The mission of procurement is to continuously purchase (high quality) products and services, against the best market prices and within the right timeframe and guarantees. “It is all about increasing profit and assuring cash flow, by better managing spend”. If you really want to manage spend, you need to step back, analyze and think long term! When building a procurement strategy, one will talk about objectives, processes, supply base, categories, monitoring and evaluation, … but also “buying channels”. When spend analysis and process evaluation have been done, category strategies have been defined, then buying channels need to be identified. You cannot source all your goods and services, or categories trough the same procurement channels. “Porter’s Five Forces”, “Kraljic’s Matrix” and many others, will help you to identify the best way to source a certain item in a certain context (buying paper is different for a “printing company” than for a “car manufacturer”). Will you need a strategic relationship with the supplier, or will you have a number of preferred suppliers you will challenge, or is the “where” you buy your item absolutely irrelevant, and “automation” becomes THE objective? When automation becomes an objective, we are most likely talking about “tail spend”. And that is typically the spend you would ask the Spot Buy Centre to address.