GE HealthCare, made the same point from a different angle. AI should not be a layer sitting on top of procurement. If the systems underneath are fragmented, the result is garbage in, garbage out. AI should remove layers, not add one.

Sandeep Sharma, Director of Group Procurement and Supply Chain at Domino’s, raised the data-history problem. Machine learning often needs two and a half to three years of data before inferences become reliable. He also questioned whether cross-functional data exists at all. If a procurement spike is caused by a marketing promotion, is that relationship even visible to the model?

Two kinds of maturity

Ajaay Kapur, VP and Head of Procurement at HSBC Group, argued that data, skills, and governance are subsets of a larger issue. What matters first is the ecosystem. That is a top management decision about direction, followed by a deliberate effort to identify manual and non-value-adding processes across functions.

At HSBC, that shows up structurally. Risk owns AI governance. IT owns adoption and tool selection, working with the business on requirements. Procurement owns the process. The organization also signed an agreement with LinkedIn requiring employees to complete 30 to 40 hours of AI training with certification attached.

Mishra summarized the requirement as two maturities working together. Digital maturity gives you connected data, platforms, and technology. Enterprise maturity gives you standardized processes, governance, ownership, and capability. AI readiness depends on both.

Kim Beng Chan of Dell Technologies added a practical note about scale. Many SMEs simply do not have the data yet, because years of records still sit in hard copy in a warehouse. Digitizing comes first, then data hygiene, then governance, then security. Enterprises can fund data scientists and architects to run that. Smaller firms cannot assume the same starting line.

Where to actually start

The panel converged on a narrow-scope approach.

Kulkarni laid out three foundations. Start with a small bounded domain and one specific decision area rather than an enterprise-wide data program. Define a common language, meaning agreed identifiers, category and commodity structures, critical definitions, ownership, and basic quality rules. Then assign a business owner to every critical field and exception, because AI will never own an unresolved gap or a conflicting business rule. The third foundation is a repeatable exception process that distinguishes valid results from low-confidence recommendations and missing evidence, with a defined reviewer for each route.

Sandeep Sharma stressed sequencing and honesty about returns. Pick the highest-priority function where backups exist and ROI is clearest. In his experience, AI does not deliver ROI inside 24 months, and during implementation the human brain still carries roughly 60% of the load against AI’s 40%.

Asked how clean the data must be before starting, Mishra offered the most useful reframe of the session. There is never a perfect moment. Take a contract renewal covering 500 suppliers with inconsistent payment terms, messy descriptions, and missing fields. The instinct is to declare the organization not ready. Instead, decide what you want to improve, such as expiry dates, categories, and commercial terms. Let AI surface the 20 contracts that need urgent attention, then clean outward from there.

Kapur described the same logic through a PeopleSoft to Oracle migration, where AI helped identify duplicate supplier records registered under name variants before the data moved.

Who owns it, and who checks it

On ownership, Kulkarni drew a clean line. Procurement defines the process and the objective. IT owns the data architecture and cybersecurity. IT does not decide what gets verified as an exception. When procurement and IT disagreed at his organization, the resolution came through a business case with quantified outcomes and minimal spend, since the solution was built in house rather than purchased.

Kapur described a handover model borrowed from automotive, where a new-model team passes a matured process to mass procurement. Once his Oracle Fusion implementation stabilized, procurement handed operations to IT so the function could move to the next project.

On blind trust, Mishra gave the sharpest example. AI may recommend a supplier based on a flawless delivery history. The buyer knows that supplier just had a fire at its plant. AI will never surface that. Use AI as a copilot, never on autopilot.

Takeaways for procurement leaders

Learn AI architecture, not prompting. Kulkarni’s strongest advice was that copying and pasting data into ChatGPT or Copilot is not AI adoption. He built spend classification for 200,000 line items in house using Python connected to Azure OpenAI, plus a semantic and lexical matching model that found duplicate master data across 111 assets in 16 countries. Commercial equivalents run into six figures.

Fix the process before you automate it. Asked how to repair broken processes without a two-year project, Kulkarni recommended bringing an operational excellence expert alongside management. Mishra offered a lighter alternative for teams without one: value stream mapping. Map the steps, find where the process breaks, then iterate.

Where is your procurement data weakest, and what would you have to fix before you trusted an AI recommendation in a sourcing decision?

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Every procurement function has the same complaint. We get brought in too late. The supplier is chosen, the price is emotionally agreed, and the function inherits a compliance job dressed up as a sourcing decision. The standard response is to tighten policy, add an approval gate, and escalate. It rarely works, because the problem was never that stakeholders forgot the rule. It is that calling procurement did not feel useful.

The alternative is tactical rather than structural, and procurement writer Tom Mills laid out ten habits from his own practice. Meet stakeholders before you need them. Learn what they are measured on, not what their job title says. Give bad news straight and in person. Never raise a concern in the room for the first time. Bring two options, not one. Follow up in writing within the hour. Give a recommendation, not a report. Make compliant the easy option. Find out what they are being asked in their next meeting. Tell them what you would do with your own money.

The list is unglamorous and entirely behavioural. What the responses added was a rough consensus on which of these actually moves the needle, and why.

Read more

Coupa replaced its chief executive in late August. Leagh Turner stepped down. Michael Lipps, a Thoma Bravo operating partner who has sat on Coupa’s board since 2023, took over the following Monday.

Two weeks on, the personnel story is finished. The argument it set off is not, and most of it has very little to do with Coupa. Analysts, chief procurement officers, board directors and vendor founders filed several hundred public comments in a week. Read together, they amount to the most candid public audit of procurement software the market has produced this year.

The background is short. Thoma Bravo took Coupa private in 2023. Rob Bernshteyn, who ran the company for 14 years, left the same year. Turner arrived from Ceridian in November 2023 and led through a take-private, four acquisitions and an AI cycle that aged every legacy platform. Lipps is the fourth name at the top in roughly 40 months. Two of those appointments came from the sponsor.

Orchestration finally got cross-examined

Intake and orchestration has been the loudest category story in procurement for two years. The threads split on whether it is a product category or a symptom.

Jason Busch of Spend Matters argued the wave came from something real. Suites promised a clean process and delivered something else when the work broke down under actual conditions. Buying starts messy and cross-functional and almost never inside a purchase-to-pay workflow. Challengers built their entire go-to-market on that gap.

Koray Köse of KŌSE Advisory called orchestration a symptom of unmodernized procurement organizations and restless capital, not a destination. He brought numbers. MIT’s NANDA initiative found that 95% of enterprise generative AI pilots deliver no measurable profit-and-loss impact, against $30bn to $40bn chasing the promise. Procurement technology specifically reports implementation failure rates of 80% to 95%.

Practitioners were harsher than either analyst. Tony Marino, a CPO and board director across private equity portfolio companies, wrote “Orchestrator tools are kinda B.S. for me” and described them as a way for CPOs to look like they are enabling the business.

Rob Turner, a chief procurement officer, gave the most useful diagnosis in either thread. He sees implementations fail because orchestration layers sit on infrastructure that cannot carry them. His test question for any vendor is “where is the data foundation maintained”. He argued that procurement teams now need people with genuine source-to-pay architecture expertise on staff. Andrew Daley of Edbury Daley agreed that most CPO teams lack it and called operating without it a false economy.

That is the practical takeaway from the entire debate. If nobody on your team can answer the data foundation question, you are buying an interface and calling it a strategy.

Data is not an advantage until it can act

The strongest consensus had nothing to do with leadership.

Matt Zimmerman of Prime Digital Solutions made the point across both threads. Intelligence sitting behind dashboards is not a moat. The contest is “who can turn intelligence into governed execution at scale”. Knowing what should happen, knowing what you are authorized to do, and actually getting it done are three separate problems. Most vendors have solved the first one.

Georg Wall supplied the missing half. Agents need structured, real-time access to what can actually be bought, including prices, availability, alternatives and commercial rules, plus the authority to transact. That is a different problem from catalogs and punchouts. Busch endorsed it as a sixth priority to his own list.

Derek White argued the data only pays off if it becomes a procurement-specific language model with a knowledge graph for governance. He also warned that switching-cost protection may already be running out for some accounts.

Marino delivered the customer verdict in one line. Getting value out of the data takes too much effort, and it should be instant. That is what a paying enterprise customer thinks about a decade of accumulated spend intelligence. Every vendor claiming a data moat should read it twice.

Somebody pays when a pilot fails

Köse raised a point nobody else did, and it applies across the sector.

When an orchestration or agentic pilot fails at the rates already documented, the customer rarely blames the vendor in public. The team quietly returns to the incumbent platform to patch the data, reconcile the mess and restore the workflow the failed tool broke. Internally, that gets narrated as loyalty. Köse calls it a hidden tax. The incumbent’s support organization absorbs the operational cost of somebody else’s failure, usually for free, and never gets paid for the risk it just underwrote.

Buyers should invert that. If your team has quietly rebuilt what a failed pilot broke, the cost belongs in your business case and your vendor scorecard, not buried in support tickets. Failed procurement pilots are almost never accounted for honestly, which is exactly why the failure rate stays high.

Busch’s version of the same exposure runs the other way. He believes customers are already developing alternatives their incumbent has not detected, and put the window at roughly 18 months before quiet renewal conversations turn into real suite losses.

Leadership churn belongs in your risk register

Marcel Van Wonderen framed why any of this matters beyond one vendor. Many companies have made themselves materially dependent on a single platform. The direction that vendor picks sets the direction of their procurement function. That is concentration exposure, and it deserves the same treatment as any Tier 1 supplier.

Jack Miles of MainSpring Advisors asked the governance question directly. A board member stepping into the seat raises whether the move was sudden or long planned. He put the correction at six to 18 months and warned that a further leadership change would end the reset. Patrick Scully, a non-executive director, read the appointment plainly: “this is a signal that Coupa will be shopped soon”.

The dissent was blunt. Michael Lamoureux argued the platform is now a single interface rather than a coherent suite and said “Coupa’s glory days ended with Rob Bernshteyn’s departure”. Markus Hornburg’s judgment on the years since drew the widest agreement in its thread.

Others pushed back. Javier Carnevali and Michelle T. defended Turner’s record on customer focus and culture. Köse opened his own piece with a tribute to her stewardship through a take-private and a brutal AI cycle.

Two lines summarized the risk better than any analysis. Jan-Henner Theissen wrote, “Sometimes assets can become a burden”. Van Wonderen pressed the same nerve: “Sometimes doubling down is just refusing to turn around”. Both apply to any incumbent vendor sitting on a large installed base, and to any procurement team that built its process around one.

How to read vendor proof

Two exchanges are worth more to buyers than the strategy talk.

Tricia Miller, a former Accenture procurement leader now at Coupa, cited a 2026 Gartner Customers’ Choice distinction for source-to-pay with a 99% willingness-to-recommend rate. Busch challenged the methodology, arguing that crowdsourced peer models are a different instrument from analyst research, and said a board should watch net promoter score over time as the leading indicator of net revenue retention. Whatever you conclude, the exchange is a reminder that badges in a vendor deck do not all measure the same thing, and few buyers check which is which.

Köse also asked Nico Bac, founder of Digital Procurement Now, to declare his commercial relationship with a competing vendor before endorsing a position. Procurement technology commentary runs heavily on relationships that are never stated. Somebody finally said so in public.

Takeaways

Treat vendor leadership change as supply risk, not industry news. Run the same review you would run on any critical supplier under new ownership. Document your dependency, your switching cost and your realistic alternative before the renewal conversation, not during it.

Set a diligence standard for every agentic vendor you evaluate, incumbent included. Know which model runs underneath, who controls the weights, whose data pipeline it uses, and where the legal exposure sits the day it fails. Demand a validated, monetizable use case with measurable KPIs before signature. A demo is not evidence.

Audit your own data foundation before you buy another layer on top of it. Ask who maintains it, who owns governance, and whether anyone on your team can defend the architecture. That question decides more implementations than the vendor selection does.

What would you change in your vendor review process after reading this?

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The shift underway in procurement is not about adding another AI tool to the stack. It is about a function moving from using AI to being powered by it. That was the takeaway procurement writer Tom Mills brought back from a day at Amazon Business Exchange in London, and the framing he offered has proved unusually durable: not AI replacing procurement teams, but AI taking the weight off them so they can focus on the parts of the job that actually need a person.

Five ideas anchored the argument. AI does not remove the need for great teams, it raises the bar, because two teams given identical technology still produce different outcomes. AI is starting to act rather than answer, taking the next step instead of responding to a question. The boring foundations matter more than ever: data, then integration, then optimisation, in that order, and you do not get to skip the first part. Procurement’s biggest AI opportunity might be time itself. And the ambition should stretch past efficiency toward something more commercial, more strategic, and more human where being human matters.

The question posed to readers was which of the five matters most. The answers split cleanly into two camps, and the more interesting argument happened inside the winning one.

Time Won. Then Came the Caveat.

The time argument drew the most support, and the most immediate qualification.

Strahinja Jovanovic, who builds supply chain operations in eCommerce, put the caveat first. “Freeing up time does not automatically create better procurement. Teams also need to be deliberate about where that time goes. Otherwise the administrative work disappears and gets replaced by a different set of low value activities.”

That is the failure mode nobody plans for. Automation removes a category of work and the vacuum fills itself, usually with meetings, reporting, and a different flavour of administration. The capacity gain is real and entirely invisible on any measure that matters.

Mark Strange, a transformation leader, took the point further and landed on the sharpest reframing in the discussion. “The opportunity is not really the time AI gives back. It’s what we choose to do with that time. If we automate transactional work and simply fill the space with more activity, we have improved efficiency but changed very little.”

His conclusion inverted the original question. “Perhaps the question is not just what could procurement become? It’s what do we want our people to become better at? Because AI can create the capacity. Leadership still has to decide what that capacity is for.”

That distinction matters operationally. Capacity is a technology outcome. Direction is a management decision, and the second does not follow automatically from the first.

Pierre Mitchell, a longtime procurement technology analyst, grounded the argument in economics. “Economic cost equals opportunity cost. The biggest cost in procurement is the opportunity cost of resources, in a function that delivers 5x to 10x ROI, wasting time on low impact tasks versus investment of their time into high impact activities that build way greater capabilities.”

Framing recovered hours as an investment decision rather than a productivity gain changes how they get allocated. A CFO would never let a 5x-return function reinvest capital without a thesis. Time gets treated with far less rigour.

Hazel Tinsley, a procurement and third-party risk leader, named where it should go. “More time for judgement, relationships and understanding the wider enterprise, rather than simply doing the same things faster.”

The Unglamorous Prerequisite

The second camp argued that none of this happens without the foundations, and their case was harder to romanticise.

Georgia Giannia, a senior IT procurement professional, delivered the line that best captures the problem. “Everyone wants the clever use case, nobody wants to reconcile the vendor master, but you cannot optimise spend you cannot see, and that is where most of the value has always been hiding.”

That last clause deserves weight. The value was never trapped behind a missing AI capability. It was trapped behind a vendor master nobody wanted to clean. AI does not unlock it. It simply makes the failure to unlock it more expensive.

Frederick Magana, a CIPS Fellow, described what the work actually involves. “AI adoption requires a lot of heavy lifting with data cleansing, approval workflow alignments, procurement process mapping. Unfortunately people usually see the end product.”

Nuha Luqman, working in energy supply chain, stated the dependency plainly. “Without clean data and integrated systems, the promise of AI collapses. Get the basics right, and the opportunity becomes transformational.”

The two camps are not actually in conflict. The time argument describes the destination. The foundations argument describes the toll booth. Functions that skip the second and campaign for the first end up with expensive automation running on data nobody trusts.

AI as a Governed Teammate

A separate thread addressed what happens when AI stops answering and starts acting.

Esther Adorable Emoedume, who builds procurement AI, drew the line most precisely. “AI should become a governed teammate, not an unsupervised decision maker. Procurement professionals should retain accountability. While AI does the information work, the human makes the consequential decision.”

That formulation, information work versus consequential decision, is a cleaner operating boundary than most AI governance frameworks manage in several pages. It also implies something uncomfortable: the boundary only holds if someone maintains it deliberately. Agentic systems drift toward taking more steps because that is what they are built to do.

Rebecca May Shah, a commercial lawyer working in AI governance, confirmed the pattern outside procurement. “These closely align with the changes in the Legal world. AI will help us, and act as a starting point, but it cannot replace human judgment or relationships.”

Hisham Serry, a supply chain consultant, noted a measurement practice worth copying. “Some companies have started to track the time saved by Copilot Cowork and are beginning to utilize that additional time for other more procurement thinking activities.”

Tracking recovered hours is the only way to know whether capacity is being redeployed or quietly reabsorbed. Very few functions measure it at all.

The Widening Gap

The most consequential prediction came from Rebecca Bellairs, co-founder of a marketing pitch platform. “The already strong teams are going to catapult into previously unknown performance levels with the appropriate use of AI in next few years. And the cost and cash obsessed tactical set ups are going to really struggle. The tools are just applying a magnifying glass and multiplication to what you’re already doing.”

Her warning about skill investment cut against the prevailing training rush. “Potentially too many people focusing only on AI fluency and not on upskilling in their own subject matter expertise. Both are essential.”

Abhishk Sinha, a procurement leader formerly at Maersk, compressed the same idea into a sentence. “AI will expose which procurement teams were strategic all along.”

That is the uncomfortable corollary of the raises-the-bar argument. Identical technology producing different outcomes is not just an optimistic note about culture. It means the distribution widens, and functions currently mistaking activity for strategy will find that harder to hide.

Takeaways for Procurement Leaders

Three lessons run through the discussion. First, decide what the capacity is for before you create it. Automation without a redeployment thesis produces efficiency and changes nothing. Leadership owns that decision, not the technology.

Second, fix the vendor master before the use case. You cannot optimise spend you cannot see, and the value has always been hiding behind exactly the work nobody volunteers for.

Third, track the hours you recover. If nobody measures where saved time goes, it does not go anywhere useful. It gets absorbed.

If AI gave your team back a day a week starting Monday, do you know what you would have them do with it?

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The contradiction is easy to miss until someone states it plainly. A procurement professional is required to be physically present in a service centre or office, while the travel budget that would put them in front of a supplier or on an operational site has been cut. As Linda Tomsone, a strategic indirect procurement partner, framed the problem: that is optimising for presence, not value. Her stakeholders, suppliers, and markets are spread across the world. The office is in a different country from the plant. Most of the work with suppliers and key stakeholders already happens by phone or online. So what exactly is the desk achieving?

The question landed because it names a policy most functions have accepted without examining. Procurement is built on relationships, trust, and influence. Physical presence genuinely matters. The argument is not against presence. It is against presence in the one location where it produces the least return.

The discussion that followed produced broad agreement, one genuinely uncomfortable rebuttal, and a set of operating questions the original framing left open.

The Rebuttal Worth Taking Seriously

The sharpest challenge came from Aleksandr Bondarenko, a manufacturing procurement leader, and it deserves airing in full because it exposes the weakest part of the case.

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There is no university course for sourcing executives. You can study buying, product management, or marketing. You cannot study how to build a factory network across four continents, absorb an overnight tariff shock, and keep 10 suppliers investing in your brand at the same time.

That gap is one reason the path to the top of sourcing looks different for everyone who gets there. Laurent Madelaine, Chief Product and Supply Chain Officer at Gymshark, started his on a Carrefour shop floor. Thirty-five years later, after building Carrefour’s Bangladesh sourcing office from scratch in 2001, running clothing and footwear sourcing for Tesco from Hong Kong, and leading end-to-end operations at Lacoste, he has a clear view of what separates the brands that get sourcing right from the ones that treat it as a cost line.

Start by walking in someone else’s shoes

Madelaine’s early career spanned stores, buying, and merchandising before he ever touched sourcing. He credits that range for much of what came later. When he landed in Bangladesh, he knew exactly what buyers wanted and where the gaps were, which mattered in a country no one at head office had worked in.

His framing of the role is direct. Sourcing is a service function for the rest of the business, even while it shapes strategy. Supply chain is a chain, a group of people who work together and hand over to each other. Losing sight of that turns the function into a bottleneck instead of an enabler.

Partnership means standards plus emotional attachment

Ask Madelaine what world-class supplier partnership means and he splits it in two.

The first half is standards. You need world-class manufacturers and industry specialists who can go deep on materials and technology, operating state-of-the-art factories. Size is not the issue. Doing it the right way, with real investment and real passion, is. Where a supplier falls short, you either help them reach the benchmark or you raise your expectations.

The second half is harder to systematize. You need emotional attachment to your brand. That means the supplier matters to you and you matter to them. At Lacoste, he ran supplier conferences during the French Open in Paris. At Gymshark, suppliers get invited to the Lift event. The point is not to review quality standards. It is to let suppliers see the brand, the community, and the customer, then explain what the business wants to do next.

The commercial logic is straightforward. If you do this well, suppliers want to invest in your business. Ten partners each investing a million dollars a year gives you ten million dollars of investment and a competitive advantage that is hard to copy.

The traffic runs both ways. Madelaine takes CEOs, buyers, marketing, and merchandising colleagues to visit factories. They take ownership of the relationship and they communicate the brand better afterward.

Partnership is not friendship

He is blunt about the limits. Partnership does not mean friendship. It is business. As a brand, you feed the supplier with volume. Growth brands find partnership easier to build because they invest to do better and to do more. Suppliers commit because you bring business, create jobs, and improve their margins, not because the meetings are pleasant.

What sustains it is consistency. Do what you said. Change plans or send mixed signals and trust erodes fast. He recalls telling suppliers directly that his planning was not accurate during a period of rebuilding. Suppliers can work with that. What they cannot work with is discovering a problem nobody mentioned.

Consistency has to hold across the team too. If the sourcing executive says one thing and the buyer says another, the strategy collapses on contact.

De-risking is the whole job now

On risk, Madelaine’s philosophy starts with end-to-end thinking. Fiber, material, trims, everything. You cannot produce a garment if you are missing a zip, a yarn, or a dye.

He rejects the idea that disruption is new. Early in his career, anti-dumping actions and embargoes hit overnight, and the postponed end of the China quota system left goods floating and unreleasable at customs. What has changed is the ability to anticipate. Being on the ground used to give you warning. Now you can wake up to 100% duty and see it reset to zero the next day.

His recent example: when the United States announced new duties and Vietnamese product faced a sharp increase, his team kept calm, assessed the situation, got the right people around the table, and modeled scenarios. Because some of their sourcing sat in countries that were duty-free to the US and then faced only the 10% minimum, they shifted volume from the Middle East to Asia and from Asia back the other way. The result was a US supply base distinct from the European one.

His verdict on the wait-and-see camp is nuanced. You work on the plan and wait. Rushing overnight is never good when stock sits in your DC, on the water, and in production. But waiting while doing nothing is not a strategy. Know your options and measure what you can absorb financially.

AI: own the process first

Madelaine sees AI moving fast in Asian factories, including fabric defect detection, and encourages suppliers to invest. For brands, his advice is sequenced. Know your process properly. Identify which parts are genuinely painful. Then apply AI where it brings accuracy and speed, which flows through to cost.

He points to critical path management, container consolidation, and costing as strong candidates. Instead of people typing into spreadsheets, resource shifts to development and innovation. His caution is about ownership. You cannot delegate a process you do not understand to a machine, and you need to protect the know-how that forms your brand’s DNA.

Takeaways for sourcing leaders

Hire for curiosity, not just technique. Madelaine says technique can be learned. What cannot be taught easily is the willingness to travel, to check assumptions, and to accept that what was true five years ago is false today. He nearly missed Morocco’s revival because he assumed the industry had not moved. A younger generation had rebuilt it and was running fast-turnaround programs for Zara.

Talk about what you have seen, not what you think. A Tesco boss taught him to go to the right level of detail to find the truth. If you have not been in the factory, you do not know.

Nearshoring is a tool, not a doctrine. It only works if the materials are close too. Producing near home while shipping fabric from Asia lengthens lead time rather than shortening it. Treat it as part of a de-risking mix and as a company project, not a sourcing project.

Does your leadership team visit factories, or does it rely on reports from 10,000 kilometers away? And where would you start if you had to rebuild supplier trust from zero?

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Your pilot worked. The demo impressed the board. Twelve months later, the P&L has not moved.

That gap is now the defining problem in supply chain technology. Spending is not the constraint. Gartner reports that 72% of supply chain organizations have deployed generative AI, yet most see middling results on both productivity and ROI. The tools are live. The returns are missing.

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Every procurement team knows the asymmetry. A negotiated price cut lands on a tracker, gets reported to the board, and earns the function its budget for another year. Deflecting a supplier’s 12 percent price increase, killing a spend request for a service nobody needed, or catching a supply risk before it becomes a shutdown produces nothing visible at all. The money never left. There is no before-and-after line to point at. As procurement writer Tom Mills put it in laying out the distinction, cost avoidance is arguably the bigger and more important job, and it is the part that largely goes unnoticed, right up until the organisation decides it does not need procurement, because the numbers were never on a tracker, or because Finance did not believe them.

The argument drew procurement executives, category leaders, consultants, and CFO-side voices into a debate that split cleanly. On which discipline creates more value, the verdict was close to unanimous. On whether procurement can prove it, almost nobody was confident.

Reduction Has a Ceiling. Avoidance Does Not.

The clearest structural case came from Navnith Hanumanthappa, who builds procurement technology. “Cost reduction has a ceiling. You can only negotiate so deep before you hit supplier profitability. Cost avoidance has none, because you’re catching bad spend before it’s committed. The hard part is proving a negative. Finance won’t credit money you never spent. Which is also why it’s the bigger job.”

Kshitiz Kumar, a procurement consultant at Alvarez & Marsal, added the compounding argument. “Reduction is a one-time step-down. Avoidance always compounds: every price increase you deflect resets the baseline suppliers negotiate from next cycle.”

That point deserves more attention than it usually gets. A price cut is a single event that improves this year’s P&L. A deflected increase permanently lowers the base from which every future negotiation starts. Over a multi-year horizon, the second is worth considerably more, and almost no savings tracker is built to show it.

Cynthia O’Dell, a procurement transformation VP, framed the visibility problem in the sharpest terms. “Preventing a $5M exposure is less visible than delivering a $500K price reduction, even though the business outcome may be far greater.”

The Baseline Problem

Where the discussion turned genuinely useful was on why avoidance fails to convince Finance, and what would fix it.

Amine Assaoui, a procurement transformation advisor, located the failure precisely. “What makes cost avoidance difficult is that, when it works, it often just looks like the business stayed on budget. Procurement may prevent millions in supplier increases, challenge unnecessary demand, close contract gaps or avoid costly risks. But because those costs never materialise, there is no obvious saving on the P&L.”

His prescription was the most practical in the thread. “The real challenge is agreeing the baseline upfront with Finance. Otherwise, procurement says it protected millions while Finance simply sees that the budget was respected.”

That sentence describes the trap most functions live in. Procurement claims value. Finance sees a budget that held. Without a jointly agreed baseline established before the intervention, those two readings never reconcile, and Finance’s version wins every time.

Amol Ghanekar, a global procurement leader, reframed the whole issue away from recognition and toward governance. “The bigger issue is governance rather than recognition. Until Finance, Procurement and the business align on how cost avoidance is defined, validated and reported, the conversation becomes about defending the numbers instead of demonstrating value. Cost reduction improves today’s P&L. Cost avoidance protects tomorrow’s P&L. The real test is whether we measure prevention with the same discipline as realized savings.”

Mariia Studentcova, a senior procurement leader, offered a concrete mechanism. “Provided a precise measurement methodology is strictly followed and both are validated by Finance, I would add the Savings vs. Budget as a smart way to recognize cost avoidance at the P&L level.”

Matthias Svetic, a negotiation advisor, suggested the presentational fix. “Most stakeholders can’t picture a cost that never happened. Maybe the fix is showing the before and after price on every deal, not just the total saved.”

The Dissent Worth Reading

Not everyone voted for avoidance. Olca Kazanci, a senior strategic buyer, made the case for the discipline that actually pays the bills. “Cost reduction reflects to the budget directly, cost avoidance takes much more time from the procurement time but only impacts on the unnecessary spend. My vote is 1.”

Patrick Richards, a category management and sourcing transformation leader, gave the fullest answer to why reduction remains the default. “Avoidance can be squishy, getting alignment on finance on the calculations, scenarios, etc. to recognize the impact is KEY. Why is savings the standard? It’s easy to track and historical, plus not a crystal ball.”

But his primary vote went the other way, and his reasoning added a dimension the rest of the debate largely missed. “As product assortment changes over time, it is CRITICAL that sourcing improve the product margin UPFRONT. All the work sourcing puts into New Product Intros is a major unlock to the future of the business. It’s where the company is placing its next bet via marketing, sales incentives. A few more percentage points can make a BIG impact for the P&L.”

Randy Piechowicz, who ran procurement finance at a global function, settled it from the CFO side. “The answer is both. When I was a global procurement CFO I had my team develop tracking, reporting, and analysis of both, along with graphics for executive level reporting.”

Where Avoidance Actually Happens

Several practitioners pushed the definition upstream. Veera Baskar K, a supply chain consultant to mid-sized manufacturers, made the point most cleanly. “The strongest form of cost avoidance starts before RFQs are issued. When Procurement is involved during product design and demand planning, decisions around specification rationalisation, MOQ optimisation, and inventory policies prevent costs from entering the system instead of negotiating them away later.”

Vicki Munson, a procurement executive, quantified the cost of late involvement. “When we are not involved, the quote is accepted as is, which oftentimes can equate to 20 to 30 percent more than when Procurement is involved from the beginning.”

Gokulakrishnan Srinivasan offered a concrete IT example. “Anticipating OEM price revisions driven by memory and storage cost increases, we forecasted demand and purchased early. The result wasn’t a bigger discount, it was avoiding future cost escalation and protecting the approved budget.”

The Vocabulary Problem

The bluntest observation came from David Račak, a procurement AI consultant, and it undercuts much of the sophistication above. “Most stakeholders doesn’t see difference between cost avoidance and savings. We need less terms and more easy metrics.”

That is worth sitting with. Procurement has built an internal vocabulary that the rest of the business does not share and has no incentive to learn. John Jodka, a supply chain director at General Dynamics NASSCO, made the same point from the receiving end. Avoidance is always worth more, “but most organizations see that as a part of the job description.”

If the business considers preventing unnecessary cost to be the baseline expectation rather than a delivered result, no amount of methodological rigour will earn credit for it.

Takeaways for Procurement Leaders

Three lessons run through the discussion. First, agree the baseline with Finance before the intervention, not after. Avoidance claimed retrospectively will always read to Finance as a budget that simply held.

Second, move avoidance upstream. Specification rationalisation, demand challenge, and early supplier engagement prevent cost from entering the system. Deflecting a price increase at renewal is the last and weakest place to do this work.

Third, simplify the language. If stakeholders cannot distinguish avoidance from savings, the problem is not their comprehension. It is procurement’s insistence on terminology the business never asked for.

Does your Finance function validate cost avoidance with the same rigour it applies to realised savings, and if not, who is going to propose that it should?

Continue the discussion on Chain.NET, the global supply chain community, at www.chain.net. Ask questions, join events, and access exclusive resources.

The case arrived without hedging. Indirect procurement is already dead, argued corporate advisor Ramesh Krishnamoorthy, and most organisations lack the courage to read the autopsy report. The team of fourteen at headquarters is not transforming. It is a legacy structure held together by politics and by leaders who would rather protect headcount than confront an uncomfortable truth. Vendor onboarding, spend analytics, contract extraction, RFx creation, risk scoring, all now automated. Generalist category managers get dismantled by vendor commercial teams that do nothing but that category, across fifty clients at once. Savings that never reach the income statement. Stakeholders who route around the function entirely, because shadow procurement is a rational response to organisational failure rather than rogue behaviour.

What survives, by that reckoning, is two or three people. One to govern the outsourced model, one to manage AI platforms, one for compliance. No VP. No layer of directors. No category lead for every spend bucket.

The argument spread quickly through the procurement community, drawing CPOs, interim directors, transformation advisors, outsourcing providers, and category specialists into an unusually candid exchange. What is striking is how little of the response defended the existing model. The fight was over the arithmetic.

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Most organisations still treat procurement as a cost centre. That framing is increasingly a strategic mistake. If procurement influences profitability, resilience, risk, sustainability, innovation, and capital allocation, why is it still measured primarily through savings? The question sits at the heart of a framework called the Procurement Value Creation Ecosystem, built on a simple premise: procurement does not create value through a single activity. It creates value when disciplines, capabilities, technology, and judgement work together. Sourcing, supplier management, risk, finance, ESG, and operations, supported by negotiation and stakeholder skills, enabled by data and AI, all connected to help the business make better decisions. Because that is where procurement’s real contribution starts. Not in the process. Not in the dashboard. In the quality of the decisions that follow.

The framework drew procurement directors, CPOs, consultants, technology founders, and a supplier voice into an extended debate. The agreement that savings alone undersell the function was near universal. What deepened the conversation were the layers contributors added: decision integrity, revenue enablement, and the honest paradox of proving strategic value before being given a strategic role.

From Transactions to Outcomes

The cleanest reframing came from Colin Ricardo, Founder and CEO of Digital Optima. “Procurement is often still measured like purchasing. Cost in, savings out. But purchasing executes transactions. Procurement orchestrates outcomes. The distinction matters because the moment you start managing risk, resilience, supplier relationships and capital allocation, you are no longer running a cost centre. You are running a decision engine for the business.”

His conclusion drew the line between tools and judgement. “Technology gives you visibility. Judgement is what you do with it.”

The framework’s author extended the point. “Technology can improve visibility, but it cannot decide which trade-offs the business should accept.” That distinction runs through the entire discussion. The trade-offs, cost versus resilience, speed versus compliance, short-term savings versus long-term value, are where procurement earns its keep. As the author put it in a later exchange, “Perhaps Procurement’s role is not to eliminate those tensions, but to help the business navigate them consciously. That is where judgement becomes more important than process.”

The Decision Integrity Layer

The most original addition came from Ricardo Manuel Machado Ferreira, creator of a decision science methodology. “Procurement value is only fully protected when the decisions behind that value can be defended later. Savings can be reported. Dashboards can be shown. Supplier performance can be measured. But the harder questions are: why this demand existed, why this supplier path was chosen, which trade-off was accepted, what alternative was rejected, who owned the risk, what evidence supported the decision.”

His conclusion introduced a concept most procurement frameworks miss entirely. “The most valuable procurement organisations do not only help the business make better decisions. They help the business make decisions it can still defend when conditions change.”

His follow-up sharpened the principle into something every CPO should internalize. “A bad outcome is not always a bad decision. But an undocumented decision becomes very hard to defend when conditions change.”

That layer matters more each year. As supplier risk, ESG, and resilience become board-level issues subject to regulatory and audit scrutiny, the ability to show that a decision was conscious, evidenced, and defensible at the time it was made becomes a capability in its own right.

The Revenue Side Nobody Staffs

Howard Richman, a global procurement transformation leader and co-author of Procurement Confidential, pushed the framework toward the dimension procurement rarely claims. “A core discipline which needs to find its way into graphics such as these is Procurement Enabled Revenue, and how the function helps support the drive toward revenue growth. I see this as key to breaking away from the function always defining itself as a command and control ‘Savings R Us’ function.”

His examples from his own CPO tenure were concrete. “I had my team training our sales teams on how best to negotiate with customer procurement functions when trying to win new business. We also helped our New Product Development team with their licensing deals, and helped the software audit team with negotiations for underlicensed customers. All of this helped to enhance revenue growth.”

Craig Burnett, a supply chain professional, confirmed the gap. “It is under-valued, under-researched, under-focused on, especially on the direct side. I think this is one of the top 2 biggest value-levers that is used the least.”

That observation deserves attention. Procurement expertise in negotiation and commercial structuring is transferable to the revenue side of the business. The functions that lend it out change how the organisation perceives them.

Price Is What You Pay. Cost Is What You Bear.

The supplier perspective came from Mandy Tang, who runs a precision hardware manufacturer supplying NVIDIA, BYD, and Cooler Master. “From the supplier side, we see this play out every day. The lowest quote often isn’t the lowest total cost. Rework, delayed deliveries, extra communication, and quality risks all add up after the PO is signed. Price is what you pay. Cost is what you actually bear.”

The author’s reply distilled the measurement implication. “Price is a transaction. Total cost is the consequence of dozens of decisions made before and after the PO is issued. That is precisely why I believe procurement should be measured by business outcomes rather than negotiated prices.”

Fidel Ferreira, a supply chain and procurement professional, connected the lesson to recent history. “One thing many organizations learned during recent global disruptions is that the lowest-cost decision is not always the lowest-risk or most sustainable decision. That shifted procurement from being viewed as a transactional function toward becoming a strategic business enabler.”

The Knowledge Connector

A recurring theme reframed procurement’s core identity. Sanchita Sur, a GenAI founder incubated by SAP, named it. “Procurement creates the most value when it translates between finance, legal, operations, technology, and the supplier ecosystem, not by owning every answer, but by helping the business make better decisions.”

The author embraced the shift. “The more I reflect on procurement, the less I see it as a function that owns expertise and the more I see it as a function that connects expertise.”

Manivardhan Reddy B, a strategic sourcing lead at Huntsman Corporation, identified the missing piece in most organisations. “Perhaps the challenge for many organisations is not capability availability, but the architecture that connects capabilities into decisions.”

Urszula Woronowicz, a procurement and contract strategy leader in energy CAPEX, grounded the whole debate in the human element. “People create value by thinking ahead, managing risk, and recognising connections that others don’t see.” The author’s reply completed the thought. “AI can generate options. Data can reveal patterns. But recognising which patterns matter, anticipating second-order consequences and making decisions under uncertainty remain deeply human capabilities.”

The Seat at the Table Paradox

Claudia Cebulok, a leadership coach with two decades of procurement leadership, named the catch-22 that traps most functions. “To truly drive value, it needs a seat at the table, so it can show how it enables better business decisions. Ironically, proving that value is exactly what earns procurement a bigger seat, but that’s hard to do without being invited in to begin with.”

The author’s resolution was pragmatic. “The more procurement contributes to better business decisions, the more trust it earns. And the more trust it earns, the greater its opportunity to influence future decisions.”

Volodymyr Babilunga, a supply chain consultant, offered the practical maturity test. “One way to assess the maturity of a procurement function is to look at the conversations it has with the business. If every discussion revolves around price, procurement will probably be perceived as a cost centre. If discussions include resilience, growth, innovation, risk and capital allocation, procurement starts being recognised as a strategic business partner.”

Takeaways for Procurement Leaders

Three lessons run through the discussion. First, measure decisions, not activities. Savings are one expression of value, but the function’s real contribution is the quality of the business decisions it enables and the trade-offs it helps the organisation navigate consciously.

Second, build decision integrity now. Document why demand existed, which alternatives were rejected, who owned the risk, and what evidence supported the choice. A bad outcome is not always a bad decision, but an undocumented one is indefensible when conditions change.

Third, claim the revenue side. Procurement’s negotiation and commercial expertise transfers to sales, licensing, and product development. The functions that lend it out stop being seen as Savings R Us and start being seen as a business accelerator.

Where does procurement create the most value in your organisation today, and is that where it gets measured?

Continue the discussion on Chain.NET, the global supply chain community, at www.chain.net. Ask questions, join events, and access exclusive resources.

For most of its history, fashion sourcing was treated as a commodity. Find a factory. Make a product. Ship it. Then COVID broke the supply chain, and the boardroom finally noticed that the part nobody wanted to own was the part that mattered most.

That shift sits at the center of a candid conversation with Anne-Laure Descours, former Chief Sourcing Officer at Puma and a 30-year veteran of the industry based in Hong Kong. She stepped down from Puma’s board at the end of 2024 and now advises brands, sits on boards, and backs recycling startups. Her view is direct. The old sourcing playbook is finished, and the brands still using it are already two years behind.

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A procurement career rarely follows a straight line. It is built from a series of choices that quietly compound over decades, each one nudging your perspective, your leadership style, and your professional identity in a direction you may not have planned. Direct or indirect spend. Specialist or generalist. Stay or move. Expert or leader. None of these decisions is binary, and most experienced practitioners will tell you the best opportunities of their careers were never part of the original plan. The value is not in picking the perfect path. It is in making each choice consciously rather than by drift.

The conversation gained traction online after a procurement veteran laid out ten major career decisions, from spend area and geography to company size and the choice between deep specialism and broad leadership. The post framed procurement as an adventure with many possible directions and closed with a simple formula for success: do what you are good at, do what you love, stay curious, and be bold. The post drew procurement leaders across pharma, fragrances, real estate, telecom, and CAPEX-heavy industrials. The agreement that careers are built from accumulated choices was universal. What deepened the discussion were the decisions contributors felt the original list had missed.

The Choice of Reputation

The most cited addition came from Luciano Corrêa Garcia, an executive procurement leader. “I would add one more decision: choosing the type of impact you want to be known for. Procurement careers are shaped not only by category, company size, geography or leadership path, but also by the value people associate with you over time.”

His framing turned reputation into a deliberate career lever. “Are you known for savings, risk management, supplier innovation, transformation, governance, stakeholder influence, or broader business value? That positioning matters. You can move across industries, countries, categories and roles, but having clarity on the impact you consistently bring makes those career decisions much more intentional.”

The author endorsed the point directly. “Reputation does matter. Over time people tend to associate you with a particular strength or area of expertise, and that can have a significant influence on your career path.”

That observation reframes the ten decisions. The category you pick and the company you join matter, but the through-line that follows you across every move is what people believe you are good at. That reputation is built on purpose or by accident, and the difference shapes which opportunities come to you.

Managing Suppliers or Managing Change

The sharpest single distinction came from Josemon M R, a procurement and supply chain leader in telecom and automotive. “One of the biggest career decisions is choosing between managing suppliers and managing change. The latter often becomes the foundation for broader leadership opportunities.”

That dividing line cuts deeper than the original post’s category-management-versus-transformation framing. Managing suppliers is the craft most procurement professionals are trained in and rewarded for early. Managing change is the capability that translates into general leadership. The professionals who consciously build the second skill set open doors the supplier specialists never reach.

The author had already gestured at this in the original list, noting that switching between category management and central excellence is entirely feasible. The comment sharpened it into a strategic choice with leadership consequences.

The Project Side Versus Corporate Side Gap

Wael Reda, a commercial director in real estate procurement, surfaced a decision the original list omitted. “One decision that deserves a place on this list is Project Side or Corporate Side. Working for contractors, consultants, developers, and corporate procurement functions teaches very different lessons.”

His reasoning connected the choice to commercial judgment. “The professionals who experience multiple perspectives often develop stronger commercial judgment because they understand how decisions impact the entire value chain, not just their own function. That broader perspective becomes invaluable as careers progress into leadership roles.”

The author conceded the omission honestly. “I did strongly consider this. As a consultant myself it was a big decision whether to stay in-house as an FTE or work outside. Both teach very different things. Having got to 10 good points, I ran out of space to fit it in.”

That distinction matters in project-heavy sectors like construction, energy, and infrastructure. The buyer who has only ever sat on the corporate side sees one slice of the value chain. The one who has worked for contractors and consultants understands how their decisions land downstream, which is exactly the judgment senior commercial roles demand.

Training Versus Hands-On Experience

Fateme Assar Kashani, who works in freight and logistics software, raised a foundational early-career decision. “Decide whether you’ll learn primarily through formal training and certifications or through hands-on experience in challenging roles. The best procurement professionals usually combine both, but knowing when to prioritize each can accelerate growth significantly.”

The author connected the choice to company size. “Typically the learning experience is quite different in larger versus small businesses who often train in more or less structured ways.”

That observation links two of the original decisions. The size-of-company choice is also a learning-style choice. Large multinationals offer structured training, certifications, and defined progression. SMEs offer accelerated hands-on responsibility with less formal scaffolding. The professional who knows which mode they need at each career stage can sequence their moves deliberately rather than taking whatever role appears.

The Move Decision That Resonates Most

Of the original ten, the decision to stay or move struck the deepest chord. Frederick Magana, a CIPS Fellow, spoke from experience. “Number 9 resonates with me a lot. After spending over a decade in one company I had to move to achieve career growth.”

That testimony validates the original advice with a caveat. The post recommended staying a minimum of three to five years per company, switching only if you are not growing. Magana’s decade in one place shows the risk on the other side. Loyalty has a ceiling. When the room to evolve runs out, staying longer stops being commitment and starts being stagnation.

The author’s own career arc, spanning more than four decades, underlined the broader truth that the rules have shifted. Times have changed, and the tenure expectations that governed earlier generations do not map cleanly onto a market where mobility is more accepted and sometimes necessary.

Procurement as Vocation or Accident

Felipe Solano, a procurement manager in fragrance manufacturing, raised an honest reflection on how people enter the field at all. “I’m not sure I know anyone, or heard of, who has had Procurement as a vocation for study-from-scratch career path and a clear direction of what area, sector or industry to get involved in.”

His own anchor was purpose rather than category. “The clear direction is to be within a Procurement function that contributes to the creation of something that people need, like or make a difference to them, which gives me a sense of pride on contributing to it.”

That observation reframes the entire decision framework. Most people arrive in procurement sideways, not by design. The decisions in the post are less a roadmap chosen in advance and more a set of forks encountered along a path that was never fully planned. The author agreed, noting his own career was never a straight line and that many of his best opportunities were never part of the original plan.

Takeaways for Procurement Professionals

Three lessons run through the discussion. First, decide what impact you want to be known for. Category, geography, and company size matter, but the reputation that follows you across every move is what people believe you deliver. Build it deliberately.

Second, choose between managing suppliers and managing change early, with eyes open. The supplier craft is rewarded early. The change capability is what translates into broad leadership. The two paths diverge more than they appear.

Third, seek varied perspectives before you specialize into leadership. Project side and corporate side, structured training and hands-on stretch, large and small companies each teach commercial judgment the others cannot. The leaders with the strongest judgment usually sampled several.

What big career decision shaped your procurement path most, and would you make the same choice again?

Continue the discussion on Chain.NET, the global supply chain community, at www.chain.net. Ask questions, join events, and access exclusive resources.

A category strategy is not strategic because it has a slide deck. It becomes strategic when it changes how decisions are made. That distinction sounds obvious until you look at how most procurement strategies actually perform under load. Clean segmentation, a supplier matrix, a clear roadmap, nice governance, good language. The artifacts look complete. Underneath, the basics are often still missing. Nobody can answer with confidence who is really buying, why they are buying it, what should actually be standardized, which exceptions are legitimate, and which trade-off the business is trying to make. Without those answers, a category strategy does not guide decisions. It decorates confusion.

The debate gained traction online when a global indirect procurement leader proposed a single test. When pressure rises, does the strategy make choices easier, clearer, and harder to distort? If not, it is still just procurement thinking, not procurement influence. Good category work is not only market-facing. It is decision-facing. The post drew procurement directors, supply chain leaders, business analysts, consultants, and even a supplier voice. The agreement on the diagnosis was strong. What deepened it were the specific tests each contributor offered for spotting a strategy that is still too abstract to be useful.

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