Art of Procurement

Learn from Procurement Experts. Host Philip Ideson talks with thought leaders who share the trends, strategies and tactics that you can lever to elevate the role of procurement - and your career.

BTW EP 29: The Phil-Ins: Confront the Data Delusion 04/15/2026

861: Procurement Under Pressure: Disruption, AI, and the New Operating Model W/ Amit Mahajan and Jon Jensen 04/13/2026

EP 04: Procurement’s Innovation Sandbox: How Digital Garages Deliver Value with Adam Brown 04/08/2026

860: Inside AOP’s Catalyst Event Series: Elevating CPO Collaboration Beyond the Conference Room W/ Philip Ideson and Jim Cahalan 04/06/2026

BTW EP 28: Develop Expense-Specific Systems: Why One Dashboard Can’t Manage Every Category 04/01/2026

BTW EP 28: Develop Expense-Specific Systems: Why One Dashboard Can’t Manage Every Category Procurement talks about “the data” as if it’s neutral. It rarely is. For years, we have talked about “the data” as if it were a single, uniform thing… a stack of invoices, a dashboard of KPIs, a quarterly business review deck handed over by a supplier. Here’s the problem: invoices are curated. Reports are crafted. And, most of the time, suppliers decide what you see… unless you know what to ask for. In this episode of Buy: The Way…To Purposeful Procurement, Brian Gamble, COO at FineTune and a 30-year veteran of indirect services, joins podcast co-hosts Philip Ideson and Rich Ham to unpack BuyLaw #6: “develop expense-specific systems.” The directive is fairly simple on its surface, but it’s also disruptive: no single data set or measurement system works across diverse categories. Uniforms are not utilities. Security is not pest control. Waste is not janitorial supplies. And trying to manage them all with the same playbook guarantees procurement will create blind spots. Brian has seen those blind spots from both sides up close, first as a regional VP for a national uniform provider, now as an advisor helping clients defend their P&L against quiet leakage. He doesn’t mince words: if your definition of “the data” is whatever appears on an invoice PDF, you are operating inside a commercial narrative written by your supplier. The episode walks through examples that sound almost unbelievable until you realize how common they are. Security “dark hours” where posts go unfilled but still get billed. Pest control programs charging for weekly service where there’s been no activity in months. Uniform inventory definitions that vary between suppliers, creating a scenario where 17 cents can be far more expensive than 21 cents, depending on what number you’re multiplying. None of that shows up cleanly on a summary invoice. Which brings us to AI… As procurement leans more heavily on AI for benchmarking and research, the technology can generate polished, authoritative answers, even when the underlying data is thin or incomplete. But, the quality of the output rises or falls with the quality of the inputs. For example, Brian shares a live demonstration his team conducted internally: a generalist asking AI for “a good price” in a complex service category gets laughable, contradictory answers. Garbage in, garbage out, so to speak. A more informed user does slightly better. When a true category expert feeds AI high-quality, relevant, structured data does the output become meaningfully useful, and even then, it still requires human judgment to separate signal from noise. This episode also challenges another sacred cow in procurement: not all dollars are created equal. A $100 million utilities category might require minimal management. A $1 million uniform program might require 50 times the oversight. Yet procurement teams are often sized and measured purely by spend under management, not complexity, risk, or management intensity. If procurement is going to be measured by what actually hits the P&L (as the earlier BuyLaws argue) then they must design contracts, data rights, and reporting structures that allow real validation. The future of procurement won’t be won by those who have the most data. It will be won by those who know which data matters and, perhaps most importantly, why. Links: /episode/index/show/artofprocurement/id/40382015

859: The Real State of Procurement Orchestration: Trends and Trade-Offs W/ Philip Ideson and Kelly Barner 03/30/2026

EP 03: Provider of the Week: Samsung SDS Caidentia 03/25/2026

Strategic Divestments: Turning Factory Closures into Supplier Innovation Opportunities W/ Alessandro Comerci 03/23/2026

BTW EP 27: Data or Delusion? Procurement’s Future Runs on Truth 03/18/2026

BTW EP 27: Data or Delusion? Procurement’s Future Runs on Truth Procurement doesn’t have a data problem. It has a data delusion. For 25 years, the function has told itself the same story: if we can just clean up our spend, we’ll finally be in control. And yet here we are… swimming in the same dashboards, drowning in fields, and still struggling to answer a simple question: what do we spend? In this episode of Buy: The Way…To Purposeful Procurement, Jason Busch, founder of Spend Matters and now a self-described builder of AI “co-workers,” returns to the podcast to pressure-test BuyLaw #5: “prioritize comprehensive, high-quality data.” If procurement wants to operate in a world of AI employees, continuous validation, and P&L accountability, their data cannot remain partial, fragmented, or shaped by suppliers. Jason draws a sharp distinction between the roles or entities that manage procurement data: copilots, agents, and what he calls digital co-workers (multi-agent infrastructures capable of executing complex work autonomously). But all that capability comes with a catch. When the marginal cost of activity drops toward zero, the absolute risk of bad data increases exponentially. Humans have the battle scars and the intuition to know when something isn’t quite right with the data. AI doesn’t, unless we explicitly teach it what ‘right’ looks like. That’s where procurement’s comfort with incomplete data becomes dangerous. For decades, the function has relied on narrow slices of information: negotiated price, historical spend, maybe a market index or two, but in an AI-enabled world, that’s insufficient. Jason explains why context means everything – supplier financial health, commodity forecasts, tariffs, inventory signals, competitive pricing, risk data, contract performance signals, governance structures, and the cultural guardrails that determine how decisions are made. If procurement feeds incomplete, biased, or poorly governed data into increasingly autonomous systems, those systems won’t just make mistakes faster; they’ll actually end up institutionalizing them and making procurement’s data problem unnecessarily worse. Jason’s advice for procurement is pragmatic and urgent: set up a data governance committee tomorrow. Not to tidy historical spend, but to define what data matters, which sources are trustworthy, what tolerances exist for error, and at what point autonomous systems are allowed to act on that data. In a world of digital co-workers, incomplete data isn’t a nuisance. It’s a real, human liability. Links: /episode/index/show/artofprocurement/id/40381910

857: How Decisioning Platforms Reshape Procurement Strategy W/ Tomas Wiemer 03/16/2026

EP 02: Startup of the Week: SourceReady W/ Ricky Ho 03/11/2026

856: Building an AI-Capable Procurement Team: What CPOs Need to Know W/ Andrew Daley 03/09/2026

BTW EP 26: The Phil-Ins: Stop Counting Wins Start Counting Outcomes 03/04/2026

BTW EP 26: The Phil-Ins: Stop Counting Wins Start Counting Outcomes Procurement’s incentive problem doesn’t stop at the contract. It gets worse after signature. In this Phil-Ins episode of “Buy: The Way…To Purposeful Procurement,” Rich Ham and Philip Ideson are joined by Kelly Barner to unpack three “Buy Laws” at once, mainly because they’re inseparable in practice. First: count only what hits the ledger. If the value doesn’t show up in actuals, it doesn’t count. That means moving procurement out of the projection business and into the results business… where the CFO lives. Second: stop counting only the good. The status quo lets category managers rack up credit for isolated wins while bad outcomes quietly pile up elsewhere. Procurement can’t become more credible (or more strategic) if the scoreboard only records highlights. Third: fund a validation function. If you’re going to demand that outcomes be real, you have to resource the work that proves it. Validation isn’t optional. It’s the bridge between negotiation and execution, the place where contract adherence, leakage, “technically compliant but avoidable” spend, and invoice-level reality either confirm the deal… or expose the fiction. Along the way, the conversation also confronts the uncomfortable tension at the heart of all three Buy Laws: procurement can’t control everything that drives financial outcomes. But that can’t be an excuse to keep rewarding imagined savings. The answer is a healthier system altogether, which should include clear carve-outs, smarter attribution, and a consistent discipline of asking the simplest kinds of questions procurement too often avoids: “this was supposed to be 12… so why is it 15?” If procurement wants to claim value, they have to stay involved long enough to validate it, and build a measurement system strong enough to survive contact with reality. Links: /episode/index/show/artofprocurement/id/40206190

855: Coworking Trends Every CPO Should Watch W/ Sarah Travers 03/02/2026

EP 01: Introducing the ProcureTech Insider: A New Art of Procurement Podcast 02/25/2026

EP 01: Introducing the ProcureTech Insider: A New Art of Procurement Podcast “Sometimes you just need to recognize that getting from the baseline, whatever your baseline, to the next step… that's really significant.” - Jyothi Hartley, Director of Digital Enablement, AOP Art of Procurement is proud to launch a brand-new podcast series: the ProcureTech Insider. The procurement technology market is evolving faster than ever, promising exponential transformation. But what actually works in the real world? ProcureTech Insider exists to take procurement leaders and decision makers beyond the hype. In this new series, we will bring you real-world intelligence from practitioners implementing technology, solution providers building next-generation capabilities, and experts and leaders evaluating what delivers impact in practice. In this first episode, Art of Procurement Founder and Managing Director Philip Ideson welcomes Jyothi Harley, AOP’s Director of Digital Enablement, to discuss the vision behind the show and to explore what digital transformation can look like inside visionary procurement teams. With more than 25 years of experience across practitioner, transformation, and advisory roles, Jyothi shares why there is no one-size-fits-all blueprint for procurement technology success. Instead of chasing “big bang” transformation, she explains why incremental progress grounded in culture, timing, and organizational readiness often delivers the most sustainable impact. If you’re navigating AI buzz, (re)evaluating your tech stack, or feeling pressure to transform faster than your team may be able to absorb, this conversation – and all of those that will follow it – will help you identify your best next step. In this episode, you’ll learn: Why there’s no universal playbook for digital procurement transformation How to assess your true starting point before investing in new technology Why incremental progress can be more powerful than sweeping change The role culture, adoption, and timing play in successful implementation How AOP’s digital enablement practice bridges strategy and execution This episode also marks Art of Procurement’s expanded coverage of the rapidly changing procuretech landscape through regular podcast episodes and the ProcureTech100. Links: /episode/index/show/artofprocurement/id/40219420

854: Transforming Procurement from the Inside Out W/ Ben Farrell 02/23/2026

BTW EP 25: The S-Word: Why Procurement Must Stop Saying “Savings” (and What to Replace it With) 02/18/2026

BTW EP 25: The S-Word: Why Procurement Must Stop Saying “Savings” (and What to Replace it With) Procurement’s biggest measurement problem isn’t that “savings” is incomplete. It’s that “savings” has become a substitute for truth. In the first Buy: The Way…To Purposeful Procurement episode of 2026, co-hosts Philip Ideson and Rich Ham unveil the first of the show’s new procurement “Buy-laws.” It’s the one that almost every serious practitioner agrees with, but very few organizations are ready to operationalize: replace savings with defined value. That doesn’t mean adding a few extra KPIs in addition to savings. It means removing the word entirely and replacing it with a primary metric that includes verified spend reduction and revenue generation, plus company-specific priorities like emissions reduction, process improvement, resilience, risk reduction, and anything else the business actually cares about. To help map what this kind of “value” can and should include, Phil and Rich are joined by Omer Abdullah, co-founder of The Smart Cube and co-author of Risk and Your Supply Chain: Preparing for the Next Global Crisis. Omer has spent decades close to the function, advising teams, building intelligence services around procurement decisions, and now working at the intersection of startups, go-to-market strategy, and what he calls a “post-AI” future for procurement. The idea of “post-AI” matters more than it sounds. Omer isn’t talking about a world where AI fades away. He’s talking about the moment when AI becomes a hygiene factor – embedded, expected, and no longer a differentiator. The result is uncomfortable: once AI takes the transactional load, procurement doesn’t automatically become “more strategic.” Not unless leaders define what that actually means, what outcomes it should produce, and how to measure those outcomes without defaulting back to the simplest (and most misleading) number on the page. The conversation also goes straight at one of procurement’s most corrosive incentives: short-termism. The function keeps making long-term sacrifices for short-term wins because the system asks it to. Rich calls it a “scourge,” and Omer lays out what a healthier alternative could look like. He recommends a scorecard that includes in-year expectations, multi-year outcomes that reflect how value compounds over time, and a controlled level of discretionary evaluation to capture the contributions that matter but refuse to sit neatly inside a spreadsheet cell. Underneath all of this is a truth that the episode doesn’t dodge: none of it works without executive support. The CFO and CEO have to buy into procurement’s expanded definition of value. Procurement can’t wait to be understood; they have to be sold. Procurement is a business within a business, and the C-suite is its most important customer. If leaders don’t see the function’s potential, it’s on procurement to advocate, educate, and prove (through better definitions and better scorekeeping) that the status quo isn’t merely outdated. It’s actively harmful. Links: /episode/index/show/artofprocurement/id/40092485

853: From Pain Points to Progress: Medtronic’s Procurement Evolution W/ Amit Saronwala and Jeremy Lappin 02/16/2026

853: From Pain Points to Progress: Medtronic’s Procurement Evolution W/ Amit Saronwala and Jeremy Lappin “Procurement is what you make of it. It can be a bargain basement function at some firms, but it’s also becoming more strategic. We have to take a more holistic, integrated view of things and try to understand the big business problems we can help solve and then offer a business solution, not just a procurement solution.” – Amit Saronwala, VP, Global Indirect Supply Management, Medtronic Procurement leaders in healthcare are feeling the heat: innovation cycles are tightening, supplier bases are vast, and new pressures on cost and cash flow are here to stay. So how do you build more agile, high-performing procurement teams without adding complexity or burning out your people? In this episode, Philip Ideson speaks with Amit Saronwala, VP of Global Indirect Supply Management at Medtronic, and Jeremy Lappin, CEO of Candex. Amit draws from his clinical experience and deep commercial expertise to share how Medtronic is recasting procurement’s role by focusing on smarter supplier segmentation, business-centric metrics, and technology that makes friction disappear. Jeremy adds perspective from supporting global procurement teams at scale, revealing where automation and analytics can create breathing room for strategic work. This conversation takes a candid look at how one of healthcare’s biggest names is making indirect procurement a critical lever for business value and what it takes to bring suppliers and stakeholders on the journey. In this episode, Amit and Jeremy discuss how procurement can: Set a clear line for strategic vs. transactional suppliers… and stick to it Speak “business” (not just “procurement”) to increase influence with stakeholders Automate low-risk, high-volume purchases to free up valuable talent Choose tools that require little or no change management for smoother adoption Redefine procurement’s core skillset for the next five years Links: /episode/index/show/artofprocurement/id/40087835