Daily Archives: November 10, 2025

You Don’t Need To Read Another State of Procurement Study for the Next 5 Years!

Earlier this year, Deloitte released their annual Global CPO Survey which was again done in collaboration with Pierre Mitchell of Spend Matters which included, among other things:

  • Top Barriers/Roadblocks to Success/Challenges
  • Major Procurement Risks with High or Moderate Impact
  • Primary Concerns/Strategic Priorities for Procurement Leaders
  • Significant Skill Competency Gaps/Support Needs

just like every Deloitte CPO Study that came before and, moreover, every Hackett (which now owns Spend Matters), Kearney, CapGemini, E&Y, PwC, Everest, etc. study that has come before for at least the past five years. I know, because:

  1. I’ve been reading them.
  2. I went back through 15 of them in detail and a few other related papers published in the same timeframe and pulled out each of these for all of them.

Now guess what? They’re all more-or-less the same with only about 20% to 30% divergence. With respect to the 20 papers I went back through in detail, for the Deloitte

  • top barriers, of the 10 quoted in 2 or more of the papers, 7 are in the Deloitte study,
  • major procurement risks, of the 7 quoted in 2 or more of the papers, 5 are in the Deloitte study, and
  • primary concerns, of the 13 quoted in 2 or more of the papers, 8 are in the Deloitte study.

Moreover, if we were to abstract the barriers, risks, and concerns one level and start looking at the underlying systems or processes that would need to be addressed, the similarities would be even more significant.

More importantly, they aren’t changing much year to year, and aren’t going to change much for the next decade at least.

A year ago I penned a post where I pointed out that before you get all excited to learn about trends for fall conference season, with the exception of:

  • Gen-AI being the new fluffy magic cloud
  • Fake-take (sorry, intake) being the new dangerous and dysfunctional dashboards

the majority of trends that have been discussed for the past year are the same trends that were discussed ten years ago (and I have the blog history to prove it, especially since I didn’t purge over half of my blog on a site upgrade and migration 2 years ago).

This is because the core purpose, and thus the core priorities, challenges, and risks, of Procurement haven’t changed in decades. The systems have evolved, the processes have become more complicated, and the global supply challenges haven’t been this bad since the nineties, but the core HAS NOT changed (and, to be fair, has NOT changed since the first manual was published in 1887 and has NOT changed much since cross-continental trade began thousands [and thousands] of years ago).

Which means we don’t need any more annual surveys on these issues (every 5 years would be more than enough, and even then you might find that the only movement is related to the hot tech of today vs. the hot tech 5 years ago, as I did when I did the exercise last year).

However, to make abundantly clear why these barriers, risks, priorities, and skillsets, are not going to change, we’re going to explore them in the months ahead so you never have to read the exact same report all over again (at least for five years).

We hope you enjoy.

P.S. These are the 21 papers that I reviewed and may be referenced in this ongoing series. There are many more examples over the last 5 years if you look, but it’s really hard to keep reading essentially the same content, especially after you’ve done so 21 times!