If services spend feels harder to track, measure, or control, that’s because it is. Unlike goods, services are less tangible, more variable, and often managed across different teams with traditional tools.

You can’t control what you can’t see, and for many organisations, services spend is hiding in plain sight.

Outsourced services are essential but, when they’re managed with the wrong tools, hidden costs quickly increase. From vague scopes to missed milestones, this article explores why services procurement often goes wrong, and what to do about it.

This survey brings to light common pain points experienced across industries from operational inefficiencies and ambiguous ownership to challenges with visibility, data, compliance, and strategic decision making.

Services procurement plays a critical role in organisations that rely on outsourced expertise. But without the right tools in place, the process can quickly become complex, inconsistent, and inefficient. To ensure services procurement is delivering value, it’s essential to assess how current processes are working and where they might be falling short.

When most people think about procurement, they picture systems that manage physical goods, everything from office supplies to industrial equipment. But there’s a massive part of company spending that often falls under the radar: services.  

"When considering bringing AI solutions into your organisation, the critical thing is to be clear on any deployment goals by identifying the high value AI use cases. Ultimately, if you're lining up the deployment goals with your business strategy to clearly understand what you want to get out of AI, I think that's the key to success."

"Ideally base high consequence decisions around internal data where you can, because that's the data you theoretically should have the highest level of trust in, particularly if it's being captured by a system as part of a workflow."

Drawing on first hand experiences of starting and scaling successful service procurement programs from within the strategic sourcing function.

How service procurement professionals can leverage people, process, and technology to become business-enablers.

What started as a meme became a great conversation about choosing the right contracting mechanism when getting work done.

The importance of contracts in the world where non-lawyers are negotiating complex services contracts.

The role of heroes, villains and storytelling in managing spend on services in large organisations.

How do we guide people on the best way to liberate the opportunity rather than leaving them to be the architects of their own problem?

To understand the opportunity in SOW spend management, we surveyed the attendees of CWS Summit Europe 2024 and their peers on LinkedIn. Read the results here.

Learnings from implementing an SOW spend management program, told from the perspective of both procurement and MSP partner.

How can the market get a better understanding of the huge savings that can be made?

Practical advice on combining curiosity, technology, the right stakeholders and a good MSP in driving successful SOW management programs.

When it comes to SoW, who should be involved and how does procurement ensure everyone is adding value?

How you can use consistent, detailed analytics to understand the value of outcome-based services.

The beauty of procurement’s exposure to the wider business and tying this understanding in to systems, process and policy