While it sounds like lean sourcing, which can be defined as a strategic purchasing approach focused on maximizing value and minimizing waste, should be the ultimate solution to strategic sourcing, especially when you consider some of the core activities in Procurement:

• Value Addition: Identifying exactly what the end customer values and eliminating products, features, services, or luxury materials that do not contribute to it. (Supports Value Definition and Value Stream Mapping)
• Process Standardization: Simplifying workflows to reduce bottlenecks, speed up purchasing cycles, and lay the foundations for automation. (Supports Flow)
• Strategic Partnerships: Cultivating close, long-term relationships with a compact, reliable supplier base rather than continually chasing the lowest bidder to streamline the supplier network. (Supports Pull)
• Continuous Improvement: Cultivating a culture where buyers regularly refine practices and reduce inventory. (Supports Pursuit Perfection)

it should be the perfect solution. But it’s not. The problem is that Lean was born out of manufacturing, not supply chain, and not sourcing and procurement. Here are the problems with Lean in Sourcing/Supply Chain:

• Myopic focus: Taken to extremes, not only results in a company minimizing not only product lines, and the components used, but their focus on the product lines that consumers want. This is profitable and successful in the short term, but consumer preferences for products change over time, and if you don’t keep up with shifting consumer trends, you’ll be too late to capitalize on major opportunities. (Just like Blockbuster missed out on Netflix, Kodax on digital cameras, and Xerox on the personal computer.) And if you don’t keep an eye out on new developments, you’ll miss opportunities for new integrated components and working with engineering to save money.
• Automation First Philosophy: the whole point of process standardization was to allow for consistency, transparency, productivity, error reduction, and resource optimization, not necessarily automation — but the interpretation has been to automate everything without any thought as to whether or not humans can do it better or Human Intelligence (HI!) is needed
• Long Term Agreements: a long term agreement is not a partnership, it’s just a long term contract; most Procurement organizations have failed to grasp what a strategic partnership is! (Japan gets it with keiretsu, but that’s about it.)
• JIT: you want JIT in terms of factory production, especially since factories have limited space so you don’t want to pull from the warehouse too fast, but it’s one thing to JIT from a local warehouse, it’s another thing to try to JIT across global supply chains filled with fragility and unpredictability and constant disruptions

In other words, in order to succeed from lean, you have to modernize Lean for Procurement and the modern world. And get a little mean while you’re at it.

• while the primary focus is optimizing costs against the value stream, the secondary focus is pushing strategic partners for new designs and products that will change both the value of the customer offering as well as the cost of production and service; in other words, you’re only happy with the status quo today, you expect proposals for improvement tomorrow
• constantly push for process redesign where you can reliably use unintelligent automation (with rules-based deterministic certainty and adaptive exception management) and not hallucinatory agentic / Gen-AI for true efficiency improvements; it also keeps platform/cloud costs way down even as throughput scales by orders of magnitude
• shift from cost focus in agreements to co-development focus — that’s the way you form true partnerships
• migrate to balanced inventory management where you keep extra stock on hand of critical/scarce/hard-to-get materials and components sufficient to cover at least the average delay time when a disruption occurs — it can also optimize logistics costs and production costs at a different economy of scale, making up for the slightly increased inventory costs (which only need to be a fraction of their traditional inventory-cost based percentage with smart inventory management)

In each of these cases you are forcing more than just the process (which your team and suppliers will think is mean), putting cost second (which the C-Suite will think is self-centered because it’s all supposed to be savings to please the board members), and putting more burden on your internal networks (which your team will think is really mean, considering your operations and consultants have spent decades shifting to suppliers).

It might seem mean, but modernizing your practices in a resilient and collaborative fashion is what it will take to thrive in today’s global landscape.