The Untapped Opportunity in Services Procurement
The Untapped Opportunity in Services Procurement
Services procurement has been one of the biggest, misunderstood areas of organisational spend. It accounts for almost half of global organisational expenditure, yet for years has sat in a grey area, vital to business outcomes, but lacking ownership, structure, and visibility.
This issue formed the basis of a discussion between Nat Jackson and Darren Topping from Guidant Global, and our CEO, Jonny Dunning, exploring why services procurement has been left behind, and how it’s changing.
Services Procurement Has Been Left Behind
“Organisations buy goods, people, and services. Buying goods is solved. Buying people is solved. But the way organisations buy services? It’s nowhere near as mature.”
Procurement has spent years refining how it manages goods, items that are easily defined, tangible, priced per unit, and easy to catalogue. Services, on the other hand, are difficult to define, complex, variable, and outcome driven.
“Services are intangible hard to define, hard to track, hard to measure. Goods have SKUs; services have outcomes.”
The large difference in lifecycles and process explains why services spend has remained unmanaged. With manual processes, contingent workforce technology and generic procurement systems not fitting the complex needs of services, end-users circumvent the process, misclassification occurs, scopes drift, and control and visibility disappears.
The Unmanaged Services Procurement Risks
“When people can’t get what they need through procurement, they go around it. That’s where misclassification, rogue spend, and risk creep in.”
The impact is more than administrative, it means missed savings, unmanaged risk, and less control over performance and outcomes. But as the conversation highlights, the opportunity on the other side is significant.
The Game-Changing Opportunity
“When businesses start running services procurement properly, we’re seeing 10–20% savings per project and faster speed to value.”
That level of improvement doesn’t just come from efficiency, it comes from alignment across the organisation and c-suite. When procurement and business units operate from a shared system and process built for services, it stops being a cost and starts becoming a strategic advantage.
And with AI now capable of analysing unstructured project data, what was once “too complex” to manage is no longer out of reach.
“AI has taken away the excuses. Large language models mean the unstructured data that made services procurement ‘too hard’ is now manageable.”
Solving Services Procurement
It’s clear that services procurement is moving from sitting in the background to the core of enterprise strategy. The question for organisations isn’t whether they should focus on it, it’s how.
“It starts with ownership. Recognise the problem, take responsibility, and be curious about how others are solving it.”
As services continue to drive transformation, innovation, and growth, understanding and taking ownership of the problem will be the strategic success factor for organisations to create value and compete effectively in the market.