You're a procurement manager at a mid-sized company that's growing fast. This should be a great job, but every day feels like you’re herding cats.
The marketing team keeps emailing suppliers without telling you. Shadow IT is spreading like a rash, and Operations are hoarding their own list of vendors for office supplies. Nothing connects.
You're drowning in duplicate orders, missed discounts, and that nagging feeling that you're bleeding money without knowing where. One afternoon, you're chasing down a rogue purchase from accounting that could have been bundled for a volume deal, but no, it's already done, and that opportunity is lost.
This is procurement fragmentation… and it’s frustrating.
Procurement Fragmentation Defined
Fragmentation exists when a company's buying activities are all over the place, scattered across departments, systems, and suppliers. Instead of a smooth, unified process, everything's disjointed, leading to hidden costs, swamp-level visibility, and missed savings.
It often happens when teams rely on disparate tools like emails, random platforms, or spreadsheets, and nobody is willing or able to see the bigger picture.
A hallmark of fragmentation is siloed operations, or different teams doing their own thing with their own tools and no central hub to tie it all together. Then there's data disconnection: spend data, supplier performance, and contracts everywhere, making it impossible to track what's really going on. People end up using manual workarounds, wasting hours hunting for details or cobbling together quick fixes.
The side effects are ugly. Costs skyrocket because you're missing out on volume discounts, duplicating efforts, and dealing with rogue spending. Poor visibility means decisions are basically guesses. Operationally, approvals crawl, errors pop up everywhere, and procurement cycles stretch longer. Supplier relationships also suffer.
GPOs: Solving Procurement Fragmentation & Disjointed Processes
This mess doesn't have to be your reality. A group purchasing organization (GPO) like Una can glue it all back together. A GPO pools the buying power of all its members to snag huge discounts and streamline your purchasing. Our mission is to help optimize your strategy, boost your cost savings, and make spend management feel empowering instead of exhausting.
At Una, we leverage over $100 billion in combined purchasing power to lock in deeply discounted pricing and excellent contract terms from a huge network of suppliers. Members get immediate access to over 2,500 pre-negotiated contracts with best-in-class pricing. The result? An average of 18-22% savings each year on the indirect goods and services you need to keep your business humming.
How Do GPOs Help Solve Fragmentation?
Una helps simplify procurement by cutting through the silos and data chaos. Instead of teams operating in isolation, you take a unified, centralized approach that connects everyone to game-changing discounts. Una's setup lets you access established, pre-negotiated contracts with some of the nation’s best suppliers.
This means faster sourcing, bypassing the need to vet vendors or negotiate deals, and way more efficiency overall. Procurement cycles speed up, errors drop, and you get that big-picture visibility that's been missing.
Getting those siloed teams on board with Una's GPO contracts is key to making this work. Start by showing them how easy it is: Una's pre-negotiated deals are ready to go, so no one has to reinvent the wheel. Host quick workshops or share Una's resources like our group purchasing guides and playbooks to highlight the perks. Make group purchasing part of your company's culture, and lean on Una's consultative team. We're pros at helping you tailor strategies that get buy-in from everyone, focusing on shared goals like cost savings and efficiency.
What about maverick spend? The trick is to employ a mix of education and enforcement, or carrot and stick. Encourage teams to use Una's contracts by demonstrating the wins, like how sticking to them avoids duplicate buys and unlocks those 18-22% savings. Set up simple approval workflows that flag non-compliant spends early, and reward compliance with shout-outs or incentives.
Dive In and Start Saving
At the end of the day, choosing a GPO like Una means no more fragmentation-induced frustration. Just efficient, cost-effective procurement that lets you focus on what matters.
Ready to see how this could work for you?
Book a no-obligation discovery call, or calculate your potential savings with our GPO Cost Savings Calculator.
Una has the tools, the team, and the track record to solve your procurement fragmentation challenges, thanks to the power of supplier consolidation and bulk savings.
