By Nick Hudson
Most procurement transformations change the tooling but not the cycle time. The real gains come from attacking the wait states between decisions, not the work.
In over ten years across the GCC, I have seen the same pattern in procurement: most large enterprises have transformed the function at least once, yet a strategic RFP still takes as long as it ever did. The tooling changed; the cycle time didn’t. That is where programmes quietly stall — rarely a technology problem, but a question of how decisions get made and how long sourcing waits. What moves the number is attacking those wait states: collapsing hand-offs and pulling decision-makers and suppliers into the room. On one MTN Group programme, doing that cut RFP cycle times by 55%.
Why hasn’t the cycle time moved?
Look closely at one of these programmes and the symptoms are familiar. There is a target operating model on a slide somewhere, a category strategy, a digital sourcing platform that took eighteen months to implement. The function looks modernised. Yet the people who run sourcing will tell you, quietly, that nothing important about the timeline has changed — the big decisions still take as long to make, and the work still stops between them.
That gap — between the transformation that was bought and the outcome it was meant to produce — is rarely a technology problem. The platform usually works. It is a problem of how decisions get made, how work flows between functions, and how long a sourcing exercise sits waiting for an approval, a clarification, or a committee that meets fortnightly. Until those are addressed, a new system simply digitises the same delays.
Activity is not the same as outcome
Procurement transformation tends to be measured by the things that are easy to count: spend under management, contracts migrated, suppliers onboarded, compliance rates. These matter, but none of them is the thing the business actually feels. What the business feels is time — how long it takes to go from “we need this” to “we have a signed contract that delivers it.” When that number doesn’t move, no amount of platform adoption will convince a sceptical CFO that the transformation worked.
The uncomfortable truth is that most of the delay in a strategic sourcing cycle is not work. It is waiting. Waiting for sign-off, waiting for legal, waiting for a stakeholder to come back from leave, waiting for the next governance gate. Map a real RFP end to end and the hands-on effort is often a small fraction of the elapsed time. The rest is queue.
Borrowing the right discipline from delivery
This is familiar territory for anyone who has run an agile transformation in software or operations. The insight that reorganised delivery teams twenty years ago — that flow matters more than utilisation, that small batches move faster than big ones, that a decision deferred is a cost incurred — applies almost directly to sourcing.
We describe the application of those ideas to sourcing as Procurement Agility. It is not a rebrand of agile, and it is not about running stand-ups in the procurement office. It is the deliberate application of Lean-Agile Procurement principles — visualising the whole sourcing flow, cutting work into smaller increments, pulling decision-makers and suppliers into the room at the same time rather than serialising them, and ruthlessly attacking the wait states between steps. The framework is open and well documented; what matters is the discipline of applying it to a function that has historically optimised for control rather than speed.
What it looks like in practice
On a programme with MTN Group’s Global Shared Services Centre, this approach delivered a 55% reduction in strategic RFP cycle times. That figure is worth sitting with, because it did not come from a new platform or a bigger team. It came from changing how the work flowed: collapsing sequential hand-offs into structured working sessions, bringing requirements, sourcing, legal and the supplier into the same conversation earlier, and making the queue visible so that the organisation could see — and remove — where time was actually being lost.
The pattern repeats across organisations. The biggest gains rarely come from doing the work faster. They come from not waiting between the work. Once a sourcing function can see its own flow, the bottlenecks are usually obvious, and they are usually decisions, not tasks. A requirement that sat for three weeks awaiting a clarification, a contract held a fortnight for a signature that took two minutes to give — these are not capacity problems, and no amount of extra resource will fix them. They are problems of sequence and visibility, and both can be changed quickly.
Where transformation programmes go wrong
Three mistakes recur. The first is installing a framework instead of changing the operating model — adopting the ceremonies and the vocabulary while leaving the underlying governance, approval chains and incentives exactly as they were. The activity changes; the outcome doesn’t.
The second is measuring the wrong thing. If the transformation’s success metric is platform adoption or process compliance, the programme will optimise for those and quietly tolerate the same cycle times. Anchor the programme to an outcome the board can see — elapsed time to contract, time-to-value on strategic categories — and the behaviour follows.
The third is treating procurement as an island. The delays that matter usually live at the seams: between procurement and the business that raised the requirement, between procurement and legal, between procurement and finance. A transformation that only changes what happens inside the procurement team leaves most of the wait state untouched.
Starting small, proving fast
None of this requires a multi-year programme to begin. The most reliable way to start is to take one real, strategic sourcing exercise, map how it actually flows today, and run it differently — with the wait states visible and the decision-makers pulled in early. In practice that means putting the whole flow on a wall, agreeing who can decide what without escalating, and replacing serial email approvals with a short, time-boxed working session where the people who would otherwise have been a fortnight apart are in the room together. A single cycle is usually enough to show the organisation what is possible, and to build the case for changing the operating model behind it. Procurement transformation that proves itself on one live RFP is far more persuasive than one that arrives as a slide pack.
The function that gets this right stops being the place where good intentions go to wait. It becomes a source of speed the rest of the business can feel — which is, in the end, the only transformation that counts.
About the Author
Nick Hudson is co-founder of Agility Arabia, a Dubai-based boutique consultancy specialising in procurement transformation and Procurement Agility for large enterprises across the GCC. He has over 30 years’ delivery experience, more than ten of them in the region, including work with Emirates Airline, Ooredoo, ACWA Power and Riyad Bank, and is a Scrum.org Professional Training Network partner.
