Leverage Outsourcing in Procurement: How to Maximise Efficiency with Trace Consultants

There's a conversation happening quietly inside most Australian procurement functions, and it goes something like this: the easy savings are gone.

The strategic sourcing waves that delivered 8-12% cost reductions five years ago now deliver 2-3%. The supplier consolidation that once created leverage has been done — and in some cases overdone, creating concentration risk. The competitive tenders that used to generate genuine competitive tension now feel performative, because there are only two credible suppliers left in the category. The annual negotiation cycle yields marginal gains that barely keep pace with inflation. And the procurement team — which once earned its seat at the table by delivering hard dollar savings — is now under pressure to justify its existence using increasingly creative definitions of "value."

This isn't an Australian problem alone, but it's acute here. The Hackett Group's 2026 Procurement Key Issues research shows procurement leaders facing an 8% increase in workload amid declining headcount and operating budgets. Deloitte's 2025 Global CPO Survey, covering more than 250 CPOs across 40 countries, found that 57% identify siloed working structures as the biggest barrier to delivering value. Competing priorities dilute focus for 46%, and 34% cite the talent gap. The traditional procurement model — run sourcing events, negotiate savings, report the number — is producing diminishing returns at the exact moment the organisation is asking procurement to do more.

This article is about where the next wave of procurement savings and value actually comes from, and why the organisations that find it will look fundamentally different from the ones still running the old playbook.

Why the traditional playbook has run its course

The procurement savings model that most Australian organisations still operate was built for a specific era. It was designed when globalisation was expanding the supply base, when switching suppliers was relatively easy, when commodity deflation was the baseline, and when procurement's primary job was to reduce the unit price of things the organisation was already buying.

That era is over.

Supply markets have consolidated. In many categories — particularly in Australia's relatively concentrated market — there are fewer credible suppliers than there were a decade ago. This means competitive tension is harder to create, switching costs are higher, and the "threat of substitution" that underpins traditional negotiation leverage is weaker. Running a tender with two suppliers who both know they're the only realistic options is theatre, not strategy.

Inflation has structurally changed the savings equation. After years of deflation-era thinking where procurement could reliably deliver year-on-year price reductions, many categories have experienced sustained cost increases driven by energy, labour, raw materials, and logistics. In this environment, cost avoidance — preventing prices from rising as much as they otherwise would — is genuinely valuable work, but it's hard to quantify and even harder to get credit for. Finance teams accustomed to seeing hard dollar savings struggle to recognise cost avoidance as equivalent value.

And globalisation is fragmenting rather than expanding. Tariff uncertainty, geopolitical risk, and the shift toward regionalisation mean that the cheapest source of supply is no longer always the smartest. Over 90% of manufacturers globally are now prioritising supply chain regionalisation, according to the World Economic Forum and Kearney. Nearly two-thirds are adopting "power of two" sourcing strategies where most direct spend is covered by two separate regions. These are strategically sound moves, but they often increase unit costs in the short term — precisely the opposite of what the traditional procurement savings model is designed to deliver.

The expectations placed on procurement have also expanded dramatically without a corresponding expansion in resources. The Hackett Group's 2024 CPO Agenda found that cost reduction had returned to the number one priority for procurement leaders, driven by economic uncertainty and executive pressure to reclaim margins eroded by inflation. But in the same breath, procurement is being asked to manage third-party risk, deliver on sustainability targets, support digital transformation, and serve as a strategic advisor to the business. Trying to deliver all of these with a team and operating model designed primarily for sourcing events creates the impossible equation that most procurement leaders are living with today.

The result is a procurement function that's working harder than ever but delivering less of what the organisation has historically measured. This isn't a failure of effort or capability — it's a structural shift that requires a fundamentally different approach to where procurement creates value.

The eight sources of next-wave procurement value

1. Spend visibility and leakage recovery

Before looking for new savings, most organisations should start by capturing the value they're already supposed to have.

The reality in most Australian organisations is that a significant portion of negotiated savings never reaches the bottom line. This happens through several mechanisms. Maverick spending — purchases made outside established procurement processes — costs organisations between 10-20% of their negotiated savings according to Ivalua's analysis. The Hackett Group's research puts the figure at 5-16% of targeted savings lost to maverick buying. The American Productivity and Quality Center found that maverick buying accounted for 1.8% of annual purchase value in organisations studied — which for a business with $1 billion in purchases means approximately $18 million in uncontrolled spend annually.

Contract leakage is equally significant. Prices paid don't match contracted rates — one analysis found systematic pricing leakage where actual payments exceeded contracted rates by 12%. Payment terms negotiated in contracts aren't reflected in actual payment practices. Volume commitments that unlock tiered pricing aren't tracked, so the organisation pays a higher rate than it's entitled to.

Tail spend — the long tail of low-value purchases that typically accounts for 80% of transactions but only 20% of spend — is where much of this leakage concentrates. These transactions involve hundreds of suppliers, often with no negotiated pricing, no consolidated demand, and no systematic management.

The first wave of next-generation procurement value comes from getting serious about spend visibility: consolidating procurement data across business units, identifying where actual spend diverges from contracted terms, quantifying the gap, and implementing the process and technology controls to close it. This isn't glamorous work, but in our experience at Trace, it routinely unlocks 3-7% of addressable spend — often more than the next sourcing event would deliver.

2. Demand management — buying less, not buying cheaper

The most powerful savings lever in procurement isn't negotiating a better price — it's reducing the volume of what gets purchased in the first place. Yet most procurement functions spend virtually all their time on supply-side levers (who to buy from, at what price, on what terms) and almost none on demand-side levers (whether to buy at all, how much to buy, whether the specification is right).

Demand management operates across several dimensions. Specification rationalisation involves reviewing whether the organisation is over-specifying its requirements — buying higher grades, tighter tolerances, or premium features that don't add value to the end customer. This is particularly prevalent in professional services, facilities management, and IT categories, where scope creep is endemic and requirements documents grow with each procurement cycle.

Volume challenge involves questioning whether the quantity being purchased is right. Are we ordering based on actual consumption data, or based on a budget allocation that hasn't been revisited? Are we carrying excess inventory because the min-max settings haven't been updated? Are we subscribing to software licenses we don't use? Gartner's research found that nearly 40% of SaaS spending goes unmonitored — a significant pool of value that procurement hasn't traditionally touched.

Substitution involves identifying whether a different product or service could meet the business need at lower cost without meaningful compromise. This requires procurement to understand the business need, not just the purchase requisition — which in turn requires the kind of stakeholder relationship that transactional procurement models don't build.

In our experience working with clients across FMCG, retail, resources, and government, demand management consistently delivers larger savings than the next round of supplier negotiations — but it requires procurement to be involved earlier in the buying cycle, to have credibility with business stakeholders, and to understand the operational context well enough to challenge requirements constructively.

3. Category strategy that goes beyond sourcing events

Traditional procurement treats categories as portfolios to be tendered on a cycle. Every 2-3 years, the contract comes up, procurement runs a go-to-market process, negotiates new terms, and reports the savings. Between cycles, the category is largely unmanaged.

Mature category management looks fundamentally different. It involves continuous market intelligence — understanding supply market dynamics, cost drivers, and supplier economics in enough depth to identify value creation opportunities outside the tender cycle. It involves supplier relationship management that goes beyond performance scorecards to genuine collaboration on cost reduction, innovation, and process improvement. It involves total cost of ownership analysis that considers not just the purchase price but the full lifecycle cost — including quality costs, logistics costs, inventory carrying costs, administrative costs, and disposal costs.

Deloitte's 2025 Global CPO Survey found a stark performance divide. Organisations they classify as "Digital Masters" — characterised by higher investment in technology and talent — met or exceeded their savings plans 96% of the time, compared to 80% for followers. These leading organisations aren't just negotiating harder. They're investing in the analytical capability and supplier relationships that unlock value sources that purely transactional procurement can't reach.

The Hackett Group's Digital World Class research reinforces this: top-performing procurement organisations deliver 2.6 times greater ROI than peers, while operating with 31% fewer full-time employees and at 19% lower cost as a percentage of spend. They achieve this not by doing more sourcing events but by investing in better analytics, deeper category expertise, and stronger supplier collaboration — and by spending 1.8 times more on procurement technology to enable it.

4. Supplier collaboration and value engineering

Once you've exhausted the savings available from competitive tension, the next wave comes from working with suppliers rather than against them. This sounds counterintuitive to procurement functions raised on adversarial negotiation, but the logic is straightforward: your suppliers understand their own cost structures better than you do, and in a mature supply relationship, there are often opportunities to reduce costs jointly that neither party can capture alone.

Value engineering involves working with suppliers to redesign products, processes, or service delivery models to reduce cost without reducing value. This might mean changing a packaging format to reduce material cost and freight cost simultaneously. It might mean adjusting delivery schedules to optimise the supplier's production runs, reducing their manufacturing costs in exchange for a share of the savings. It might mean co-investing in automation that reduces the supplier's labour cost on your account.

Joint process improvement involves eliminating waste in the transaction and relationship itself — simplifying ordering processes, reducing unnecessary quality inspections, consolidating deliveries, standardising specifications, or integrating planning processes to reduce buffer inventory on both sides of the relationship.

Innovation capture involves positioning procurement as a channel through which supplier innovations reach the organisation — new materials, new processes, new technologies that can improve performance or reduce cost. This only works if the supplier sees the relationship as worth investing in, which in turn only works if procurement has moved beyond treating every interaction as a price negotiation.

None of this is possible with a purely transactional procurement model. It requires procurement professionals with deep category knowledge, relationship management skills, and the commercial judgement to structure collaborative arrangements that create value for both parties. It also requires a procurement operating model that gives category managers the time and mandate to do this work — which means automating or eliminating the low-value transactional activities that currently consume most of their time.

5. Working capital and commercial terms

Procurement's impact on the balance sheet is often larger than its impact on the P&L, but most procurement functions don't measure it, don't manage it, and don't get credit for it.

Payment terms directly affect working capital. Extending payment terms from 30 to 60 days on $100 million of annual spend frees up approximately $8 million in working capital — real cash that the organisation can deploy elsewhere. Procurement is uniquely positioned to negotiate these terms because it controls the commercial relationship.

Inventory optimisation is equally significant. Procurement decisions about order quantities, delivery frequencies, and safety stock levels directly determine how much working capital is tied up in inventory. The Hackett Group's 2025 U.S. Working Capital Survey identified $1.7 trillion in trapped liquidity across the companies studied; the European equivalent found €1.4 trillion. Much of this is locked in inventory and payables that procurement can directly influence.

Supply chain financing and dynamic discounting programmes create additional value by allowing buyers to offer early payment to suppliers (at a discount) when the buyer has excess cash, or to extend payment terms when they don't. These programmes generate returns that typically exceed the organisation's cost of capital, creating genuine value rather than just transferring it between buyer and supplier.

For procurement functions that have traditionally been measured only on cost savings, expanding the value framework to include working capital improvements often reveals a pool of value that's larger than the remaining savings opportunity on the P&L.

6. Risk reduction as value creation

Every supply disruption has a cost. When a supplier fails and the organisation has to source material at spot market prices, the premium paid is a cost that procurement could have prevented. When a quality failure causes a product recall, the cost dwarfs the savings that were achieved by choosing the cheapest supplier. When a single-source supplier raises prices by 15% because they know you have no alternative, the cost of that dependency is a procurement failure, even if the original sourcing decision looked sound.

Deloitte's CPO Survey found that the most effective risk mitigation strategies among leading CPOs are maintaining active alternative sources (74%), enabling greater visibility into the supply chain (64%), and enhancing supplier information sharing and collaboration (61%). A CDP study of over 8,000 businesses estimated that climate-related supply disruptions alone will cost $120 billion by 2026, with manufacturing and food industries most affected.

Procurement organisations that quantify the cost of risk — and that treat risk reduction as a measurable value contribution — can unlock investment in resilience measures that would otherwise be seen as pure cost. This includes supplier diversification, qualification of alternative sources, inventory buffering for critical materials, and supply chain mapping to identify and mitigate hidden dependencies.

In Australia's concentrated supply markets, this is particularly important. Many categories have limited domestic supplier options, making the cost of supplier failure disproportionately high. Procurement functions that can quantify this risk and present it alongside traditional savings metrics are more likely to secure the investment needed to build genuine supply resilience — and to get credit for the value that resilience creates.

7. Sustainability as a procurement value driver

Sustainability has moved from a reporting obligation to a genuine source of procurement value — though most organisations haven't yet made that connection operationally.

The regulatory trajectory is clear. In Australia, the Australian Sustainability Reporting Standards (ASRS) are progressively requiring large entities to report on climate-related financial risks, including Scope 3 emissions — which for most organisations are dominated by the supply chain. European regulations including the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) are creating extraterritorial compliance obligations for Australian companies with European operations or customers. And the Australian Government's Environmentally Sustainable Procurement Policy is requiring businesses bidding for government work to demonstrate specific sustainability outcomes.

But the value opportunity extends beyond compliance. Sustainable procurement practices often reduce cost in parallel: reducing packaging reduces both waste disposal costs and freight costs; energy-efficient specifications reduce operating costs for the buyer; circular economy approaches to end-of-life management can convert disposal costs into recovered value. Supplier sustainability assessments frequently reveal operational risks — poor environmental management often correlates with poor quality management, financial instability, or regulatory non-compliance.

Procurement functions that integrate sustainability criteria into category strategies, supplier assessments, and total cost of ownership analysis can deliver measurable value across multiple dimensions simultaneously — cost, risk, compliance, and brand. Those that treat sustainability as a separate workstream divorced from commercial procurement will find it adds cost and complexity without delivering proportional value.

8. Procurement operating model redesign

This is the meta-lever — the one that enables all the others. Most Australian procurement functions are structured to run sourcing events and manage contracts. Their operating models, capabilities, technology, and performance metrics all reflect this transactional orientation. The next wave of value requires a fundamentally different operating model.

The Hackett Group's 2026 research found that 76% of organisations now report AI-driven improvements of 25% or more in key performance metrics as adoption scales. Deloitte found that Digital Master procurement organisations — those allocating up to 24% of their budgets to technology — achieved a 3.2 times return on their generative AI investments. But the technology alone isn't what drives the performance. It's the combination of technology and the operating model redesign that allows people to work differently.

An operating model redesign for next-wave procurement value typically involves several elements. First, automating transactional procurement — purchase order processing, invoice matching, catalogue management, routine supplier queries — to free up human capacity for strategic work. Second, investing in analytics capability — spend analytics, market intelligence, cost modelling, risk analytics — to provide the insights that drive better decisions. Third, restructuring the organisation around categories rather than around processes — so that category managers have end-to-end accountability for value creation, not just for running tenders. Fourth, redesigning the performance framework to measure total value (savings, cost avoidance, working capital, risk reduction, sustainability, innovation, stakeholder satisfaction) rather than just cost savings. Fifth, building the capability pipeline — through recruitment, development, and strategic use of external expertise — to close the skills gap that 34% of CPOs identify as a barrier to value delivery.

What this means for Australian organisations

Australian procurement functions face a particular version of this challenge shaped by the characteristics of this market.

The domestic supply market is smaller and more concentrated than in the US or Europe, which limits competitive tension in many categories. Industries like construction materials, facilities services, packaging, and professional services have seen significant supplier consolidation over the past decade. In some categories, there are effectively two or three viable suppliers nationally — which makes adversarial negotiation not just unproductive but counterproductive, since the suppliers know their position as well as procurement does.

The tyranny of distance adds logistics cost and complexity that procurement must factor into total cost decisions. A supplier in Melbourne serving sites in Perth faces fundamentally different cost economics than a supplier serving sites in Sydney. Network design and distribution configuration directly affect the supply base available to procurement — a connection that's often invisible when procurement and supply chain planning operate in silos.

Tariff and trade policy shifts — including the flow-on effects of US tariff volatility on global supply chains — are reshaping sourcing economics in real time. Australian organisations that source components, materials, or finished goods from China, Southeast Asia, or the US are navigating a tariff environment that changes faster than contract terms can adapt. This requires procurement to develop scenario planning capability and supplier optionality that the traditional annual sourcing cycle doesn't provide.

And the talent shortage in procurement and supply chain is structural, not cyclical. Hays reports that category managers, sourcing specialists, and procurement professionals with technology and sustainability expertise are among the hardest roles to fill in Australia. Strategic sourcing managers in Perth and Melbourne can command salaries up to $210,000, reflecting the scarcity of qualified professionals. This means procurement functions can't simply hire their way to better performance — they need operating models and technology that amplify the capability of the people they have.

Against this backdrop, procurement functions that continue to measure themselves primarily on negotiated savings will find themselves on a treadmill — working harder to deliver diminishing results while the organisation's expectations grow. The procurement functions that thrive will be the ones that redefine what value means, invest in the capabilities to deliver it, and build the credibility with the business to be measured on it.

This requires honest conversations with CFOs and CEOs about what procurement can and should deliver. It requires investment in technology, analytics, and people — not as cost to be minimised but as capability to be built. And it requires a procurement leadership that sees the function's role not as reducing the cost of what the organisation buys, but as optimising the total value of how the organisation engages with its supply markets.

Where to start

For procurement leaders reading this and recognising their own organisation, the question is where to begin. The answer depends on context, but there are several practical starting points that apply broadly.

Conduct a savings leakage audit. Before investing in new savings initiatives, quantify how much of your existing negotiated value is reaching the bottom line. Map contracted terms against actual prices paid, identify maverick spend by category, and quantify the gap. This exercise typically takes four to six weeks and almost always reveals more value than expected — value that requires process improvement and governance rather than new sourcing activity.

Redefine the value framework with finance. Have the conversation with your CFO about what procurement value means beyond cost savings. Build a value framework that includes cost avoidance, working capital improvement, risk reduction, and sustainability outcomes. Agree on how each will be measured and reported. This isn't a cosmetic exercise — it fundamentally changes what procurement focuses on and how it allocates its limited resources.

Identify the categories where traditional levers are exhausted. Not every category needs a new approach. Some categories still have competitive supply bases and genuine switching optionality — traditional sourcing approaches work fine there. Focus the new playbook on the categories where traditional approaches have plateaued: sole or limited source categories, long-standing supplier relationships with no recent competitive test, categories where specification drift has increased costs without corresponding value, and categories where risk concentration is high.

Invest in analytics before investing in technology. The most common mistake is buying a procurement technology platform before understanding what questions you need the data to answer. Start with spend analytics — getting clean, classified spend data that tells you where your money goes, who you're buying from, and how that compares to what you contracted. This foundation supports every other initiative in the value framework.

Build category management capability. The shift from transactional sourcing to strategic category management is the single most impactful organisational change most procurement functions can make. It requires dedicated category managers with market knowledge, analytical skills, and stakeholder credibility — not generalist buyers who run tenders across unrelated categories. If you can't hire these people (and in today's market, you may not be able to), consider supplementing with external category expertise while you build internal capability.

How Trace can help

At Trace, we work with Australian organisations to diagnose where procurement value is being lost, redesign procurement operating models for the next wave of value creation, build category strategies that go beyond sourcing events, and implement the governance, processes, and performance frameworks that make it sustainable.

Our procurement advisory spans strategic sourcing and go-to-market, category management, spend analytics, procurement operating model design, supplier relationship management, and procurement technology strategy. We work across government, health, FMCG and manufacturing, retail, and resources sectors — each with distinct procurement challenges and value opportunities.

We're independent — we don't sell procurement software, and we don't have commercial relationships with technology vendors. Our recommendations are driven by what will create the most value for your organisation, not by what generates licence revenue for a platform provider.

If your procurement function is working harder to deliver less, the answer isn't more effort on the same playbook. It's a different playbook entirely. Get in touch to discuss how we can help you find the next wave.

Trace Consultants is an Australian supply chain and procurement consulting firm. We help organisations move procurement from cost centre to value driver — with deep category expertise, rigorous analytics, and practical operating model design grounded in the realities of Australian supply markets. Visit our insights page for more on the challenges shaping Australian procurement and supply chain.

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There's a pattern that plays out in procurement teams across Australia with depressing regularity. A contract is approaching expiry. Someone raises the flag — usually later than ideal. A decision is made to "go to market." Templates are pulled from the last process. Requirements are gathered in a rush, often by copying the existing scope of work with a few tweaks. The RFx goes out. Responses come back. An evaluation panel scores them against criteria that may or may not reflect what the organisation actually needs. A preferred supplier is selected. Terms are negotiated — usually under time pressure because the existing contract is about to lapse. A new agreement is signed.

Everyone breathes a sigh of relief. The procurement team moves on to the next fire.

And somewhere in that process — usually in several places — the organisation left a significant amount of commercial value on the table. Not because anyone did anything wrong, exactly, but because the process was designed around compliance rather than value creation.

This is the fundamental challenge with procurement go-to-market processes in most Australian organisations, whether government or private sector. The mechanics of tendering — the RFx documents, the evaluation matrices, the probity frameworks — are well understood and generally well executed. What's far less consistent is the strategic thinking that should sit around those mechanics: the choices about when to go to market, how to structure the approach, what to test with suppliers before formalising requirements, how to design evaluation criteria that surface genuine capability differences, how to negotiate beyond price, and how to transition from procurement process to contract performance without losing the commitments that were made during the tender.

Each of those choices — made well or poorly — has a material impact on the commercial outcome. And collectively, they're where the difference sits between a GTM process that delivers 5% savings on the incumbent's rates and one that delivers 15-25% total cost improvement through a combination of scope redesign, service model innovation, better commercial structures and genuine competitive tension.

Why go-to-market processes underperform

Before getting into what good looks like, it's worth understanding why so many GTM processes deliver underwhelming results. In our experience working across procurement programs in both government and commercial organisations, the same failure patterns come up repeatedly.

Starting too late

The single biggest driver of value leakage in procurement is compressed timelines. When an organisation starts its GTM process six months before contract expiry, it's already behind. Complex service categories — facilities management, logistics, IT managed services, labour hire, professional services — need 12 to 18 months of lead time to do properly. That includes time for spend analysis, requirements definition, market sounding, document preparation, response period, evaluation, negotiation, contract execution and transition.

When timelines are compressed, the first things to get squeezed are the activities that create the most value: market research, requirements challenge, commercial baseline development, and negotiation. The process defaults to "get compliant responses and pick the best one" rather than "shape the market to deliver the outcome we actually need."

The Australian National Audit Office has repeatedly identified this as a systemic issue in Commonwealth procurement, noting that procurements need to be well planned and with sufficient time to give decision-makers a genuine choice. The same dynamic plays out in state government and the private sector.

Copying the existing scope instead of challenging it

Most go-to-market processes start by documenting what the organisation currently buys — the existing scope, volumes, service levels and specifications. This feels like a sensible starting point. The problem is that it anchors the entire process to the status quo.

If the organisation has been buying a service the same way for five years, there's a reasonable chance the scope has drifted, service levels have become misaligned with actual need, specifications include requirements that made sense when they were written but no longer do, and the commercial model reflects the last negotiation rather than what the market can actually deliver.

A well-run GTM process challenges the scope before going to market. It asks: are we buying the right things? Are the service levels calibrated to business value, or have they become an untouched artefact of the last contract? Could a different service model — different bundling, different risk allocation, different technology — deliver a better outcome? These are the questions that unlock genuine value, and they need to be answered before the RFx documents are drafted, not discovered during evaluation when it's too late to restructure.

This is fundamentally a strategy exercise, not an administrative one. It requires understanding what the organisation actually needs, what the market is capable of delivering, and where the gap between the two creates an opportunity for a different commercial conversation.

Treating evaluation as a scoring exercise

The evaluation stage of most GTM processes is built around weighted criteria and scoring matrices. Panel members read responses, assign scores against predetermined criteria, and the highest-scoring respondent is identified as the preferred supplier.

This approach has strengths — it's transparent, defensible and consistent. But it has a significant weakness: it tends to reward well-written responses rather than genuinely differentiated capability. A supplier with an excellent bid writer can score well on methodology, resourcing, innovation and risk management criteria without any of it translating into superior delivery. Meanwhile, a supplier with genuinely different capability but a less polished response may score lower.

The best GTM processes supplement scoring with structured evaluation activities that test capability more directly: reference checks that go beyond the names provided by the respondent, site visits to see operations first-hand, scenario-based sessions where shortlisted suppliers work through realistic problems, and commercial modelling that stress-tests pricing structures against volume variations, scope changes and escalation mechanisms.

These activities take more time. They also produce dramatically better information for making what is often a multi-million dollar decision.

Negotiating too narrowly

Perhaps the most common point of value leakage in procurement is the negotiation phase. In many organisations, "negotiation" effectively means pressing the preferred supplier on rates — asking them to sharpen their pricing, remove margins, or match the lowest price from the competitive field.

This is the least valuable form of negotiation. Suppliers know it's coming, and they price accordingly — building headroom into their initial offer specifically to accommodate the expected rate discussion. The result is a predictable dance where the supplier concedes 3-5% on rates, the procurement team claims a saving, and the actual commercial structure remains largely unchanged.

Genuine value in negotiation comes from a different set of levers entirely: scope definition (what's in, what's out, what's optional), risk allocation (who bears volume risk, who absorbs cost escalation, who owns transition), commercial mechanism design (fixed fee versus cost-plus versus gain-share versus outcome-based), indexation and escalation (CPI, WPI, bespoke indices, cap and collar structures), performance and remedies (KPIs that actually drive behaviour, meaningful service credits, improvement mechanisms), change control (how scope changes are priced, who initiates, what the governance looks like), and exit and transition (how the contract ends, what the obligations are, how IP and data are handled).

Each of these levers typically represents more commercial value than the rate negotiation that gets all the attention. A well-structured negotiation strategy identifies which levers matter most for the specific category and pursues them systematically.

Losing value at contract transition

The final failure pattern is the handover between procurement and contract management. In many organisations, these are different teams with different priorities and limited overlap. The procurement team manages the GTM process, negotiates the contract, gets it signed, and moves on. The contract management team inherits an agreement they weren't closely involved in shaping, with commitments they may not fully understand and performance expectations they may not have the tools or authority to enforce.

The ANAO has documented cases where Commonwealth contracts were managed by 19 different people over a 14-year period, with few having experience managing large-scale contracts or formal contract management training, and none involved in the original tender or negotiation. It's an extreme example, but the underlying dynamic — disconnection between procurement and contract management — is extremely common.

This is where the value negotiated during the GTM process either gets realised or evaporates. Without deliberate transition planning, performance baselines, and contract governance structures, the gap between what was agreed and what gets delivered can widen quickly.

What a high-performing GTM process looks like

The organisations that consistently maximise value from their go-to-market processes share a set of common practices. None of them are revolutionary — but the discipline of executing all of them, consistently, for every significant procurement, is what separates good outcomes from mediocre ones.

Phase one: strategic preparation

The GTM process should begin with a clear commercial hypothesis, not a set of tender documents. This means understanding the current state comprehensively: what are we spending, with whom, on what scope, at what service levels, under what commercial terms? It means analysing that baseline against market benchmarks and identifying where the gaps, inefficiencies and opportunities sit. And it means developing a go-to-market strategy that's tailored to the specific category — not a generic "run an RFT" decision, but a deliberate choice about the right approach for this market, this scope, this set of objectives.

For a mature, competitive market with clear specifications, a single-stage open tender may be appropriate. For a complex, evolving category where innovation matters, a multi-stage process starting with an expression of interest or request for proposal may deliver better results. For a category with limited competition or high switching costs, a structured negotiation with the incumbent — backed by genuine market intelligence — may be more effective than a full tender that attracts marginal competitors.

This strategic preparation phase should also include market sounding — structured conversations with potential suppliers (conducted within appropriate probity boundaries) to test assumptions about scope, pricing, capability and appetite. Market sounding is one of the most underutilised tools in Australian procurement. It costs relatively little time, and the intelligence it provides can fundamentally reshape the GTM strategy.

The Victorian Government's procurement guidance explicitly encourages market sounding as a means to "seek feedback from the market and encourage market interest in contesting the project." NSW Government's procurement framework positions open requests for proposal as particularly useful "when you're unsure of pricing or don't know which supplier can best satisfy your agency's procurement needs." Both recognise that preparation and market intelligence are prerequisites for value, not optional extras.

Phase two: requirements and document design

With a clear strategy and market intelligence in hand, the requirements definition and RFx document design phase can begin. The key principle here is that the documents should be designed to generate the information you need to make a good decision — not just to satisfy a compliance checklist.

This means writing requirements that describe outcomes rather than prescribing methods wherever possible. It means designing evaluation criteria that weight the factors that actually differentiate value — capability, approach, risk, innovation, total cost — rather than defaulting to a standard 60/40 or 70/30 split between technical and commercial scores. It means structuring the commercial response format so that pricing is comparable across respondents, transparent in its assumptions, and amenable to modelling under different scenarios.

Poorly designed documents are one of the most common causes of value leakage — not because they fail to attract responses, but because they attract responses that are difficult to compare, hard to evaluate meaningfully, and don't surface the information needed for effective negotiation.

For government organisations in particular, where probity constraints limit the ability to iterate with suppliers during evaluation, the quality of the documents issued at the start of the process has an outsized impact on the quality of the outcome.

Phase three: market engagement and response management

How an organisation engages with the market during the GTM process matters as much as what's in the documents. Pre-tender briefings, Q&A processes, site visits and industry engagement events all serve to improve the quality of responses by ensuring suppliers understand the context, the priorities and the genuine areas of flexibility.

Organisations that treat the response period as a black box — issue documents, answer formal questions, wait for submissions — typically receive less innovative and less commercially compelling responses than those that invest in genuine engagement. Suppliers respond to signals. When they see an organisation that's invested in understanding the market, has clear priorities, and is open to creative commercial structures, they invest more effort in their response.

Managing the response period effectively also means being responsive to questions, providing consistent information to all participants, and maintaining competitive tension. The goal is to create an environment where every shortlisted supplier believes they can win — because when suppliers believe the outcome is predetermined, the quality of their offer reflects it.

Phase four: evaluation and shortlisting

Evaluation should be multi-dimensional, combining scored assessment of written responses with practical verification activities for shortlisted suppliers. The evaluation plan should be designed before the process starts — not retrofitted once responses are in — and should align directly with the strategic objectives identified during preparation.

For complex categories, interactive evaluation sessions with shortlisted suppliers can be enormously valuable. These sessions — sometimes called "competitive dialogue" or "interactive tender process" — allow the evaluation panel to probe claims made in written responses, test capability through realistic scenarios, and identify genuine differentiators that don't emerge from scored documents.

The Victorian Government's procurement framework explicitly supports interactive tender processes and structured negotiations as tools for resolving issues "under competitive tension." These mechanisms are particularly valuable for service categories where the way a supplier approaches problems, manages exceptions and adapts to changing requirements is as important as their baseline capability.

Phase five: negotiation

Negotiation should be treated as a distinct phase with its own strategy, preparation and skilled execution — not as an afterthought bolted onto the end of evaluation.

A strong negotiation strategy identifies the key commercial levers for the specific category, establishes a clear BATNA (best alternative to negotiated agreement), sets target and walkaway positions for each lever, and sequences the negotiation to build toward agreement on the most valuable terms.

In our experience, the levers that create the most value are rarely the ones that get the most attention. Rate reductions are visible and easy to measure, but scope optimisation, risk reallocation, indexation design, and performance mechanism calibration typically deliver 2-3 times more commercial value over the life of a contract. The challenge is that these levers require deeper category knowledge and more sophisticated commercial modelling to pursue effectively.

This is one of the areas where external procurement expertise makes the most tangible difference — bringing category benchmarks, negotiation experience across comparable deals, and the commercial modelling capability to quantify the value of different structural options.

Phase six: contract transition and governance

The final phase — and the one most often neglected — is the transition from signed contract to operational performance. This requires a deliberate handover from the procurement team to the contract management or operational team, including detailed briefing on the commitments made, the rationale behind key commercial terms, the performance framework and how it's intended to work, and the escalation and governance mechanisms.

It also requires establishing the operational rhythm for contract governance: regular performance reviews, supplier relationship meetings, commercial reviews, and mechanisms for managing scope changes and continuous improvement. Without these structures, the commercial value negotiated during the GTM process erodes over the first 12-18 months as scope creeps, service levels blur, and the relationship defaults to informal arrangements that may not reflect the contract.

For organisations with complex, multi-site operations — whether in FMCG and manufacturing, resources and energy, or health and human services — this transition is particularly critical because the gap between head office contract terms and operational site-level behaviour can be substantial.

Common categories where GTM value gets lost

While these principles apply across all procurement categories, certain categories are particularly prone to value leakage during the GTM process.

Facilities management and property services. Complex scope, multiple service lines, significant site variation, and long contract terms create enormous potential for scope ambiguity and cost drift. The difference between a well-structured FM contract and a poorly scoped one can be 20-30% of total spend over the contract life.

Logistics, transport and warehousing. Categories where volume variability, geographic complexity and operational interdependencies mean that headline rates tell a small fraction of the commercial story. Understanding total cost — including indirect costs like inventory impact, service failures and administrative overhead — is essential for meaningful evaluation. Trace's warehousing and distribution and BOH logistics expertise is particularly relevant here.

IT managed services and technology. Categories characterised by rapid change, high switching costs, and commercial models that can range from input-based (people and hours) to outcome-based (service levels and availability). The scope and commercial structure choices in technology procurement often lock in more value — or destroy more — than the rate negotiation.

Labour hire and contingent workforce. Categories where margin transparency, markup structures, and the interplay between procurement terms and workforce planning and operations create significant complexity. A well-designed GTM process considers not just the rates paid but the workforce model that drives demand.

Professional and consulting services. Categories where the evaluation challenge is acute — distinguishing between suppliers who write well about capability and suppliers who actually deliver. Panel arrangements in particular can become stale, with work flowing to incumbents regardless of the competitive framework.

How Trace Consultants can help

At Trace Consultants, we help Australian organisations design and execute procurement go-to-market processes that deliver genuine commercial outcomes — not just compliant processes.

Our approach starts with the strategic preparation that most GTM processes skip: spend analysis, baseline development, market intelligence, requirements challenge and commercial hypothesis development. We do this work before a single tender document is drafted, because it's where the largest opportunities are identified and the GTM strategy is shaped.

Go-to-market strategy and design. We help organisations determine the right approach for each category — single or multi-stage, open or selective, competitive or negotiated — based on market conditions, organisational objectives and risk appetite. Our strategy and network design capability ensures the GTM approach reflects the broader supply chain and operational context.

Requirements definition and scope challenge. We work with stakeholders to define requirements that reflect actual business need rather than inherited scope, and structure them in ways that encourage innovative responses and enable meaningful comparison.

RFx document development and market engagement. We draft tender documentation that's clear, commercially intelligent and designed to generate the information needed for effective evaluation and negotiation. We support market sounding, pre-tender briefings and supplier engagement activities.

Evaluation design and support. We design evaluation frameworks that surface genuine capability differences, and support evaluation panels with commercial analysis, reference checking and scenario-based assessment activities.

Negotiation strategy and execution. We develop and execute negotiation strategies that go beyond rate reduction to address the full range of commercial levers — scope, risk, indexation, performance, change control and exit. Our procurement team brings benchmarks and deal experience across the categories where Australian organisations spend the most.

Contract transition and governance. We help organisations bridge the gap between procurement and contract management — establishing performance baselines, governance rhythms and management frameworks that protect the value negotiated during the GTM process. Our project and change management capability supports smooth transition from procurement to operational delivery.

Capability uplift. We help procurement functions build the internal capability to run effective GTM processes independently — through training, playbooks, templates and coaching that embed better practices into the organisation's standard way of working. Our organisational design expertise ensures procurement capability sits within a structure that supports sustainable performance.

Getting it right matters more than ever

Australian organisations — in both the public and private sectors — are operating in an environment where cost pressures are intensifying, supply markets are tightening in several critical categories, compliance and transparency expectations are increasing, and the consequences of getting procurement wrong are more visible than ever.

In that context, the go-to-market process is one of the highest-leverage activities any procurement function undertakes. The difference between a mediocre GTM process and an excellent one is measured in millions of dollars for large organisations — not over many years, but on each significant contract.

The organisations that invest in doing it properly — that give themselves enough time, challenge their own assumptions, engage the market intelligently, evaluate with rigour, negotiate with skill and transition with discipline — consistently outperform those that treat procurement as a transactional compliance exercise.

If your organisation is preparing to go to market on a significant contract and you want to make sure the process delivers its full commercial potential, we'd welcome the conversation.

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There's a conversation that plays out in boardrooms and executive meetings across Australia with remarkable consistency. The procurement team is under pressure. Costs are rising. Contracts are expiring. Compliance requirements are tightening. Stakeholders want more from procurement — more savings, faster turnaround, better risk management, stronger sustainability credentials — and the response is almost always the same: try harder, move faster, do more with less.

But here's the thing most organisations eventually discover, often after a painful period of churn and underperformance: the problem isn't effort. It's design.

A procurement function can only perform as well as its operating model allows. If roles are unclear, if decision rights are muddled, if the team is structured for a world that no longer exists, then no amount of individual effort or new software will close the gap. The operating model is the foundation. Without the right one, everything built on top is unstable.

This article unpacks what a procurement operating model actually is, why it matters so much in the current Australian environment, the key design decisions organisations face, and how Trace Consultants helps organisations get it right.

What Is a Procurement Operating Model?

A procurement operating model is, at its core, the answer to a deceptively simple question: how does procurement work here?

It defines how the procurement function is structured, how it interacts with the rest of the business, and how it creates and protects value. It covers the people, processes, governance arrangements, technology, and performance frameworks that together determine whether procurement is a strategic capability or a transactional bottleneck.

More specifically, a well-defined procurement operating model addresses questions like:

What sits within procurement's remit, and what doesn't? Who makes sourcing decisions, and at what thresholds? Are procurement activities centralised, decentralised, or a hybrid of both? How does procurement interface with finance, operations, legal, and frontline business units? What category management approach applies, and how are categories governed? What technology platforms support procurement execution, reporting, and compliance? How is procurement performance measured, and who is accountable for outcomes?

These aren't theoretical questions. They are the practical design choices that shape day-to-day behaviour across the organisation. And too often, they go unanswered — or worse, they're answered differently by different parts of the business.

Why It Matters Now More Than Ever

Australian organisations are operating in an environment that has fundamentally changed in the past five years. The cumulative effect of supply disruption, inflation, regulatory expansion, ESG scrutiny, and labour market shifts has pushed procurement from the back office into the spotlight.

Consider the pressures. Government agencies must comply with increasingly complex probity and transparency requirements. Healthcare organisations are managing tighter budgets while maintaining critical supply continuity. Infrastructure and energy sector players are scaling up procurement pipelines at pace to support national priorities. Retailers and FMCG businesses are navigating volatile input costs and margin compression. And across all sectors, modern slavery legislation, sustainability reporting, and climate-related financial disclosures are creating new obligations that land squarely on procurement's desk.

At the same time, procurement workloads have grown significantly while headcount has often stayed flat. Teams that were sized for a pre-COVID world are now expected to manage more categories, more compliance requirements, more complex contracting, and more demanding stakeholders — all with roughly the same resources. The result is a function that's perpetually reactive, firefighting from one tender to the next, with little capacity for the strategic work that would actually move the needle.

This imbalance between what's expected of procurement and what the operating model can support is the root cause of much of the frustration executives feel. The team isn't underperforming — it's under-resourced and under-designed for the task at hand.

In this context, an ad hoc approach to procurement simply doesn't hold. Organisations need a deliberate, well-designed operating model that can absorb complexity, scale with demand, and deliver outcomes consistently — not just when the right person happens to be in the room.

The organisations that get this right tend to share a few characteristics. Procurement has a clear mandate. Roles and accountabilities are understood. There's a rhythm to how categories are managed, how suppliers are engaged, and how performance is tracked. And the operating model is designed to fit the organisation's reality — its size, sector, maturity, and strategic priorities — rather than being copied from a textbook or a competitor.

The Key Design Decisions

Designing a procurement operating model isn't a one-size-fits-all exercise. But there are a handful of design decisions that every organisation needs to work through. Getting these right is what separates procurement functions that deliver from those that simply exist.

Centralised, Decentralised, or Hybrid?

This is often the first and most contentious question. Should procurement decisions be made centrally by a dedicated team, or should business units retain autonomy over their own buying?

The honest answer is that neither extreme works well on its own. Fully centralised models can create bottlenecks, disconnect procurement from operational reality, and frustrate business units who feel their needs aren't understood. Fully decentralised models lead to fragmented spend, inconsistent supplier management, duplicated effort, and limited visibility for leadership.

Most Australian organisations land somewhere in the middle — a centre-led model where strategic procurement activities (category strategy, major sourcing events, contract frameworks, policy, and reporting) sit centrally, while tactical execution and day-to-day supplier management are handled locally. The art is in drawing the line in the right place, and making sure the interfaces between central and local are well governed.

This is particularly relevant for organisations with multi-site operations, such as property and hospitality businesses, healthcare networks, or government agencies with regional offices or facilities.

Decision Rights and Delegations

One of the most common failure points in procurement is unclear decision rights. When people don't know who is authorised to approve a sourcing strategy, sign a contract, or vary an agreement, the result is either paralysis or unchecked risk — neither of which is acceptable.

A good operating model includes clearly documented delegations of authority that reflect the organisation's risk appetite. These delegations should cover not just dollar thresholds, but decision types: who approves a new supplier? Who can extend a contract? Who signs off on a sole-source justification? Who is accountable when a contract underperforms?

In large organisations and government contexts, these delegations also need to account for probity requirements, audit expectations, and the separation of commercial and operational roles. Getting this wrong exposes the organisation to compliance failures and reputational damage.

Category Management Structure

How an organisation segments its spend into categories — and how those categories are managed — is a core design element of the operating model. Effective category management allows procurement to take a structured, strategic approach to the market rather than treating every purchase as an isolated transaction.

The Procurement Excellence Framework that Trace Consultants uses with clients provides a practical structure for assessing and designing category management approaches. It covers how categories are defined, who owns them, how strategies are developed and refreshed, and how performance is tracked over time.

A common mistake is to build a beautiful category taxonomy but then not resource it properly, or to assign category ownership to people who don't have the time, skills, or authority to actually manage their categories. The operating model needs to connect category structure to real people with real capacity and clear accountability.

Capability and Workforce Design

The people dimension of the operating model is arguably the most important — and the most frequently undercooked. It's not enough to have the right number of people. The function needs the right mix of skills, seniority, and experience to deliver against its mandate.

For many Australian organisations, the procurement workforce has evolved organically rather than being deliberately designed. You end up with a team that's strong in transactional purchasing but weak in strategic sourcing, or capable in one category but lacking depth across the portfolio. There may be gaps in commercial acumen, contract management capability, or data literacy.

Designing the right capability model means starting with the operating model and working backwards to determine what roles are needed, what skills they require, and where the gaps are. For some organisations, this also involves thinking about where external support — such as Procurement as a Service — can supplement internal capacity, particularly for surge workloads or specialist categories.

Workforce planning in the procurement context also means thinking about career pathways, development programs, and succession planning. It's hard to attract and retain good procurement professionals if the function doesn't offer a clear trajectory.

Technology and Data

Technology is an enabler, not a solution. But the right technology choices can dramatically improve the efficiency, visibility, and governance of a procurement function.

The operating model should define what technology platforms support procurement activities — from source-to-pay platforms and contract management systems to spend analytics tools and supplier portals. It should also clarify how procurement data flows between systems, who is responsible for data quality, and how reporting supports decision-making at different levels of the organisation.

Too many procurement technology implementations fail because they're disconnected from the operating model. A new system layered onto broken processes and unclear accountabilities just automates dysfunction. The operating model should come first, with technology deployed to support the design — not the other way around.

Governance and Performance Management

A procurement operating model without governance is a set of good intentions. Governance is what ensures the model is actually followed and that procurement delivers on its mandate.

Good governance includes regular reporting on procurement performance — savings delivery, pipeline status, contract compliance, supplier performance, and risk exposure. It includes forums where procurement and business leaders align on priorities and resolve escalations. It includes clear escalation paths and consequences for non-compliance.

Importantly, governance should be proportionate. A small organisation doesn't need the same governance architecture as a federal government department. What matters is that there's a clear rhythm: procurement reports on what it's delivering, leadership provides direction and removes barriers, and there's accountability for both.

Supplier governance is another dimension that many organisations underweight. Once a contract is signed, the value needs to be actively managed through structured supplier relationship management — regular performance reviews, KPI tracking, issue escalation, and periodic market testing. Without this, the savings identified during sourcing erode over the life of the contract.

It also includes periodic review. The operating model isn't a set-and-forget exercise. As the organisation's strategy evolves, as the market shifts, and as procurement matures, the model needs to adapt. Building a review rhythm into the governance framework ensures the model stays current and fit for purpose.

Common Pitfalls in Procurement Operating Model Design

Having worked with organisations across sectors, a few patterns emerge consistently when operating models fail to land.

Designing for the ideal, not the real. It's tempting to build a sophisticated, best-practice model that assumes capabilities, systems, and behaviours that don't yet exist. The best operating models are designed for where the organisation is today, with a clear roadmap to where it wants to be. A phased approach — moving from current state to an intermediate model and then to a target state — is almost always more effective than trying to leap to the end state in one go.

Ignoring the stakeholder landscape. Procurement doesn't operate in a vacuum. If business units don't understand or support the model, they'll work around it. Effective design includes early engagement with the stakeholders who will live with the model every day, not just the executives who sponsor it. This means finance, operations, legal, and frontline managers all need to be part of the conversation — and their feedback needs to genuinely shape the design, not just be noted and filed.

Over-engineering process. Some organisations respond to procurement risk by layering on process — more approvals, more templates, more checkpoints. At some point, this tips from risk management into obstruction. The operating model should make it easier to do the right thing, not harder to do anything at all. The best policy frameworks are ones that people actually follow at 5pm on a Thursday when delivery is under pressure, not 140-page manuals that sit on a shared drive collecting dust.

Confusing structure with capability. Reorganising the team and redrawing the org chart feels like progress. But if the same people are doing the same work with the same skills, the reorganisation hasn't changed anything meaningful. Operating model design must address capability alongside structure — what skills the function needs, where the gaps are, and how they'll be closed.

Treating operating model design as a one-off project. The design phase is important, but it's not the end. Implementation, change management, capability building, and ongoing governance are where the real value is realised. An operating model that lives in a slide deck isn't an operating model — it's a concept.

Disconnecting procurement from the broader supply chain. In many organisations, procurement operates in a silo — separate from logistics, planning, inventory, and operations. But procurement decisions have direct implications for how the supply chain performs. A contract that optimises unit cost but creates delivery unreliability, for instance, is a net negative. The most effective operating models integrate procurement within the end-to-end supply chain strategy, ensuring alignment rather than conflict.

How Trace Consultants Can Help

Trace Consultants is an Australian supply chain and procurement consulting firm that works with government and commercial organisations to design, implement, and sustain procurement operating models that actually work.

What sets Trace apart is a combination of specialist depth, senior-led delivery, and a relentless focus on practical outcomes. Trace's consultants have worked across government and defence, healthcare, FMCG and manufacturing, property and hospitality, and infrastructure — bringing cross-sector insight to each engagement while respecting the unique constraints of each industry.

Trace's approach to procurement operating model design typically spans several connected phases:

Diagnostic and current-state assessment. Before designing anything, Trace establishes a fact base. This involves mapping the existing procurement structure, understanding spend, assessing capability maturity, reviewing governance and delegations, and identifying pain points through structured stakeholder engagement. The goal is to understand how procurement actually works today — not how it's supposed to work according to the policy manual.

Operating model design. Working collaboratively with the client's leadership team, Trace designs an operating model that aligns procurement's structure, roles, governance, and processes to the organisation's strategy and operating context. This includes defining the centralisation model, decision rights, category structure, technology requirements, and performance framework. Importantly, the design reflects the organisation's maturity — it's built to be implementable, not aspirational.

Implementation and change management. Trace doesn't stop at design. Through its project and change management capability, Trace supports clients to implement the new model — standing up governance forums, transitioning roles, embedding new processes, deploying technology, and managing stakeholder communication. This phase is where most operating model projects succeed or fail, and Trace treats it with the seriousness it deserves.

Capability building. One of Trace's core principles is leaving organisations stronger than they found them. Operating model engagements typically include a focus on building internal capability — whether that's through formal training, on-the-job coaching, development of procurement tools and templates, or structured knowledge transfer. The aim is to ensure the organisation can sustain and evolve the model independently over time.

Ongoing support. For organisations that need sustained procurement capacity while the new model beds in, Trace offers embedded support through its procurement services, including go-to-market strategy, sourcing execution, contract management, and supplier relationship management. This provides a practical bridge between the current state and the target model.

Trace's Procurement Excellence Framework guides how operating models are assessed and designed, ensuring every initiative is grounded in a structured, repeatable methodology while being tailored to the client's specific circumstances.

Getting Started

If your procurement function is under pressure and the response so far has been to push harder rather than redesign smarter, it might be time to step back and look at the operating model.

The questions worth asking are straightforward. Is the current structure helping or hindering procurement's ability to deliver? Are roles, decision rights, and accountabilities clear? Does the team have the right capability for what's being asked of it? Is governance in place and being followed? Is procurement aligned to the organisation's broader supply chain strategy? And critically — does the operating model support the organisation's strategy, or does it reflect decisions made years ago under very different circumstances?

One practical starting point is a short diagnostic — a structured assessment of the current operating model against the organisation's requirements. This doesn't need to be a six-month project. A well-scoped diagnostic can be completed in a matter of weeks, providing leadership with a clear picture of where the gaps are, what's working, and where to focus first.

From there, the path depends on the organisation's context. Some need a full redesign and implementation. Others need targeted adjustments — sharpening delegations, standing up a category management rhythm, or building capability in specific areas. The key is to match the intervention to the problem, rather than defaulting to a generic transformation program.

If the answers are uncertain, that's not a failure — it's a starting point. And it's exactly where a structured, specialist-led review can add real value.

To explore how Trace Consultants can support your organisation's procurement operating model, get in touch with the team. Whether it's a short diagnostic to understand where you stand, or a full operating model redesign with implementation support, Trace brings the depth, pragmatism, and execution focus needed to turn procurement from a source of frustration into a genuine competitive advantage.

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