In our previous article, "Why Some Procurement Teams Are So Darn SLOW," we unpacked the culprits behind the often-glacial pace of procurement: bureaucratic red tape, risk-averse cultures, and outdated processes that make Flash Slothmore from Zootopia look speedy.
The Cost of Delay in Procurement
Today, we're zeroing in on the brutal costs that procurement delays can inflict. These ticking time bombs can explode your bottom line, damage procurement’s reputation, and destroy your organization’s competitive edge.
Missed Discounts
Let's start with the most obvious gut-punch: missed discounts. Just like your favorite B2C retailers, suppliers’ sales teams love throwing out time-sensitive deals like seasonal promotions, volume rebates, or early-bird specials designed to close fast. But when procurement drags its feet, those savings can evaporate.
Picture a manufacturing firm eyeing bulk raw materials. The supplier dangles a 15% discount if you sign by quarter's end. Your team hems and haws, running extra checks and tweaking contract terms.
Boom: deadline missed, and you can’t convince the supplier to extend the offer. Now you're paying full price, and that "small" delay is a self-inflicted wound that just tacked several zeros onto your expenses.
Procurement Team Overheads
Procurement teams are, frankly, expensive to run. Expensive software licenses aside, practitioners command comparatively high salaries. The latest salary research from ISM revealed an average salary of nearly $133,000, with the top 5 percentile earning just over $484,000.
Image: ISM 2025 Salary Survey Summary
The standard rule-of-thumb is that a procurement pro should be able to deliver cost savings equalling 10x their base salary. So an experienced practitioner on, say, $100,000, would be expected to deliver at least $1 million in savings. (What exactly is considered “savings?” We debate that here.)
Here’s the point: the CFO does not want to pay procurement talent to twiddle their thumbs when they could be driving value and justifying their wage. Endless meetings, back-and-forth emails, and stalled projects all pile up, leading to procurement adding to costs rather than reducing them.
Opportunity Costs
Opportunity costs are where delays really sting, because they're not so much about what you lose today; they're about the doors that slam shut tomorrow. Miss a market window, and suddenly your competitors are pulling ahead, leaving you in the dust.
It's alarmingly simple: In fast-moving industries like e-commerce or healthcare, hesitation means irrelevance. Your competitors aren't waiting; they're innovating, expanding, and capturing market share while you debate contract clauses.
Erosion of Trust
You’ve probably seen something like this firsthand: A delayed contract leads to vendors blacklisting you for unreliability, or your sales team venting about how procurement "killed" a key partnership. Trust is the glue of business, and delays dissolve it.
Delays erode trust with everyone involved. Vendors get frustrated when deals drag on, while internal stakeholders like department heads lose faith in procurement, leading to rogue spending or shadow IT purchases that bypass the function altogether.
Stock-outs and Inflation
But wait, there's more! Procurement delays can trigger supply chain domino effects like stock-outs during peak seasons or rushed purchases at premium rates to fill gaps.
Inflation compounds this: While you're dithering, material costs climb, turning a manageable expense into a budget buster. And don't forget the pace of innovation; by the time you procure that cutting-edge tool, it may already be outdated.
Supercharge Your Speed-to-Source with Una
The costs of delay: missed discounts, bloated overheads, vanished opportunities, and fractured trust, are too steep to ignore. So, what's the antidote? Group purchasing.
Here's how Una drastically improves speed-to-source:
- Instead of starting from scratch with every request, you tap into a portfolio of 2,500+ pre-vetted, ready-to-go contracts with the nation’s leading suppliers.
- Our "speed-to-savings" approach connects you to suppliers aligned with your goals, bypassing lengthy RFPs and negotiations.
- It’s streamlined, compliant, and will save you an average of 18-22% per year on various goods and services.
As a true sourcing accelerator, our goal is to offer turn-key solutions that empower members to achieve category quick wins and then move on to the long-term strategies that make their business more profitable.
Una‘s pre-negotiated contracts are designed to save you more money, time, and effort. Leveraging the incredible power of volume purchasing is the ultimate way to get on the fast track to savings, granting instant access to deep discounts that would otherwise take years of business growth and negotiation to achieve.
Learn more about Una membership and the benefits of partnering with a group purchasing organization to accelerate savings in procurement here.
