Answers

Procurement questions, answered properly.

Practical guidance on procurement, commercial management, sourcing, suppliers, technology and transformation.

Written for people who have to make the decision rather than read about it: what a thing should contain, how it should be structured, what good looks like, and where it usually goes wrong.

12 answers / 6 themes

Procurement operating models

How the function is organised, resourced, governed and measured: structure, decision rights, capability and the numbers it is held to.

What is a procurement operating model?The six decisions that make the model, the four tests behind the centralisation question, and why redesigns fail on decision rights rather than structure.9 minSep 2026How should a procurement function be measured?Five measures finance will accept, the definitions that have to be agreed before any of them, and a worked example of what a saving number actually contains.9 minSep 2026

Strategic sourcing & category management

Understanding a market before going to it, building a category position that survives its first difficult negotiation, and running the process that follows.

What should a category strategy actually contain?What belongs in the commercial section, which is the one that decides the outcome, and the test that separates a strategy from a well-formatted spend analysis.8 minSep 2026What is the difference between strategic sourcing and procurement?Where the boundary sits, why sourcing is the activity that quietly stops happening, and the four mechanisms that actually protect the time for it.6 minSep 2026

Commercial & contract management

Terms, obligations, route to market and the definitions behind a savings number. The part of procurement that decides what a contract is worth after it is signed.

How do you build a credible procurement savings pipeline?What a benefit record has to contain, the five levers in order of difficulty, stage gates with a test somebody can fail, and how a delivered saving quietly disappears by month twelve.8 minSep 2026What is the difference between procurement savings and cost avoidance?The budget test that settles most arguments, why cash-releasing and recurrent matter more than the label, and what happens to the classification at next year's baseline.7 minSep 2026When should an organisation use a framework agreement?What a framework buys and what it costs, the decision that actually sets the price, and the three alternatives most people never put on the table.9 minSep 2026

Source-to-pay & procurement technology

Process, data and systems from requisition to payment, and what technology can and cannot fix in a function that is not yet working.

How should a source-to-pay transformation be structured?The four decisions that have to precede selection, a sequence organised by volume rather than by module, and the three workstreams that are always under-scoped.9 minSep 2026What can AI realistically do in a procurement function?The work it does reliably, the agent permissions question that has replaced the evaluation question, and the eight things an AI position has to state to be usable.8 minSep 2026

Suppliers & supply chain

Performance, relationships, cost and resilience across the suppliers that matter, and the governance that keeps any of it happening after month three.

How should supplier performance management actually work?What a scorecard line actually contains, why measurement and remedy are different things, and the contractual escalation sequence in the order it has to happen.9 minSep 2026How do you build a supplier cost reduction programme?Sequencing by negotiating position rather than spend size, the three routes by which a supplier recovers a concession, and why the service floor is agreed before the negotiation.7 minSep 2026

Transformation & change delivery

Designing a programme that changes how the organisation buys, and the delivery discipline that decides whether the change is still there in two years.

What should a procurement transformation programme actually include?Six workstreams, a sequence that puts delivered benefit before the system, and the governance mechanisms that decide whether the change is still there in two years.7 minSep 2026
How this is written

Every Answer opens with the answer. The detail follows for anyone who needs it, and each piece says plainly where it stops being general and starts depending on your circumstances. Nothing here is padded to a word count, and no client, figure or example is published that we cannot evidence.

These pages are maintained rather than posted. The date on each one is the date it was last reviewed.

Also from Nexus Connect

BRIEF

BRIEF answers the earlier question: what is going wrong, and what kind of help does it need. These Answers pick up once you know what you are dealing with and have to decide how to do it.

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