Eight questions on how your procurement function really operates, from category strategy and supplier visibility to contract governance and whether major awards ever face independent review.
A procurement function can hit every savings target and still expose the organisation, because savings are measured at signature and consequences arrive during delivery. This assessment scores the disciplines that show up after the contract is signed.
Last reviewed 3 July 2026 · Free and ungated
Selected senior operators from the Global Board, including people who have sold and delivered these contracts, can challenge your next major award confidentially.
Pressure-test your shortlistAnswer for how major awards actually run today, not for what the procurement policy says should happen.
Procurement here is processing transactions, not managing exposure. The organisation is choosing suppliers on the strength of their sales process rather than your evaluation process, and the cost of that shows up later, in delivery, dependency and renewals negotiated from weakness.
The function has real process on the biggest deals and thin coverage everywhere else. The exposure is the middle tier: contracts too small for scrutiny and too large to fail without damage, signed on vendor paper with nobody tracking the obligations.
This is a function the business takes seriously: aligned early, commercially literate, watching its contracts. The residual weakness in most functions at this level is the feedback loop: delivery experience and independent challenge still depend on individuals rather than the system.
These answers describe procurement operating as a genuine control and value function. The remaining risk is concentration of a different kind: mature functions develop house views (preferred vendors, trusted integrators, settled category doctrine) and house views go stale without anyone noticing.
Procurement functions get measured on the number agreed at signature, so that is what improves. This assessment scores the disciplines that never appear in a savings report and decide whether the saving was real: risk that moves decisions, contracts that stay governed, delivery experience that reaches the next award.
Each answer is worth 0, 5 or 10 points; the total maps to a score out of 100 and one of four maturity bands. Pay less attention to the band than to the shape: a function scoring 10 on commercial discipline and 0 on independent review has a very specific weakness, and it is the one vendors can sense.
Re-run the assessment after each major award cycle rather than on a fixed calendar. The questions are stable, so movement in the answers reflects real change in how the function operates. An answer that moves down after a rushed quarter is telling you something the savings number will not.
Both, separately. The gap between the CPO's answers and the business unit answers is a finding in itself: alignment that exists only in the procurement team's view of itself is not alignment.
Signature savings and delivered value diverge over the life of a contract. A function that scores low here can report excellent savings while the organisation accumulates dependency, weak exit positions and delivery failure: costs that arrive after the savings were booked.
People with no stake in the outcome examining the requirement, the shortlist and the recommendation before commitment, asking whether the evaluation was built to find the best option or to justify the preferred one. It can be internal, but the challenge is sharper from operators who have seen many comparable deals.