Procurement Controls the Price but Not Whether the Purchase Works

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Enterprise buying has a verification problem, and for thirty years the assumed answer has been procurement. Procurement reviews the deal, challenges the terms, and stands as the control point where a vendor claim meets an independent party.

The assumption is reasonable and the results have been thin, and the reason is structural rather than personal. Procurement was asked to perform a function it was never equipped to perform, and then measured on something else entirely.

What Independent Verification Requires

Scientific peer review is the closest working analogue, and it is useful precisely because its preconditions are explicit. Peer review functions because reviewers hold domain expertise in the specific claim under review, because they hold the authority to reject, because the review happens before the claim is accepted rather than after, and because a record follows the claim after publication so that failures to replicate attach to the original.

Take away any one of those and peer review stops being verification and becomes a formality.

Now apply the same list to procurement.

Domain expertise in the specific claim is rare. A procurement professional evaluating a manufacturing optimization platform is not positioned to assess whether an 18 percent scrap reduction assumption is defensible. The people who could assess it sit in operations and are not in the room with authority.

Authority to reject on value grounds is rarer still. Procurement can reject on price, on terms, on compliance, on supplier risk. Rejecting a business case because its adoption assumption is unsupportable is a different kind of authority, and it generally belongs to the sponsor who wrote the business case.

Timing works against it as well. Procurement typically engages after the solution has been selected, so the claim has already been accepted and what remains is a negotiation over its price. The narrowing that decided which solutions were candidates at all happened earlier still.

A record that follows the claim is the sharpest gap of the four. Once the contract is signed, procurement’s jurisdiction largely ends. The 30 percent improvement that justified the purchase is nobody’s obligation to check eighteen months later, and there is no mechanism that attaches the outcome back to the projection.

Optimized for What It Was Measured On

Given that mandate, procurement did exactly what any function does. It optimized what it was measured on and what it had authority over, which was cost.

The consequences show up in the published research, in two separate measures that should not be run together as though they were one. World Commerce and Contracting’s long-running work on contract value erosion puts the average at 8.6 percent, with poor contracting practices eroding value equivalent to roughly 9 percent of annual revenue and complex industries frequently losing 15 percent or more. A separate and more recent WorldCC report, summarized by the organization in January 2026, puts erosion in procurement contracts specifically at 11 percent. Those are different populations rather than one number moving, and WorldCC attributes the 11 percent to a fragmented operating model spread across the whole lifecycle rather than to the period after signature alone. WorldCC is a membership body that publishes a contract management standard of its own, which is worth saying plainly.

Its president, Tim Cummins, names the mechanism in the same terms this argument would use. Many individuals are expected to protect value without holding the authority or the data to do it, while the people who hold formal authority sit too far from execution to be accountable for the result. That is the diagnosis, and it is the right one. The remedy offered alongside it is a contract management standard the organization adopts and applies to itself, which leaves the organization grading its own work with a better instrument. What is still unassigned is who, on the buyer’s side, holds the obligation to test the claim before the money moves and to check it against the outcome afterward.

The maturity picture matches. Avasant’s 2022 research on IT vendor governance found 24 percent of organizations applying a practice that is both formal and consistently applied. Deloitte’s 2025 Global Chief Procurement Officer Survey, drawn from more than 250 chief procurement officers across 40 countries, identifies siloed ways of working as the single most cited barrier to value delivery, named by 57 percent of respondents, ahead of competing priorities at 46 percent and capability at 40 percent. Procurement operating in isolation from finance, operations, and supply chain has limited visibility into total cost of ownership, which is another way of saying it cannot see the thing it is supposed to verify.

None of this describes a function performing badly. It describes a function doing the job it was given, while a different job sits unassigned.

The Paradox

Procurement was designed to enforce discipline in enterprise buying and was optimized for price control rather than value verification. Without the authority to test claims, the expertise to evaluate them, the timing to intervene before acceptance, or the jurisdiction to measure outcomes afterward, it could not become the verification system that enterprise buying required.

This is why every reform of the last three decades partially worked. Strategic sourcing improved price, supplier relationship management improved continuity, and category management improved leverage. Each addressed a real problem inside procurement’s actual authority. None of them addressed verification, because verification was never inside that authority to begin with.

Assigning the Mandate

Giving procurement more power and hoping for the best does not close this. The correction is to state where the verification obligation sits and to give it the four preconditions that make verification work.

Expertise means the person who can assess the assumption sits in the review with standing, rather than being consulted afterward. Authority means someone other than the author of a business case can send it back on evidentiary grounds. The test has to happen before selection rather than get priced after it, which is what timing means here. And persistence means the projection that justified the spend is still on the record when the outcome arrives, with a named owner and a scheduled comparison.

Those are four declarations. A buyer can make all of them inside authority it already holds, which is why this is a standard rather than a transformation program. The organization does not need new powers. It needs to say out loud who holds the ones it has, which is the same difficulty a standard runs into when nobody is named as its custodian.

Procurement did not fail at value verification. It was never given it, and the question of who holds it instead is still open.

Deloitte, “2025 Global Chief Procurement Officer Survey,” press release 19 August 2025, more than 250 chief procurement officers across 40 countries: siloed ways of working cited by 57 percent as the top barrier to value delivery, ahead of competing priorities at 46 percent and capability at 40 percent. World Commerce and Contracting, contract value erosion research, 8.6 percent average erosion and approximately 9 percent of annual revenue from poor contracting practices; and separately “Closing the procurement value gap,” 11 percent erosion in procurement contracts, summarized January 2026. Avasant, “IT Vendor Governance Best Practices,” August 2022, 24 percent formal and consistently applied. WorldCC and Avasant both sell services in the markets their figures describe, and nothing beyond what each states is credited to it.

Keep reading: ACT II · Chapter 10: The Buyer Governance Pyramid