But think back and you’ll probably recall some horrendous corporate purchases from your own experience. There’s the kit that always kept going wrong, the professional service with unexpected hidden costs and the suppliers that promised much but let you down every time. That’s not to mention the sky-high prices paid for some items that bizarrely slipped through the net.
Sometimes ‘best value’ is achieved, sometimes it’s a vague aspiration, remote from the real world.
So why does this happen? In broad terms, bad sourcing is often caused by a mixture of a lack of time for procurement staff, fiendish complexity and an inability to have visibility and fully control the process in a timely fashion. But there are more specific reasons why failures keep happening.
