Procurement in transition: From episodic to continuous

This is the second blog in a series drawn from Closing the Gap: How Procurement Moves from Insight to Action, a whitepaper produced by Beroe in partnership with Kearney. Across the series, we examine why procurement’s operating model has failed to keep pace with its expanded mandate, and what it will take to close the gap between intelligence and action.  

The environment in which procurement operates has become continuous, but its decision model remains largely episodic. This mismatch is at the heart of the problem, and it is becoming impossible to ignore.

How has procurement’s mandate changed?

It wasn’t that long ago that people checked the news just once or twice a day. Information arrived in defined intervals – the morning paper, the evening bulletin, the daily briefing. There was time to absorb what had happened, interpret its relevance, and decide how to respond. Today, information is continuous, arriving minute-by-minute, often before the implications are clear. The challenge is no longer how to access information, but knowing what matters, what to act on, and how quickly.

Procurement has experienced a similar shift. For many years, it operated around defined decision intervals, where category strategies were refreshed annually, supplier reviews happened periodically, sourcing events were scheduled, and market intelligence was gathered to support defined planning cycles rather than continuous action. Performance was measured primarily against one question: did procurement deliver savings against the agreed baseline?

That question has not disappeared. But it has been joined by many others. Today, procurement is expected to protect margin, manage supply risk, support sustainability commitments, strengthen resilience, improve working capital, and help the business respond faster to a market environment that does not pause for planning cycles. The mandate has expanded significantly in scope, in strategic weight, and in the speed at which it must be executed.

The underlying rhythms made sense in a world where markets were more stable, planning horizons were longer, and the main performance question was whether procurement could deliver savings against its agreed baseline. But that world no longer exists. Markets now move continuously. Cost drivers shift in real time, supplier risk can emerge overnight, and both external events and internal business priorities increasingly reshape category dynamics faster than procurement processes can respond.

In a continuous operating model, the question isn’t when the next category strategy refresh is scheduled – it’s what’s changed since I last looked, and what needs acting on today. A tariff announcement shifts cost assumptions overnight. A key supplier’s credit rating drops, flagging concentration risk before the next quarterly review. A commodity index moves 12 percent in a month, reopening a sourcing window that was closed just weeks earlier. In an episodic model, each of these may get addressed at the next planning cycle – weeks or months later. In a continuous one, they are acted on when they happen.

The C-suite agenda has moved

The pressure on procurement cannot be understood only from the inside. It has to be seen from the wider perspective of the enterprise, where leadership is under pressure to deliver margin, resilience, speed, and sustainability in increasingly volatile conditions. 

Today, procurement is directly involved in how each of these pressures is managed. It is expected to protect the P&L, strengthen working capital, manage risk, support sustainability, and enable speed to market – all while avoiding disruption in a market where ‘poly-crisis’ is the new normal, with tariff shocks, persistent inflation, sudden wars, and climate change. 

Procurement is no longer simply optimizing what the business buys; it is increasingly helping determine what to buy, from whom, and under what conditions. On the one hand, this is a promotion. But it is also a problem: procurement has been structurally elevated without being structurally redesigned.

Procurement got promoted, but the job got harder

In many large enterprises, procurement now has better visibility with the executive team than it did a decade ago. CPOs are closer to finance, operations, supply chain, sustainability, and risk, and procurement is included earlier in strategic conversations. More stakeholders recognize the function’s role in enterprise performance – but this increased visibility has not always come with increased capacity. 

Category managers today are responsible for more categories, more suppliers, more markets, more data sources, and more strategic objectives than ever before. The operating model has become more complex, but the human capacity available to manage that complexity has not increased at the same pace. 

While the old procurement scorecard was savings-heavy, the emerging scorecard now encompasses realized value, value leakage, speed of response, risk mitigation, resilience, ESG impact, compliance, stakeholder experience, and working capital contribution. This creates a fundamental capacity challenge: procurement is expected to make more decisions, faster, across more dimensions, with greater conviction, and with more enterprise consequences attached.

An operating model designed for another era

Procurement technology has improved significantly. Investments have digitized workflows, resulting in improved compliance, increased visibility, and reduced manual effort. But in many cases, this has led to digitized fragments of the process rather than improvements to the process itself. 

These investments have not fundamentally changed how strategic procurement decisions are made. CPOs and category managers alike still have to assemble a fragmented picture – pulling data from multiple systems, reconciling inconsistencies, and aligning stakeholders. In many organizations, this work still happens across spreadsheets, emails, and disconnected tools. By the time decisions are made, the underlying conditions may already have changed. 

Technology has improved visibility without improving decision velocity. The result is a procurement function that can access more data, more dashboards, and more signals than ever before. However, assembling a coherent view still requires significant manual effort. As analyst firm Gartner recently noted, legacy processes and poor data quality remain major obstacles to digital and agentic procurement, with incomplete digitalization and fragmented process visibility continuing to hinder AI effectiveness and workflow integration.

While organizations have invested in data, analytics, and workflow tools, there remains no consistent layer that connects these elements and translates fragmented signals into coordinated, high-impact action. The gap between what procurement is expected to do and what it is structurally equipped to deliver continues to widen. Procurement has been elevated to a critical enterprise function, but it continues to operate on foundations designed for a different era. 

That gap is becoming impossible to ignore. Closing the Gap: How Procurement Moves from Insight to Action, a whitepaper authored by Beroe and Kearney, explores how procurement can close it. To read the full whitepaper, click here.  

To find out how Beroe MAX, powered by Kearney, is closing the gap between visibility and action, read the full press release here. 

Interested in learning more? Join our webinar on 30th June.

References

Gartner, Predicts 2026: Procurement Taking Steps to Become AI-First, Ryan Polk, Cian Curtin, Mel Mohamednur, Miguel Cossio, Lynne Phelan, Meghan O’Doherty, 12 December 2025