Ask any procurement team why they’re buried in urgent requests, last-minute approvals, and supplier fires, and most will tell you it’s just the nature of the job. But what if firefighting isn’t the job, it’s a symptom of missing planning?
That’s what Vera Rozanova discussed in a recent episode of the Beyond Procurement podcast. A seasoned procurement leader, invited lecturer, and former CPO at Royal Canin, British American Tobacco, Rusagro, and Procter & Gamble, Vera recently sparked a wide discussion on LinkedIn about how the lack of structured procurement planning quietly derails performance. In this episode, she unpacked why procurement keeps ending up in reactive mode, how to actually fix it, and what a planning-first procurement function looks like in practice.
Below are the questions asked to her and Vera’s answers, exactly as she spoke them, because some of the best procurement advice doesn’t come pre-polished into a framework.
In a recent LinkedIn post, you highlighted that procurement teams are always stuck in firefighting mode. Could you share some of your observations on why this reactive approach is so common in procurement?
First, I think that procurement is still associated with being a cost center, and it is a “low-hanging fruit” cost. So people need results that are immediately visible, that’s why they go rather to the short-term projects rather than the long-term projects. Also, it’s about quick fixes, we have the problem now, we need to fix it, but it will create tomorrow’s crisis, and they don’t think about this right now.
Then I think it’s about lack of planning, because it is lack of data, lack of analysis, lack of resources to do that, lack of systems, lack of processes regarding that. Sometimes it’s connected with change management, people always did it like that: “we needed it now, please give us it yesterday.” It’s also about contradicting targets. Procurement always tries to sit between several departments, when finance is about costing, marketing is about speed, sales is about reaction and new approaches, so procurement becomes like a “yes” department, to be good for everyone. And it’s about panicking. People forget something, people see that something has changed, they don’t understand what is the reason for this change, so they panic, and they try to fulfill this gap with procurement. It’s the easiest thing to fix, as they think.
What are some factors that are causing this to continue even today, now that companies are realizing this is a problem? And how can organizations start shifting to a more proactive procurement strategy?
I think, in short, this behavior is driven by, it’s easier. It’s really easier. “I have the pain right now, I need to cover it, I don’t have time to think about the longer-term consequences of a bad decision. I have the fire and I need to fight with this fire right now.” And it’s about change management, and this is about the culture, the culture in the organization, and also it’s a procurement fault, because procurement in this context, we are customer-oriented, and we would like to say yes to everyone. So, it’s twofold.
How to break that, from my experience? First of all, we should start with procurement leadership, that should start working with finance first, because I think that our major friend is budgeting, and our major friend is finance. They cannot operate in a “give it to me today” mode, that’s why we should start budgeting with them. And the budgeting cycle should start with the analysis of previous spend, and with one-to-one talks with our stakeholders on their plans and on their requirements to purchase for the next cycles, that should be embedded back into that budget cycle. It’s also the instrument of keeping that in control, so you can always reply back with finance, make them your ally: “why did it not happen, why are you not performing as was budgeted,” all this kind of thing, to be more flexible and more in line with the actual needs, because of course you cannot plan once for the year and then keep up to the plan, business is very dynamic.
That’s why my recommendation is to be embedded in the SOP cycle, sales and operations planning cycle, as a separate function, so that we can listen to our stakeholders about what has changed in their respective field and how we can reply to that. Then, I think it’s also because they don’t know the processes, that’s why I started with setting up the SLA, setting up the procedures, clear rules and responsibilities, clear timelines. And I would recommend educating stakeholders very regularly, probably on a quarterly basis, because they forget, it’s not primarily their field of expertise, they change, sometimes they just don’t care. So, you need to repeat, repeat, repeat and repeat.
And of course, it’s about tracking and reporting the violations, and it’s about making urgent purchases quite difficult, so they need to have an additional approval flow for urgent purchases. It’s not like, “I just forget it, let them do it.” No, they need to understand that if it’s really urgent, they will go to top management and look for the approval. If it’s their mistake, probably they will wait for another planning cycle and live without it. And I think the last advice is to start building strategy within procurement. It’s such strategies as procurement department strategy, including resource allocation, and it’s about category strategies. So how much do we purchase, what do we purchase, where can we find that, what are our plans, how are we aligned with the company’s growth. We always need to distinguish between “nice to have” and “must have,” between real organizational goals and what our stakeholders got used to.
One of the things you mentioned was aligning with stakeholder expectations and demands. Any recommendations on how procurement professionals can communicate the importance of planning to other stakeholders? Any examples you’ve seen that have helped in the past?
Of course, first of all, we need to align our targets, align our KPIs. Then I think that our mistake is that in procurement, we sometimes have our specific language and specific targets that we’re communicating towards. So, we need to communicate with their eyes, you know, communicate what is interesting to them, help them to achieve their goals, and that is how we will build the real partnership with our stakeholders.
Would it be possible to share an example where it worked, maybe the challenges you faced, but what was the output that really made it worth it?
For example, I would say that when I worked for a very big agricultural company, our stakeholders, and actually our finance, they were for the lowest cost at that time, because of some lack of budget at that time. I’m talking about the spare parts category of spend. At that time, we as procurement, and it was my task and my team’s, to consider the total cost of the spare parts. We understood that a lot of spare parts were either fake or very poor-quality China spare parts, and that led to bigger financial losses in the future.
We slowly started to change the point of view of our stakeholders, from short-term procurement projects to get the cheapest spare parts, towards longer-term contracts, contracts with the original manufacturer of the equipment, to get the spare parts probably a little bit more expensive, but less risky. It would be more reliable, and in the long end, on a one- to two-year horizon, it would cost us less. But it was about planning, and again, that was a very, very complex project, because when you start planning, it’s not only about the proper timing for procurement to find potential suppliers and negotiate with them, it’s also about aligning the demand of several departments, because we had several production sites across the country. We had to align their demands, combine their demands, and go with bigger leverage towards their original equipment manufacturer to get better prices from them.
“We slowly started to change the point of view of our stakeholders, from short-term procurement projects to get the cheapest spare parts, towards longer-term contracts.”
How do you see technology playing a crucial role in transforming procurement from chaos to control?
Technology plays a crucial role, because when firefighting, all your procurement team is busy with some “monkey job,” actually they are preparing hectically some documents, they are making hectically some correspondence to stakeholders, to some suppliers. So, they are busy, they don’t have time to do the proper job, to look at the market, to understand the trends, or to analyze the data. As soon as all the repetitive tasks are really done by technology, then procurement, first of all, can obtain another skill set, and this is about strategic planning, about stakeholder management, about emotional intelligence, about strategic thinking, and that is all made available with the help of technology.
What are some of the specific types of technologies you’ve seen work well in this process? There’s a chaos of technologies out there, and you don’t really need all of them depending on which phase you’re in.
Oh, of course, it is centralized master data, when you can derive any historical data centrally. I mean, when your organization is big and you have several countries, several production sites, the master data should be centralized, so that you can make so-called procurement standard cube analysis, meaning by supplier, by production site, by geography, by customer.
Then, of course, a lot of organizations now have a P2P solution, that helps them make their process more or less automatic within the system, and this is also good because having all your activities and all your documents in one place, it’s quite easy to audit that. And that’s really important, because when audit comes, the procurement department sometimes stops working for a month just to collect the data as per their questions and requests. The same is with the KPIs and workflow dashboards, if you can do it by pressing one button, it saves you a lot of time, because you know that each and every month, procurement department is busy for two, three days just making the figures, and it’s not good.
If we’re talking about less obvious ones, of course, generative AI is helping a lot, just to prepare documents, to find quick information, to make the emails, even to prepare for further negotiation. But it should be taken very, very consciously, because you know this “halo effect,” and generative AI, they can tell you a lot of information that is not realistic. So we need to check and double-check, but anyway, it saves a lot of time, a lot of time.
What else I’ve seen in my experience is that there might be a procurement process audit, to investigate repetitive tasks, and what is easiest to automate, with small decisions and chatbots to reply to frequently asked questions, from both sides, that’s from supplier sites or potential supplier sites, and from stakeholder sites. Some applications that can track your project status and send you reminders. Some applications that can track your contract lifecycle status, to remind you of the status and when something should be renewed, all these kinds of things. Of course, automated approval workflow, automated documentation workflow, all these small kinds of things very, very much help.
As procurement teams implement these changes, shifting to a much more proactive way of doing things, what metrics or indicators should they monitor to assess their progress from chaos to control?
It’s the compliance rate. As soon as we have the agreed process, we should measure the compliance to this process. And actually, I think that procurement process is not only the responsibility of the procurement department, which is a wrong perception of many people, it is the whole organization’s process. Procurement is a facilitator of this process, that’s why other departments should understand the procurement process and how they should be compliant with it, and it should be their responsibility as well. That’s why there should be some shared KPIs as well, so the shared KPIs also should be measured.
Then we need to measure the spend under management, under procurement management, what fraction of spend do we, as procurement, manage, or is there a lot of maverick spend that goes by procurement. So, budget adherence, you budgeted your money, how are you in line with your budget. Supplier performance, because if procurement has chosen unreliable suppliers, it will lead to chaos, even if your company is doing very well, but your suppliers don’t deliver on time, or the quality is poor, it will lead to chaos. Audit pass rate, because it’s also about compliance. Procurement cycle time, because the faster we can close the needs of our stakeholders, the better.
I think probably another one is cost saving, actual cost savings, not the planned cost savings but actual cost savings, because sometimes we make a very good project, but then, for example, either our suppliers don’t do the proper job, which is our procurement fault, or our stakeholders start to communicate with suppliers differently. For example, they start asking them to bring them everything “tomorrow,” and then that will also bring chaos to the process.
Is there a way that continuous improvement can be embedded into the procurement function, to ensure these metrics are not just measured but also improved, not just within procurement but with other stakeholders too?
I think the continuous improvement here is constant talking with our stakeholders, constantly asking for their feedback, being on top of their projects, taking part in their meetings, in their monthly meetings, when they discuss their projects, their KPIs, and in their project meetings. What else, then it’s about setting up controls, but the least controls as needed. Yeah, we don’t need to control everything, we need to make the process as simple as possible, but it should cover all the risk areas. And it’s about taking feedback from suppliers as well, because they can also tell us where we are good and where we can improve as a company. And it’s about taking feedback from top management, from our stakeholders. So, to interact with everyone and to listen, because sometimes we are in our silo and we cannot listen to what is obvious.
Would it be possible to share a clear ROI or case study on how you’ve seen this change the business, the impact it has made when companies shift to a planning-first procurement mode? Any success story you can share, and the impact it generated?
Yes, I have my personal story, for example. I was working for Eastern and Western Europe, I don’t remember how many end markets it was, but it was clearly around 20 end markets, and each and every marketing department bought their shopping equipment for shops separately, and they were ordering from their local suppliers very short-term, as soon as they needed it, you know, they’d have the contract signed, I don’t know, tomorrow, they never expected that, so they needed additional shelves for their products, and all this kind of thing.
So it took me like half a year to talk to each and every top team of each and every country, to collect all the requirements, unify that, and make the tender for all the unified requirements for the next three years. It was very, very difficult, because no one wanted to sign up for the volume for the next three years, and it was, you know, psychologically very, very dangerous for them. So, it took a lot of time to negotiate that with them, with the internal stakeholders, I mean, and we made up one RFQ for the volume of the next three years. It was a tentative volume, of course, and we had the contract with, I think, one of the best producers of this kind of equipment in the world, and of course it was quite an expensive one, but it was very durable, very reliable, because durability for shop equipment is very, very important. It was very premium, because marketing wanted that.
But as soon as the manufacturer saw the volume and saw the long-term solution, they managed to make improvements to their production line. It cost them some money, but they saw that they would receive the return on investment for that, and they offered us a very good discount for it.
“No one wanted to sign up for the volume for the next three years, and it was psychologically very, very dangerous for them. So, it took a lot of time to negotiate.”
Let’s go to the future for a bit. Imagine if more organizations adopt this planning-first mindset, what would the future of procurement look like?
It will be a good future. We will operate towards the data, not our gut feeling. We will have the analytics to plan, and probably to predict. We will be more collaborative, and I think that will make our work more pleasant, because it will be more, and it is already more, human-oriented. It will not contain this boring, everyday routine, but it will be more project-oriented. We will be able to spend more time towards ESG, towards initiatives, innovations with our suppliers. We will be perceived as partners in the organization, not the people that just bring savings. And I think that it will be easier to embed risk management into our everyday life, which will also make it more predictable, and yeah, we will be the real business partners for the organization.
If you could give one piece of advice to procurement leaders who are really overwhelmed by all this chaos, what would it be?
One advice, I think that chaos is not the enemy, it is like a diagnostic tool. So if you have emergencies every day, it shows that something doesn’t work properly, and probably you need to investigate what and why. And I would recommend doing this investigation with the biggest categories, the most strategic categories of spend, to understand what doesn’t work, why do you have this urgent request, how can you improve that, what will be your next plan of improvement. So, start with that, start with talking to your biggest stakeholders. And I think, to your comment, we spend so much time at work that we need to have friends that are not enemies, so start to be perceived as friends for your stakeholders, for the business, for your colleagues, and that will help.
“Chaos is not the enemy, it is like a diagnostic tool. If you have emergencies every day, it shows that something doesn’t work properly, and you need to investigate what and why.”
Conclusion
Vera’s diagnosis reframes something most procurement leaders have quietly accepted as “just how the job is”: firefighting isn’t a personality trait of procurement, it’s what happens when planning, data, and stakeholder alignment are missing. Her prescription throughout this conversation is consistent, make finance and budgeting your ally instead of your obstacle, embed procurement into the SOP cycle rather than reacting to it, make urgent, unplanned purchases genuinely harder to push through, and measure the metrics that actually reflect control, spend under management, compliance rate, and actual cost savings, not just the ones that look good on a dashboard.
The throughline across her examples, from the spare-parts total-cost story to the three-year shop-equipment tender, is that planning-first procurement isn’t slower procurement. It’s procurement that trades short-term relief for long-term leverage, and ends up with better pricing, more reliable suppliers, and a genuine seat at the table because of it.
