Our Stack’s Too Fat and Our Dashboards are Lying

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In Today's Issue

• The Quiet Fix - STOP DATA HOARDING

• The Tech Bit - COMPOSABLE PROCUREMENT

• My Best Post Lately

• Free Template of the Week

The Quiet Fix

STOP DATA HOARDING

At some point, every procurement team becomes a data dragon.

Do you know what I mean? Perched on a hoard of spend cubes, dashboards, and monthly reports, guarding them like treasure but not actually doing much with them.

I’ve been there.

We set up a beautiful BI dashboard once for a large client, fully automated, colour-coded, real-time updates... the works! Looked like a cockpit.

We were pretty proud of ourselves and even the CFO loved the aesthetics. 

But months later, we realised no one used it to make decisions. It became just another shiny artefact we could point to and say, “See? We’re data-driven.”

Collecting data isn’t the same as using it and drowning in dashboards isn’t the same as driving change.

I’ve seen companies spend millions on analytics tools and still rely on anecdotal supplier feedback and old excel files to make sourcing decisions.

I’ve watched sourcing leads manually export reports they don’t trust, tweak them in Excel, and then use that to present to leadership.

This is what is actively eroding confidence in your numbers.

And let me tell you what is worse: this mess is invisible to most executives.

The reports are there, the dashboards exist.

But behind the scenes it’s pure chaos. Multiple versions of the truth, rogue spreadsheets, data dumps emailed as attachments, and no one quite sure which figure is “official.”

So what’s the quiet fix?

Start treating your data like a product.

• Not an archive

• Not a report graveyard

• A product.

What that means is clear ownership, regular releases, defined users, and actual outcomes.

Don’t build dashboards unless you know exactly who’s using them and what decision they’re meant to inform.

1. Archive reports no one opens

2. Simplify

3. Kill off the “just in case” data streams (like from your RFPs) and focus on the 3–5 insights that will actually change someone’s behaviour

And yes, you can do this without buying another analytics platform.

Remember this is a governance issue, not a tooling one and the ROI is huge.

My favourite project I worked on, we reduced reporting by ~40% and tripled actual usage.

The team finally stopped spending half their month pulling numbers and started spending it negotiating better deals, fixing rogue spend, and helping the business buy smarter.

And my favourite bit, finance started trusting procurement again.

Clean, focused and most importantly useable data makes everyone else in the company stop seeing you as “the team with the spend cube” and start seeing you as strategic.

No new software required.

The Tech Bit

COMPOSABLE PROCUREMENT

Let’s talk about the new kid on the block that everyone seems to name-drop but few can actually explain: Composable Procurement.

At its core, it’s the opposite of the old-school, one-size-fits-all procurement suite.

Instead of buying one massive platform that tries to do everything (badly), you build your own stack by picking the tools that do each thing well, sourcing, contracts, supplier data, whatever, and integrate them together.

Sounds pretty slick, right?

In theory, you get flexibility, speed, and better UX. But in practice I have found it to be glorious or chaotic, depending on how you go about it.

You see, I’ve seen this movie before.

Someone says “modular tech stack” in a meeting and before you know it, there’s a pitch deck with 12 logos on it and a roadmap that looks more like a pipe dream.

Everyone nods along, no one asks how these systems will actually speak to each other, and suddenly I’m left trying to make Zapier look like middleware.

This is the part where you’re expecting me to bash composable procurement.

I’m not. I like the principle.

I think procurement should be able to build the tech that fits them, not the other way around. I just think we’ve all started to confuse flexibility with fragmentation.

What I’ve learned, usually the hard way, is that composability only works when someone’s actually curating it.

I’ve had clients proudly show me their “best-of-breed” toolsets and they’ve got three contract repositories, two intake forms, and a rogue Airtable that’s somehow become the single source of truth.

I’m not exaggerating.

One stakeholder once said “But we’ve built a Zap for that” and I genuinely couldn’t tell if it was a joke.

The truth is, the more tools you bring in, the more your procurement team becomes part-architect, part-integrations helpdesk. Which might be fine if that’s what you signed up for, but I promise you, most haven’t.

We just want to get decent spend visibility not become system wranglers.

And vendors haven’t helped.

“Open architecture” sounds lovely until you realise it means you own the headache of stitching it all together.

I've had to call in favours from tech teams a few times just to fix a basic approvals flow that broke because two tools decided to update on the same day.

So if you’re considering going composable, ask yourself this: is your team really ready to own it?

I’m not saying don’t do it. I’m saying don’t do it half asleep.

• Start small

• Pick two or three tools that solve an actual pain

• And be brutal about what’s working and what’s just shiny

If a suite gets you 80% of the way there and your team won’t riot, maybe don’t break it up just because someone at a conference said monoliths are dead.

Because yes, composable procurement can work, but only if you’ve got someone steering the ship.

Otherwise you’re just building a tech museum that nobody visits.

My Best Post Lately

4 LEVELS OF PROCUREMENT STRATEGY

I promise I didn’t say category strategies are useless.

I said the way most of us still do them doesn’t really fit how the world works anymore.

Back when procurement was all about structure and segmentation, category management made perfect sense.

But now the lines are blurrier. Innovation comes from ecosystems, not single suppliers. And some categories move way too fast for a static three-year plan to keep up.

The comments on this one were rather fascinating.

Some agreed it’s time to rethink the model. Others said it still works, just not everywhere. Which is kind of my point!

So maybe it’s not about scrapping category strategies, but about using them where they still fit and not forcing them where they don’t.

If you’re quietly wondering whether the model needs adjusting, you’re not alone.

READ THE FULL POST →

Free Template(s) of the week 

The RFP Series II - Travel

Continuing on with the free RFP template series, this time it’s one I’ve been meaning to share for a while. The icky category that is Travel Management.

And more specifically Travel Management Companies, the full-service providers used by large enterprises to manage corporate travel end-to-end, from booking and reporting to compliance, risk and visa support.

It’s a category I’ve sourced many, many times, usually global, usually messy, and almost always high-stakes. (It’s incredibly how touchy travel policy can be sometimes!)

This template didn’t fall into my lap (if only!) but rather pieced together over time, tested with many suppliers, and reworked more times than I’d like to admit. But now it’s one of the most solid ones I’ve got.

You can use it end-to-end, from early market engagement all the way through scoring. And like all of these, tweak what you need.

As always, it’s available for this week only then off it goes.

And if you have any ideas for the next one, just hit reply!

Download the Travel Management Services RFP Template here.

A Final Note

I would like to leave you with a quote I keep coming back to:

It’s so easy to fill your plate with good ideas.

Especially in procurement, where nearly everything feels like it could add value if you just had the time.

I have personally done my best work once I got comfortable with turning things down.

Even when the idea’s half-decent. Even when the stakeholder’s insistent.

And I don’t to it to be awkward, but rather because my job isn’t to do everything.

It’s to make sure the important stuff actually gets done.

That kind of clarity takes a lot of practice but once you get the hang of it, it will change your life.

Catch you in two weeks.

Until next time,

Procurement worth reading.