Procurement’s ‘hidden’ operational costs often sit in the coordination required to get work done across the business. Beyond the hours spent chasing stakeholders, locating contracts, reconstructing negotiation history, and digging through systems, teams can lose value through delayed savings, unsustainable supplier agreements, and the opportunity cost of focusing on transactions instead of more strategic work.
Procurement works with nearly every other function, and so these costs can accumulate in the gaps between teams without ever appearing in traditional performance metrics.
In this episode of The Sourcing Hero podcast, Host Kelly Barner welcomes Mike Fedorov to the show. Mike is the Chief Operating Officer and Co-CEO at Applied AI Labs. He has over 25 years worth of hands-on operations and supply chain experience, and he has either run or turned around operations for some of the most complex companies in the world.
Highlights
Listen in to hear Mike explain:
- Where procurement is most vulnerable to getting pulled into cross-functional busy work
- The difference between work that creates value and work that simply keeps a process moving
- How procurement should think about data readiness without getting stuck waiting for perfect data
