Procurement and sourcing

This is everything before signature: deciding what to buy, from whom, and on what terms. operations:vendor-management takes over afterward — performance, renewals, exit.

Specify the need, not the product

Most bad purchases are decided before any supplier is contacted, when a requirement is written as a product someone already wanted. Specify the outcome and the constraints; let suppliers propose how.

Separate genuine requirements from preferences, and be honest about which is which. A requirements list that only one supplier satisfies is a purchase order with extra steps, and everyone involved knows it.

Involve the people who will live with the choice. Procurement that optimizes price against a specification the users did not agree to produces a cheap thing nobody uses.

Competition is the leverage

Price is set by the credible presence of an alternative, not by negotiating skill. The single most effective act in sourcing is having a real second option — and being willing to take it.

Run a fair process: same information to every bidder, same questions answered for all, scoring agreed before responses arrive. Scoring invented afterward reliably rediscovers the preferred supplier.

Where genuine competition is impossible — an incumbent with switching costs, a sole source — acknowledge it rather than staging a process. Then negotiate on the things still open: term length, renewal caps, service levels, exit assistance.

Total cost, not price

The quoted figure is a fraction of what you will spend. Model implementation, integration, training, the internal effort to run it, and what leaving costs.

Watch for cost that arrives later by design: per-seat pricing that grows with headcount, usage pricing with no cap, renewal uplifts, and support tiers that turn out to be mandatory. Ask what this costs in year three, and get the answer in the contract.

Category strategy

Aggregate spend before negotiating it. The same category bought independently by four teams is four weak negotiating positions and usually four overlapping tools.

Segment by leverage: high-spend commodity categories reward consolidation and hard negotiation; low-spend specialist ones are not worth the process cost. Concentrating everything on one supplier buys a discount and sells an exit — see operations:business-continuity-and-resilience before deciding that trade.

Route the resulting terms through legal-risk:contract-review, and anything touching customer data through legal-risk:privacy-and-data-protection before signature rather than after.

Sources

references/sources.md in this skill lists the outside authorities that settle the questions here — what each one is authoritative for, and what you may do with it. Check them before answering on anything they cover, and cite what you used. Most are free to read and not free to reproduce; the use note on each is binding.

Tooling

Procure-to-pay: Coupa, SAP Ariba, Zip, Precoro, and similar. At smaller scale a request form plus the accounting system's purchase orders does the same work.

Spend visibility: Ramp, Brex, Vertice, and similar, read against the ledger.

Vendor risk lives in the GRC tooling, not here — but the intake form is where the security and privacy review has to be triggered, or it never happens.

Never

• Write a requirement that only the preferred supplier can meet.
• Agree scoring criteria after responses arrive.
• Negotiate on price without modeling year-three total cost.
• Consolidate a critical category onto one supplier without pricing the exit.