How do you build a procurement team that can do it all — drive savings, maintain visibility over spending, ensure compliance and lead sustainability initiatives?
Many companies think the answer lies in hiring star performers. In theory, a dream team of procurement professionals should solve everything.
The reality is more complex, and it’s hitting companies hard in 2025. The role of procurement has evolved far beyond its traditional boundaries. Today’s procurement teams aren’t just negotiating cost. They’re managing intricate supply chains, implementing sophisticated technology and steering company-wide sustainability programs.
This expanded scope has created an interesting paradox. While more companies now see procurement as crucial to their success, they’re finding it difficult to actually deliver on those expectations. In fact, 86% of procurement leaders don’t believe they have the talent they need for the future.
Why the disconnect? Think about what we’re asking these professionals to do. We want them to be negotiators, strategic partnership builders with suppliers, data analysts, sustainability experts, and strategic advisers — all while keeping up with rapidly changing market conditions and technology.
Even if you do manage to make the hire, the new employee requires time to adapt, understand the business and build a team, even as organizations navigate the murky waters of employee satisfaction and retention. The lack of a clearly defined career path in procurement further compounds these challenges. Even large corporations lack roles for procurement specialists to grow into. The necessary talent might be less interested in a position where their function is sidelined or treated as an afterthought.
Say that an organization has managed to hire and retain a handful of procurement professionals. When it comes to indirect procurement, they’ll lack the comprehensive expertise needed to cover thousands of spend categories. They may be expert in one specific category (such as marketing), but that doesn’t mean they have the skills, market data, supplier relations and industry insights or capacity to be excellent negotiators for a completely different task like facilities maintenance.
While hiring may marginally increase procurement maturity, these persistent issues are far larger than a single hire or small team can solve. Many structural challenges extend beyond individual capabilities:
- You may never find the perfect combination of abilities.
- It’s prohibitively expensive to set up a team of the right size to manage the full scope of indirect categories.
- The limited resources you can hire don’t have the bandwidth to ensure best-in-market rates.
- The infrequent nature of certain procurement requirements such as software contracts prevents your team from developing and maintaining category expertise and market leverage.
- Your hard-won team of procurement experts might start to feel pulled apart by expectations to manage complexity across all spend categories, affecting job satisfaction.
So what’s the best alternative to optimize indirect procurement? Smart companies have figured out they don’t need to build everything from scratch. Instead, they’re partnering with specialists who live and breathe procurement across industries and categories. These partnerships can provide:
- Specialized expertise. Access to professionals who focus exclusively on specific indirect categories and bring deep vertical experience — from former agency executives handling marketing spend to facilities management veterans overseeing maintenance contracts.
- Market intelligence. Partners that handle thousands of sourcing events annually across multiple clients maintain current pricing benchmarks and market insights that individual organizations can’t match.
- Market penetration. Access to data collected through continuous and repeatable market exercises throughout the year.
- Scalable resources. The ability to tap into category expertise as needed, without maintaining permanent overhead for periodic procurement needs.
- Technology and process. Access to purpose-built tools and established workflows that would be costly to develop and maintain internally.
Organizations considering this approach should evaluate potential partners based on depth and breadth of category expertise, quality and currency of market intelligence, a track record of driving measurable and sustainable results, cultural fit and alignment with organizational goals, and technology capabilities from an integration approach.
While internal procurement leadership remains crucial, attempts to maintain comprehensive category expertise in-house often yields suboptimal results. Companies that complement their internal capabilities with specialized procurement partnerships typically achieve superior outcomes — from faster execution to sustainable cost savings — while maintaining lean, efficient operations.
The “perfect” procurement hire may seem appealing, but it’s just one piece of a larger puzzle. The key lies in combining internal expertise with specialized partnerships that provide the tools, intelligence and category expertise needed for truly effective indirect spend management.
Steven Schmitchel is managing partner, client solutions with LogicSource.