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?
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Love this article! Indeed Cost Avoidance is often taken for granted since they adhere to budgets. Engaging with Finance to comprehend will be the 1st thing to do: whether it's establishing baseline before intervention or early supplier engagement.