The Indirect Procurement Autopsy: What Actually Died, and What Didn’t

A blunt obituary for the function triggered an industry argument. Almost nobody defended the status quo. Plenty disputed the body count.

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.