The Best vs. the Most Dysfunctional Procurement Teams

Over the last 12 months, we sat in hundreds of conversations with procurement, sourcing, supply chain, and operations leaders at food, beverage, supplement, and pet food companies. Some had $1M in revenue, some $1B. Brands or co-manufacturers.

The same patterns below showed up throughout. No company is named here; where an example needs context, we identify only the type of business.

Both lists climb this pyramid, bottom-up: mindset at the base, then numbers, accountability, and process, with outcomes at the top. The best teams build each level. Dysfunctional teams break the same ones, in the same order.

The 7 traits of the best procurement teams

1. They’re curious, and never satisfied

The trait underneath every other trait: curious about market prices, new suppliers, new technology, and their own blind spots. It shows up as unprompted questions and unprompted ideas. A sourcing veteran 30 years into his career proposed an improvement nobody had pitched him: auto-pull current organic certificates from the USDA database ahead of audits. And the curiosity never switches off, because the world never does. Prices change, needs and capabilities change, and you will never hear a great team say “our suppliers are great, we’re not looking to change.” Their operating assumption is that the market is always moving, so go look. One supplement co-manufacturer takes 100% of spend to market annually. 1,300 ingredients. Not to switch, but to understand the market. Gartner finds the skills gaining importance in procurement are business acumen (69%) and technology (68%); traditional procurement skills sit at 26%.

2. They know their numbers cold, and pull them live

The most reliable tell in a single meeting: strong teams answer instantly or open the source system on the spot. One sourcing director: “I can just tell you what. Our 2026 budgeted annual spend will be $152,179,936.” He had the budget file open mid-meeting.

3. They’re realistic, because they know the market

Strong teams argue every business case down, not up: a supplier’s proposal, a consultant’s model, a vendor’s ROI math. Several told their own management outright that their estimates run deliberately conservative. Call it sandbagging; it is really market fluency, and it means every number they present is one they can defend. One sourcing lead cut a savings estimate nearly in half before taking it to his COO: “I don’t know that we could sit in front of our LT and tell them confidently we’re going to save two million dollars.”

4. They put a dollar figure on their own mistakes

“There was one in particular we missed in dairy protein in Q4 that, I mean, it cost us over $300,000.” Strong teams volunteer what failures cost, because that number is the budget for fixing the process.

5. The process is a system, not a hero

Cross-functional by default: QA, finance, and R&D come into supplier decisions early because the process puts them there, not because somebody remembered to forward an email. Specs, approvals, and supplier history are documented where the whole team can see them, so the work survives a vacation, a departure, or an audit. The same instinct extends to supply itself: backup suppliers are qualified before they are needed, never after the outage.

6. They know strategic sourcing from procurement, and do both

Procurement is transactional execution: POs, replenishment, document chasing. Strategic sourcing is market-facing value creation: category strategy, supplier discovery, negotiation, risk design. The best teams structure so the first never eats the second; a breakfast foods brand keeps 85-90% of sourcing strategy in-house and outsources tactical purchase-to-pay. Deloitte’s top performers spend 39% of their time on strategic work vs 25% for followers.

7. Suppliers are partners, not adversaries

The best teams treat suppliers as partners rather than transactions, and expect the same in return: proactive market intelligence, early warnings, professionalism. They award on total value, keep redundancy, and hold suppliers accountable without hostility. A veteran candy buyer: “The fewer the better in any given category, but you always want to have backup suppliers. You want insurance.”

The 7 traits of dysfunctional procurement teams

1. Fixed mindset

“We met our suppliers eight years ago. Why would we ever switch?” A real head of procurement said that; the CEO fired him a few months later. The failure is not loyalty. It is believing that market knowledge from eight years ago is still knowledge, and treating re-evaluation as an insult to the relationship instead of basic hygiene. The same mindset wears a more modern costume too: “Buying software has me… locked into something that may be obsolete in three months.” Information gets hoarded, and “everything will change anyway” does duty as a reason to do nothing. Healthy diligence asks hard questions and then answers them; this version never engages at all.

2. They don’t know their own numbers, and don’t check

One director of planning and procurement, after finally running a report live: “I got 8,800 items. So when I said less than 1,000, I lied.” McKinsey reports less than 20% of available procurement data is ever used at most companies.

3. Nothing gets a dollar sign

Where the best teams quantify their misses, the worst claim not to have any: “We bury it pretty well, so I don’t know if it really has an impact.” A spotless record is a record of no measurement. And when pain is admitted at all, it is framed as vague time loss (“It was time. More than anything, it was time”) or as macro forces nobody can control: tariffs, war, weather. If pain has no dollar sign, it never gets budget, and nothing ever gets fixed.

4. The process lives in one person’s head

“If I’m out, then no one does anything.” One veteran, an inbox, zero redundancy. The catastrophic version: a supplier changed an ingredient and emailed only the company’s previous owners; the result was an undeclared allergen and a nationwide Class 1 recall. 69% of F&B companies still run critical processes on spreadsheets, fax, and email.

5. Too busy to plan, so everything runs at once

“This would be the only 15 minutes I could carve out for the next two weeks.” Too busy for strategy, too busy to learn, purely reactionary. The cruel part: the busyness is caused by the broken process they are too busy to fix. And because nothing ever gets prioritized, everything gets started. One company was simultaneously running an ERP upgrade, evaluating AI tools, switching corporate cards, and re-bidding freight: “All of these initiatives have kind of just dragged out.” Nothing finishes because no one ever says no.

6. The doers can’t decide, and the deciders don’t do

Decisions run through people who neither use the process nor own the outcome, while the actual users and the budget owner stay walled off. One co-manufacturer sent a freight coordinator to a sourcing evaluation: “We’re not the people that take the decision in this case.” The day-to-day version is quieter: buyers who cannot commit to a re-bid, and spec changes approved by people who have never talked to the supplier.

7. Indecisive: the slow maybe

The most dysfunctional teams do not say no. They also do not say yes. Every decision gets parked for a Monday that never comes: the stale pricing that stays “on the list to re-bid” for three straight quarters, the backup supplier who never gets qualified, the process fix everyone agrees on and no one schedules. And the dysfunctional teams never recognize that not deciding is itself a decision, one that leaves value on the table where no report will ever show it. Research for The JOLT Effect found 40-60% of B2B buying processes now end in no decision at all.

The 30-minute tells

You can read a procurement team in one meeting, whether you are auditing your own, interviewing a candidate, or sizing up a partner: the questions they ask (market and edge cases, or only price); how they talk about supplier history (a cadence or a story); whether they pull numbers live or guess; who shows up unprompted; which direction they move a business case’s numbers; whether they can put a dollar on their last mistake; and how the meeting ends (a date and an owner on the calendar, or “send me materials”). Remember that decisive teams close loops in both directions. The worst outcome is not no. It is drift.

The gap is worth closing: Hackett finds world-class procurement organizations deliver 2.6x higher ROI at 19% lower cost as a percent of spend.

Sources: Hackett 2025 | McKinsey 2024 | Deloitte 2023 CPO Survey | TraceGains 2024 | Gartner 2023 via Supply Chain Dive | The JOLT Effect (Dixon & McKenna, 2022)