I Was Handed a Healthcare Organisation With No Procurement Function. Here’s What I Built.
“You’re the CPO now. There is no team. Start Monday.” That brief taught me more about procurement than two consulting firms did.
Years ago, a healthcare organisation asked me to step in as acting CPO. Not to advise. To run it.
There was no procurement function to run. No team. No category strategies. No supplier policy. Spend decisions made wherever they happened to land: clinical heads buying one way, administration another, everyone convinced their supplier relationships were special.
I had spent years at BCG and Accenture telling clients what good procurement looked like. Now I had to build it from a blank sheet, inside an organisation where every rupee saved mattered and every stockout had real consequences.
What I learned, in order of how hard it hurt:
1. The org chart is the strategy.
Until someone owns the spend, nothing else matters. The first win was not a negotiation. It was getting agreement on who decides what, and making procurement a function people route through, not around.
2. Data before deals.
My instinct was to start sourcing immediately. Wrong. We first spent weeks building a basic picture: what we bought, from whom, at what concentration. Several “obvious” sourcing targets turned out to be small. Several boring categories turned out to be where the money was. Every sourcing wave after that was aimed by data, not anecdote.
3. Stakeholders sign off on savings. Suppliers don’t deliver them; people do.
In healthcare, clinicians can veto any supplier change with one safety concern. Legitimate or not. We won by bringing them into specification decisions early, not by presenting them with a fait accompli.
4. Quick wins buy you the right to do slow work.
A few fast, visible wins in unglamorous categories earned the credibility to tackle the harder, structural categories later.
That engagement is the direct foundation of what our firm now offers as Interim / Fractional CPO work. Not theory from a framework library. A function personally stood up, mistakes included.
Most small and mid-sized companies we meet today look like that healthcare organisation did on day one, and for the same blameless reason: they grew faster than the buy side of their org chart. Procurement still sits where it started, inside finance or operations, and the lever is waiting to be worked. The playbook for standing it up exists. We have run it.