“Procurement ensures vendor accountability.”
SLAs are in the contract. Performance reviews are scheduled. We hold vendors to clear standards. Accountability is built into the relationship.
You own the vendor relationship. You can’t fire them.
The vendor is underperforming. You documented it. You raised it. But the contract was signed by an executive who’s now in a different role. The switching cost is too high for finance to approve. The business unit that depends on the vendor says they can’t absorb a transition. You’re accountable for a relationship you can’t end, with a vendor you can’t pressure, under terms you didn’t set.
When procurement owns the scorecard but not the exit decision, accountability is documentation without power.
“We have a standardized procurement process.”
All purchases follow the same workflow. Thresholds are clear. Approvals are tiered. The process ensures consistency and cost control.
Every department found a way around your process.
Engineering buys through expense reports. Marketing uses a credit card. Sales commits to vendor partnerships that bypass procurement entirely. By the time you see the spend, the commitment is already made. Your “standardized process” covers 60% of actual purchasing. The other 40% routes around you because your process is too slow for how the business actually moves.
When 40% of spend bypasses procurement, the process isn’t governing — it’s observing.
“We track vendor performance rigorously.”
Quarterly reviews. Scorecards. SLA dashboards. Vendor performance is measured and managed.
The scorecard says the vendor is meeting SLAs. The team that uses them disagrees.
The SLA says 99% uptime. The vendor achieved it. But the 1% downtime happened during the three busiest hours of the month. The response time SLA counts from ticket creation, not from when the user noticed. The metrics in the contract and the experience on the ground are measuring different things. The vendor is compliant. The service is inadequate. Both are true at the same time.
When the vendor meets the SLA and the team is still struggling, the contract is measuring the wrong things.
“We have a mature vendor portfolio.”
Long-standing relationships. Proven partners. The vendor ecosystem has been built over years of careful selection.
Half your vendors were chosen by people who no longer work here.
The vendor was selected in 2018 by a CTO who had a relationship with their CEO. That CTO left in 2020. The relationship is now managed by someone three levels down who inherited the contract and doesn’t know why it was structured this way. The vendor knows this. They know you’re locked in. The “strategic partnership” in the contract is a one-sided memory.
When vendor relationships outlive the people who chose them, the organization is locked into decisions it can no longer explain.
“Vendor management is centralized.”
Procurement coordinates across the organization. We consolidate spend. We negotiate enterprise agreements. Central coordination is how we get leverage.
You centralized the contracts. You didn’t centralize the relationships.
Three departments use the same vendor. Each has their own contact. Each negotiated different terms at different times. None of them know what the others are paying. When you try to consolidate, each team insists their arrangement is unique. You have central visibility into the contracts. You have zero visibility into how the vendor actually operates across the org. Centralization gave you a spreadsheet. It didn’t give you coordination.
When three teams use the same vendor and none of them coordinate, centralization is a label, not a function.
Every lens sees the same system. Shared language is how the system starts to learn.
These aren’t failures of people. They’re the physics of organizations operating at scale and speed.