When organizations try to transform everything at once without first identifying where procurement can create the greatest business impact, transformation efforts often fall short. The pace of AI innovation makes it tempting to invest in new technologies before defining the business problem they are intended to solve. Without clear business outcomes and priority use cases, organizations risk investing in capabilities that fail to deliver measurable value.
Graham Crawshaw, CASME Procurement Content Director, and Matthew Bardell, Head of WNS Procurement Advisory, recently joined procurement practitioners for a practical discussion on building successful transformation programmes. Their message was clear: lasting transformation starts by aligning people, processes, data and technology around measurable business outcomes.
You can watch the session on demand—or continue reading for the key takeaways.
You can't transform everything at once—so what should you prioritise?
Procurement leaders are balancing pressure to reduce costs, manage risk, improve stakeholder experience, adopt AI and digital technologies, and build organisational capability. Every challenge represents an opportunity, but attempting to tackle everything simultaneously usually results in diluted impact.
"There's no shortage of opportunities to transform," explained Graham Crawshaw. "The hard part is knowing where to focus first and what those priorities really should be."
Matthew Bardell agreed.
"There's often a very clear reason for transformation, whether it's cost pressure or a top-down mandate to explore AI. But understanding the purpose of the transformation is critical to its success. We encourage organisations to go back to basics and ask: What does success look like, and how are we going to measure it? That's the first prerequisite for prioritising the transformation itself."
That message was reflected in the audience poll. Participants were asked to identify the single area receiving the greatest focus in their procurement transformation programmes. Cost savings ranked first (35%), followed by process efficiency (28%), reinforcing that organisations remain focused on delivering measurable business value in an increasingly uncertain economic environment.
"I'm not surprised," Graham said. "We're under significant pressure at the moment. Geopolitical instability, inflation and ongoing interest rate concerns are all increasing cost pressures for suppliers, and those pressures inevitably flow through to procurement."
Process efficiency was a close second—and for good reason.
"Many organisations are looking to standardise procurement across the business," Graham explained. Matthew added that process efficiency is also a key enabler of both cost reduction and stakeholder satisfaction.
"Process inefficiency drives unnecessary costs, and it makes the experience for employees purchasing goods and services more difficult than it needs to be."
These findings highlight an important point: while AI and technologies are attracting significant attention, procurement leaders continue to prioritise initiatives that deliver measurable operational and commercial value.
Why procurement transformations stall before delivering value
Procurement transformations rarely stall because of a lack of ambition. More often, organisations begin implementing new technologies and capabilities before putting the right foundations in place. The result is predictable: strong intentions, but limited business impact.
During the webinar, participants identified the barriers they encounter most often. Low stakeholder adoption emerged as the biggest challenge (30%), followed by unclear priorities (23%) and limited team capacity and skills (16%).
For Matthew Bardell, the results were unsurprising.
"Low stakeholder adoption is a very common challenge. Organisations often focus heavily on the technical implementation of a solution, but not enough on change management. You need to involve key users from the very start, gather their feedback throughout the programme, ensure a robust change management approach accompanies implementation, and make sure the right data foundations are in place."
That point is especially relevant as organisations look to accelerate AI adoption. While AI capabilities continue to evolve rapidly, they can only deliver meaningful value when they're built on trusted, high-quality data.
"If your data isn't usable or clean enough, you're going to have major problems building AI capabilities on top of it," Graham explained. "Cleaning data may not be the most exciting job, and it can be difficult to build a business case for it, but it's absolutely essential if you want to get credible results from the technologies you're investing in."
Matthew expanded on the point by challenging the idea that data improvement should be treated as an isolated initiative.
"Cleaning data on its own doesn't have a business case. You have to be clear about the value you're trying to create. We've seen organisations invest heavily in building data lakes, only to discover they've created data swamps instead. Our preferred approach is to start with the business processes we're trying to enable, automate, streamline or improve. Then identify the data those processes require, curate it properly, and put governance in place to ensure data quality is maintained over time."
So, how do you get it right?
With those common pitfalls in mind, organisations can build a more focused transformation roadmap by assessing five key dimensions:
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Business impact: Which business challenge matters most?
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Value potential: Where can procurement reduce costs, improve speed, reduce risk or strengthen control?
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Stakeholder pain: Where is procurement creating friction or being bypassed?
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Readiness: Are your processes, data, people and governance mature enough?
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Measurability: What tangible improvements should be visible in three, six and 12 months?
For Graham, the common thread is business alignment.
"It often comes back to business alignment. If you get that right, almost everything else follows. When procurement is aligned with the wider business, it's much easier to secure investment and demonstrate value."
Matthew believes another common reason transformations fail is the assumption that everyone shares the same view of the problem.
“There's usually a blind spot. Organisations often have a clear vision of what needs fixing, but it hasn't been sense-checked with all the relevant stakeholders. That's where many transformations begin to falter."
How does your organisation compare?
The webinar reinforced three consistent themes: start with business outcomes rather than technology, demonstrate clear value for every stakeholder, and treat change management as a strategic workstream—not an afterthought.
The final audience poll revealed that while many organisations are making progress, relatively few are completely confident that their transformation roadmap is focused on the highest-impact priorities.
To explore the full discussion, watch the CASME webinar on demand. If you're planning your own procurement transformation, WNS Procurement, Part of Capgemini would be happy to discuss your priorities, challenges and roadmap.