The Procurement Revolution: Why Sacred Cows Must Die

What happens when you strip away savings targets, approval chains, and everything procurement holds sacred?

Procurement departments everywhere follow the same playbook. Chase savings. Build approval chains. Run RFPs for every purchase. Create vendor scorecards. Write procurement policies. Measure everything.

Then they wonder why the business sees them as the cost police instead of strategic partners.

A recent post on social media threw a grenade into this comfortable consensus. Miroslav Pitlanic, founder of SPL Partners, outlined what he would do if he started a procurement function tomorrow. His list was radical.

No savings targets. Not one. No category managers, only business partners. No RFPs under 500k, just phone calls and handshakes. No approval chains, trust or fire people instead. No vendor scorecards, only relationship reviews. No procurement policy, just business principles.

His success metric was simple. Ask the business one question: “If procurement disappeared tomorrow, would you rebuild it?”

Most CPOs cannot answer yes. That is not a procurement problem. That is an existence problem.