One of our big themes for the past two years is that Procurement Has Not Changed, and has essentially not changed since the first known manual for public Procurement was published back in 1887. (Handbook of Railway Supplies).
Moreover, not only are the core goals, and processes, roughly the same, the core tech you need hasn’t changed much for two decades. As per our series on how you don’t need to read another state of procurement report for five years and myth-busting 2025 2015 procurement predictions and trends, the only thing that ever changes is the hype-du-jour and the tech-du-jour. Every other barrier to success, risk, concern, and tech is the same year after year after year.
That being said, your supply chains are breaking daily. That’s because, while the requirements for supply chain management haven’t changed, you never implemented the right systems to manage your supply chains (and the up-front procurements) to begin with — systems that understand that the world continuously changes (because many people can’t be happy with what they got — whether they got it good or bad — or the status quo) and you need to monitor and keep up.
As per many of our posts this year, including an updated checklist for major international procurements, most of your systems were built during the age of globalization with opening borders, minimal conflicts, reasonable levels of natural disasters, and efforts to secure major maritime routes were continuous. Now we are in an age of isolationism, borders are closing, sanctions are significantly restricting trade, conflicts are breaking out regularly with not only regional, but global, impacts. Major maritime routes are being cut off. Natural disasters are off the charts. Etc. (That’s also why old strategies for supply chain management are new again. And most of the 2008 trends are still relevant in 2026. See the series.)
As per the series Bob Ferrari (of Supply Chain Matters) on why Direct Sourcing Solutions Don’t Work for Direct, part of the problem is that your procurement solutions weren’t built to be supply chain aware. The other part of the problem is most supply chain software was built to support production with respect to S&OP needs, not real world monitoring, management, and mitigation.
A solution needs to support all of the long-term strategic, mid-term tactical, and short-term operational requirements from initial scoping and planning through final fulfillment which means that it’s not just point-based network design planning, strategic sourcing, supplier collaboration, demand management and EOQ, network management and source allocation, logistics and routing, warehousing, and delivery to customer. It’s also continuous market monitoring, context-based decision making, evaluation, and reconsideration; risk identification, monitoring, management and mitigation; re-orchestration and network updates; etc.
It’s the multi-level integrated framework Bob and I presented last year, which he presents again in his recent article on Materials Sourcing and Planning Decision Making Process Frameworks where he notes that the global wide supply network environment has contused to become ever more volatile and uncertain with each passing week and this requires be a more effective data management, data harmonization and analytics infrastructure. Your business and supply networks need to be ready. Our framework gives you the foundation (and, more importantly, notes that Gen-AI is just an interface to the real capabilities, it is not the miracle cure-all panacea that the silicon snake oil purveyors are making it out to be).
You are strongly encourage to read Bob’s article on Materials Sourcing and Planning Decision Making Process Frameworks and study the framework within, and if you haven’t, go back and read our series on why Direct Sourcing Solutions Don’t Work for Direct. It will be worth your time.