I talk to a number of procurement directors, and there is one story I still hear far too often.
A director tells me the procurement team is running well. No incidents, no escalations, no surprises. And then his boss asks whether the team could be a little leaner.
Some examples from practice
Ask any buyer about their best week of the past year. You might get a story about a successful negotiation. You might also get a story about something that did not happen.
The supplier that went under, when an alternative was already lined up. The liability clause on page fourteen that came out before anyone signed. The automatic renewal that was stopped in time. The production stoppage that never came, because someone asked the right question three months earlier.
That is the job. And it produces precisely zero visible results.
A problem prevented is not a story
An organisation learns from what goes wrong. There is an evaluation, a report, an improvement plan. Everyone remembers it.
Nobody learns anything from what doesn’t go wrong, because there is nothing to evaluate. There is no moment when someone says: good thing we prevented that. Everything simply worked, and by tomorrow it’s forgotten.
So how do you show what procurement adds?
Strictly speaking, the reasoning is perfectly logical: if nothing ever goes wrong, you don’t need to put any extra money into it. Every department is judged on what is visible. So the question is: how do you make visible what procurement adds?
Savings don’t always work
The most common answer to this problem is: report savings. And that is understandable, because savings are mainly what people expect from procurement.
So why does it only work up to a point?
First, the finance department usually recognises only part of them: cost avoidance (a price increase you managed to block) often doesn’t count, because it doesn’t show up in the profit and loss account.
Second, and this carries more weight: savings say nothing about the extra costs that have to be incurred elsewhere in the organisation to make up for the downsides of the saving, nor about the risks that come with the deal and only surface later.
The business case nobody can make
This is where it all comes together. If the value of procurement is invisible, so is the case for an extra buyer.
A manager who asks to expand the team has to explain what that extra person will deliver. For a salesperson, that is easy. For a buyer, the honest answer is: this person will probably prevent problems you would otherwise never have seen.
But that answer won’t get you a budget.
What happens when the team is stretched too thin
The assumption behind a thinly staffed procurement department is that everything will just take a bit longer. But what actually happens is that quality drops long before lead times go up. Not because people try any less hard, but because the first things to go are exactly the things nobody checks.
Like the market research up front. Or reading through the supplier’s general terms and conditions, or properly comparing quotes with different product specifications, or the conversation with the internal client about what they really need.
Quality slips before speed does
That is why understaffing in procurement is noticed so late. From the outside, everything keeps running. Contracts get signed, deliveries come in, nobody complains.
The bill arrives eighteen months later: a contract that renewed automatically with a price indexation nobody checked, a supplier that turned out to be the only one able to make this part, a framework agreement that half the organisation buys around because it doesn’t fit.
By then, the link with the staffing level of two years earlier can no longer be made. And so nobody makes it.
And then the person who knew everything leaves
There is another version of this problem, and it is a sharper one. In most procurement teams there is one person who knows which clauses matter, which supplier to call when things go wrong and which question to ask before you sign.
Almost none of that is written down. It is the reason the team runs well, and it is exactly the reason it is vulnerable.
We wrote earlier about the ageing of this profession and about the hidden costs of a shortage of procurement talent. This is where those two subjects meet: when that person leaves, the visible quality doesn’t leave with them straight away. It slowly slips, and by then nobody knows why any more.
The vacancy nobody understands
When it does go wrong, the vacancy appears. You are looking for someone who can negotiate with a supplier that won’t budge, who can manage a relationship when it turns sour, who can translate a strategy into concrete choices, and who sees what no dashboard shows. That is a demanding profile.
The catch: the salary structure and the job description are based on the old view of the profession — requesting quotes and placing orders. The routine work is moving to systems and to AI, but the job grading has usually not kept pace.
Why this has now become a recruitment problem
I see the consequences of this every week. Vacancies that stay open for months, not because the candidates aren’t there, but because the role on paper promises something different from what is asked of people in practice.
Good buyers spot that difference within ten minutes of a first interview. They ask who sits at the table for investment decisions, how early procurement gets involved, and so on. The answers to questions like these decide whether they take it any further.
In other words: the invisibility problem is no longer just a recognition problem. It is a reason you can no longer bring in the people you need.
Make it visible before you need it
The solution is not for procurement to shout louder. The solution is for procurement to do the same as every other department: make its added value visible. That means naming the risk at the moment you cover it, not only once it materialises. And it means recording what did not happen, because that is the only way an absent problem can still become a story later on.
Three things you can do now
- Keep a log of problems prevented. One line each time: which risk, which measure, what it would have cost if it had happened. After six months you will have the evidence you are missing now.
- Ask the internal customer what their biggest risks are. Supplier dependency, continuity and contract risk are often on the list, but without anyone making the link with procurement. Making that link takes one conversation.
- Report figures other than savings too. For example: what share of spend is under contract. That number says something about control rather than about price.
Conclusion
Procurement adds a lot of value and will have to show it. As long as that value only becomes visible at the moment it is missing, the conversation about staffing remains one that procurement loses — and the organisation only pays the bill when it is too late to do anything about it.
So don’t wait until things go wrong to show what is going right. If you start recording now, in six months you will have the story that is still missing today.
