What Will High-Level Procurement Performance Look Like in the Future?
By Procurement

I can’t tell you what the future of procurement looks like. Nobody can, and I’m wary of anyone who says they can. What I can tell you is what I hear in conversations with procurement leaders every week, and a pattern is emerging in the functions that are pulling ahead. First, what do I mean by a high-level procurement performance?

High-performing procurement functions aren’t the ones with the biggest savings numbers. I mean the procurement team that is trusted with difficult decisions and relied on for more than price. The strongest procurement performers have also sorted out four things

  1. How they are measured
  2. Who backs them
  3. What they can see
  4. How they are led

That is important because the pressures on procurement are arriving together. While cost reduction is still the main brief, AI is moving from experiment to execution, sustainability is creeping back onto the agenda, and the business wants more speed with less process. Technology, sustainability and business partnering all sit on top of those foundations.

This article looks at what separates the functions handling those pressures well from the ones that aren’t, drawing on UK hiring data and the conversations I’m having with procurement leaders.

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They’re Judged on More Than Savings

Cost reduction has been the main procurement performance metric for the last couple of years, and it will stay on the scorecard. But the question I’d ask any procurement leader is where else their success is actually measured.

Is the expectation purely savings, or does the business genuinely value resilience, risk, supplier performance, innovation and wider commercial impact? If it’s only the first, procurement performance is capped, however well the team reduced spend.

The hiring market is already moving. In Cedar’s own analysis of UK advertised vacancies, Category Management roles grew 29% in Q3 while Contract Management roles fell 18.5%. Employers are paying for people who shape categories, and less for people who administer contracts. A high-performing procurement function will have agreed a broader scorecard with the business before it needs one.

They Have a Mandate, Not Just a Mission

I’ve spoken to several senior procurement leaders recently who joined a business with a clear transformation brief, only to find the reality didn’t match what was sold in the interview. The ambition was there. The backing, investment or appetite for change wasn’t. Without it, transformation becomes stop/start rather than delivering the impact everyone signed up for.

Real backing is specific.

  • A named executive who actively sponsors the programme, rather than a general statement about support.
  • Investment that has genuinely been approved across people, technology, external support and data, rather than sitting in a business case.
  • An executive team willing to support the difficult conversations that come when procurement challenges suppliers, stakeholders and existing ways of working.

The procurement functions that deliver in the future will be the ones where this was settled before the strategy was announced.

They Can See Their Supply Base

Many procurement leaders I speak to are weighing how much freedom the business should have to spend without procurement involvement. Below a certain threshold, say £50k or £100k, autonomy makes sense. It keeps procurement on higher-value work, removes unnecessary process and gives the business the speed it needs.

But there’s a trade-off. In several of those conversations, a surprisingly large share of the supplier base had ended up in tail spend. Individually, those suppliers don’t warrant intervention. Collectively, they offer a significant opportunity for tail spend management: multiple suppliers providing similar services, fragmented spend across different parts of the business, limited visibility of total supplier exposure. After acquisitions it can be worse, with the same supplier appearing in several countries on different rates and terms.

So the useful question is how you give the business freedom to move quickly without letting the supplier base fragment. Autonomy and control don’t have to be opposites. Underpin the freedom with good data, clear preferred supplier strategies and regular analysis of the tail. One approach leaders are using is pre-vetting, where procurement agrees on a list of verified suppliers up front so duplication is caught before terms are signed.

This is also where resilience starts. You can’t manage the risk in a supplier base you can’t see. And sometimes the biggest opportunity isn’t negotiating another 5% from a strategic supplier. It’s realising you didn’t need 15 suppliers in the first place.

They’ve Moved From AI Experiments to Embedded AI

Almost every procurement leader I speak to is still wrestling with where the genuine strategic value of AI is. There’s no shortage of noise around the technology, but far fewer examples of what it’s delivering. A few results that caught my attention, all as reported by the companies and their technology partners:

What these have in common where procurement professionals spend their time afterwards. The functions pulling ahead when it comes to AI-driven procurement performance are focused on whether their biggest barrier is the technology, the data or organisational adoption. The answer decides where to invest next.

They Treat Sustainability as Part of the Job, Not a Pause Button

As cost took over the agenda, ESG and responsible sourcing slipped down the list in many functions. In our conversations, there are early signs of renewed interest in Centre of Excellence work, ESG and responsible sourcing, running alongside the cost focus rather than replacing it.

The functions best placed for that swing are the ones that kept the thread alive. A team that paused its sustainability work completely has to rebuild it from scratch. A team that kept a small version running can scale it back up.

They’re Seen as a Value Lever, Not Back-Office

“Procurement is a back-office function” is something I still hear far too often, and it’s one of the biggest things holding the profession back.

Look at private equity. With less reliance on leverage and multiple expansion to drive returns, and longer hold periods, operational value creation carries more weight than it used to. Procurement touches the whole deal: stress-testing savings assumptions in due diligence, diagnostic work in the first 100 days, sourcing transformation and working capital through the hold, synergies on every bolt-on acquisition, and the margin story at exit.

In manufacturing businesses, direct materials typically account for between 30% and 70% of total product cost. If that’s back-office, a large share of the P&L is back-office.

The high-performing procurement functions don’t wait to be taken seriously. They show where they sit in the value creation plan.

They’re Led by People Who Can Handle Ambiguity

The theme that keeps coming up with senior procurement and supply chain leaders isn’t AI, cost reduction or even talent shortages. It’s the ability to lead through change and ambiguity. Organisational redesigns, shifting priorities, geopolitical uncertainty, digital transformation, evolving stakeholder expectations.

Very few leaders are operating in stable environments and technical expertise is becoming less of a differentiator at senior level. The leaders making the biggest impact bring clarity when there isn’t a clear answer, keep teams engaged when priorities shift, make informed decisions without all the information, and stay calm while everything around them changes. A function can have the right tools, data and mandate and still stall without that.

A Test for Your Own Function

You don’t need to predict the future to prepare for it. Ask five questions to help build procurement performance:

  1. How does the business measure our success beyond savings?
  2. Who is the named executive backing our priorities, and what investment is actually approved?
  3. Could we list every supplier across business units and countries, including the duplicates?
  4. When technology frees up our team’s time, where does it go?
  5. Who leads us through change when the answer isn’t clear?

None of these needs a crystal ball. Answering them honestly now will help build procurement performance, and make the function the one the business turns to when the next shift arrives, whatever form it takes. If you’ve been through a procurement transformation, what would you add to that list?

I work with procurement leaders on the capability behind functions like these, across permanent and interim talent. If you’re planning your team’s next step, get in touch with Cedar’s specialist Procurement & Supply Chain team. Or you can contact me directly at [email protected]