Procurement & Commercial
Most organisations do not have a procurement problem. They have a spend they cannot see, contracts nobody owns, and suppliers whose performance nobody is measuring.
On this page04
Overview
This is the work of getting a commercial function into shape: knowing what you buy and from whom, holding suppliers to what they agreed, and making decisions on evidence rather than on who shouted loudest at the last review.
It is rarely glamorous and it is almost always where the money is. A contract register that is current, a category strategy that survives its first difficult negotiation, a supplier review that changes behaviour. Those are the things that move cost and risk.
Brought in when
- Supplier costs are rising and nobody can say precisely where or why.
- Nobody knows when the major contracts renew, or who owns them.
- The same categories are bought differently by different parts of the organisation.
- A supplier is underperforming and the contract gives you less leverage than you assumed.
- Social value and environmental criteria have to be evidenced, not asserted.
- A savings target has been set and there is no credible plan behind it.
What this covers
Six areas of work.
Category management
Spend analysed properly, suppliers consolidated where consolidation helps, and a sourcing approach built for each category, not one applied to all of them. The output is a category strategy your team can run without us.
Contract & risk management
Weak contract management shows up later as unbudgeted cost and compliance exposure. We negotiate the terms, shorten and clarify the lifecycle, and put in the controls that keep suppliers accountable, so obligations are tracked and renewals stop arriving as surprises.
Procurement transformation
Restructuring how procurement operates: the model, the governance, the approvals, the systems it runs on and how it engages the rest of the business. Designed to be scalable and digital-first, and to hold up when the people who built it move on.
Cost reduction & value optimisation
Reducing cost without quietly reducing what you get. We look at sourcing, specification, demand and process together, because a saving that returns as a service failure six months later was not a saving.
Supplier relationship management
A working framework for the suppliers that matter: who owns the relationship, what gets measured, how performance conversations happen and what escalation looks like. Strong relationships reduce disruption, and they are where supplier-side innovation comes from.
ESG & sustainable procurement
Environmental, social and governance criteria built into sourcing decisions and contract terms, not bolted on at evaluation. Relevant to anyone tendering into the public sector, where social value carries real weight in the score.
Where it comes up
Discuss a procurement challenge.
Most of this starts with a look at what is being spent and what is under contract. That is usually a short piece of work, and it usually changes the conversation.