Why the same project is re-tendered two years later

A procurement project can deliver an excellent result and, before long, still leave the organization almost exactly where it started. I've been seeing this pattern for more than 25 years.

A category needs more intensive management. Maybe the market and supplier landscape has shifted significantly over time. Maybe the company acquired a business that buys the same category, and its impact on the bottom line has grown noticeably. Maybe management has set a savings target the existing team can't reach with the capacity it has. So a project gets set up.

For twelve to sixteen weeks, a small team works through everything procurement normally has no time for day to day: spend gets cleansed, suppliers clustered, cost structures analyzed, markets researched, negotiation levers identified, a sourcing strategy built. And the result is often genuinely good: a clear fact base, a negotiation strategy, a list of opportunities and, standard these days, measurable savings.

Then the project ends. The project team leaves. The final presentation goes into a folder. The Excel models sit somewhere on SharePoint. Maybe someone gets a methodology document and a few hours of handover.

Two years later, the category is back on the table. Prices have changed, a contract is expiring, a new supplier has entered the market, another has been acquired, volumes have shifted. The business unit has less budget. Someone opens the old project folder.

The first question usually isn't "What did we decide?" It's "How did they actually calculate this?"

That's exactly what most organizations underestimate. The real value of a strategic procurement project doesn't lie only in the recommendation at the end. It lies in the analytical system and methodology that produced it: which data was used, how suppliers were compared, which assumptions carried the should-cost model, which market indicators mattered, which negotiation arguments worked (and which didn't). The result can be documented. The reasoning is far harder to preserve, because it consists mostly of knowledge. And when that reasoning disappears, the next team does something entirely rational: it starts over from scratch. New spend analysis, new supplier interviews, new market research, new cost models.

The project doesn't repeat because the first one was bad. It repeats because the organization kept the result, but not the capability that produced it.

I've worked both with and inside consulting firms, and I consider external project teams extremely valuable. They bring capacity, specialized methodological knowledge, external benchmarks and sometimes exactly the pressure needed to challenge assumptions that have long been accepted internally. The problem starts when companies confuse access to analytical and methodological capability (and the knowledge that comes with it) with owning that capability. During the project, the organization has both. Afterward, often only the slides remain.

You could call it a rental contract. Not because consultants deliberately hold knowledge back; good consultants do the opposite. It's because a large part of the capability lives in the way the team itself works: in the analyst who knows how to structure the data, in the expert who can tell which cost driver really matters, in the category guru who knows which benchmark can be trusted. These people leave when the engagement ends. And without a mechanism to preserve their analytical and methodological work in a usable form, part of the capability leaves with them.

A PowerPoint deck doesn't solve this. A methodology handbook usually doesn't either. Knowing that you should run a supplier cost analysis is different from having the underlying cost logic, the assumptions and the decision history at hand when you need to update it eighteen months later. It's the difference between cooking from a recipe (sometimes it tastes great, sometimes not so much) and a chef who can cook the dish "blind," without scales or measuring cups, at three-star level.

I've essentially seen three responses to this challenge:

• Knowledge transfer at the end of the project. I think it's necessary, but usually too late. Four months of expert-level analytical, methodological and process thinking can't be squeezed into a two-hour handover.
• Methodology documents and playbooks. I think they're useful for standardizing ways of working. But they rarely capture enough of the actual analytical and methodological context, and they don't really enable knowledge transfer. The same work has to be done again later.
• Bigger teams. I think this naturally increases procurement's own capacity, meaning how much work procurement can get done. But it doesn't automatically make the knowledge created along the way reusable, let alone scalable.

What I haven't seen often enough is a procurement organization where every analysis makes the next one easier. Where a should-cost model doesn't end as an Excel file but becomes a living model. Where a supplier negotiation doesn't end with the signed contract but deepens the organization's understanding of that supplier. Where a market analysis doesn't disappear when the presentation is closed but becomes part of the category's lasting knowledge base, even when buyer "X" leaves (see my note from September 11).

That would change the economics of procurement consulting considerably. Not by making consultants redundant; quite the opposite. The best external expertise could be applied to increasingly demanding questions instead of rebuilding the foundation again and again. The first project builds the model. The next one improves it. The third starts from a level of knowledge that used to get lost between projects.

That's what organizational learning should look like. And yet we still often treat analytical and methodological work in procurement, and domain expertise (on a specific category, for instance), like a disposable product: a project starts, a project ends, a folder stays behind, and two years later it's Groundhog Day again.

On Monday, September 28, we'll show what we've been working on at Elevatry. One of the questions behind it was remarkably simple: What would strategic procurement look like if yesterday's analytical work, methodological knowledge and domain expertise became the starting point for tomorrow, instead of something that has to be rebuilt? This isn't an argument against consulting. It's an argument for making every piece of expertise cumulative and treating it the way it deserves to be treated: as a competitive differentiator with a major impact on business success (one that also secures our jobs in strategic procurement).

This week's question for my network of procurement experts: How often have you restarted a project that was two or three years old, only to find that you could see the result, but could no longer trace how the team got there?

I'm interested in your experience, especially from categories and spend segments where external projects run regularly, and I welcome every comment! If you don't want to miss the Elevatry launch and upcoming Friday notes, you can sign up for free here.

— Heiko, founder of Elevatry. 25 years of strategic procurement. Elevatry goes live on September 28 at 3:00 p.m. My next note will be published on October 2: Three quarters of the time.