According to Deloitte’s Global Chief Procurement Officer (CPO) Survey 2025 [1], margin improvement through cost reduction and operational efficiency rank among the top priorities for procurement leaders. At the same time, according to the BME benchmark “Top Procurement KPIs 2025” [2], the average internal cost per purchase order is EUR 121.75. This brings additional cost factors into focus alongside the pure purchase price: personnel, IT, and process costs associated with creating, approving, transmitting, and tracking an order. In operational procurement, cost-effectiveness is therefore determined not only by the price of an order, but by the entire process – from demand capture and approval through ordering to follow-up and system operation.
This is precisely where a widespread misunderstanding lies. When cost drivers in operational procurement are discussed, the focus often first turns to the purchase price. In reality, however, at least four types of costs are at work simultaneously: the expenditure for the requirement itself, the workload of the procurement team, the time required from requesters, and the costs of the digital process landscape. Anyone who optimizes only one of these variables often achieves no real relief, but merely shifts costs from one place to another.
Cost shifting instead of real savings
The underlying logic is similar to a blanket that is too short: if you pull it over your feet, your shoulders get cold. If a company tries to control spending more tightly through additional manual checks, processing effort and lead times usually increase. If it reduces procurement FTEs without properly automating self-service and rules, the work shifts to the specialist departments. If the user interface is simplified without taking contractual and policy logic into account, faulty orders and maverick buying increase. And if every process gap is closed with an additional tool, the digital landscape grows – but efficiency does not necessarily grow with it. The result is zero-sum optimizations that may look good in KPI reports, but do not create any real cost advantage for the company.
The underestimated KPI: requesters’ time
The time required from requesters is particularly underestimated in operational procurement. After all, ordering is not done only by procurement, but also by development, production, the laboratory, marketing, HR, or facility management. Every additional minute spent searching, every query about the correct commodity group, every status email, and every unstructured free-text entry ties up expertise outside the actual core job. Especially in knowledge-intensive companies, this is far from a marginal issue. When highly qualified employees become temporary procurement coordinators, hidden costs arise that often remain invisible in isolated analyses of procurement costs.
This makes requesters’ time a genuine management variable. Companies that want to make operational procurement more cost-effective should therefore measure not only procurement volume and process costs, but also search duration, the query rate, the share of informal procurement channels, and the time required until a requirement is captured in compliance with the rules. Only then does it become clear whether a process actually reduces workload – or merely shifts work elsewhere.
Where operational inefficiency actually arises
A key cost driver is poor findability. If catalogs, marketplaces, inventory, framework agreements, and preferred suppliers are not accessible via a shared entry point, the expensive part of the process starts even before the order is placed: with searching, comparing, asking questions, and media discontinuities. Free-text orders by email or verbal request are often not exceptional requests, but rather the symptom of insufficient findability of pre-negotiated sources of supply.
The second driver is unstructured free text. Free-text requirements cannot be avoided entirely. However, they cause indirect costs when they are recorded incompletely or without reference to existing contracts, commodity groups, and suppliers. Procurement must then first translate the request into a processable form. Operational procurement pays for this with additional processing effort, while the specialist departments pay with delays and longer waiting times until the requirement is fulfilled.
The third driver is manual policy work. Even properly captured requirements create unnecessary effort if budget checks, supplier status, commodity group rules, approvals, or conversion rules have to be reviewed or triggered manually. Such steps only make sense where genuine exceptions need to be assessed. But if approvals also have to be handled by people in standard cases, each transaction adds a block of cost that accumulates across thousands of orders.
The fourth driver lies in the technical process logic. If procurement solutions work with outdated, incomplete, or time-delayed synchronized data, error rates, correction effort, and exception handling increase. In that case, the additional costs do not arise in the procurement process itself, but where the interface, rules engine, and leading ERP system do not interact cleanly and ongoing coordination and corrections tie up resources.
Not every digitalization effort reduces costs
For precisely this reason, digitalization does not automatically mean efficiency. A new tool can help to manage spending more effectively and use procurement channels more consistently, while at the same time increasing the effort required for operation, maintenance, and coordination. A more standardized approval process can relieve procurement, but place an additional data-entry burden on the specialist departments. And a modern user interface does not solve a single structural problem if contract logic, master data, and policies are not applied consistently in the background. The decisive question is therefore not whether a process is digital, but whether digitalization influences all relevant cost levers at the same time.
Anyone who wants to make operational procurement more cost-effective must therefore look at cause and effect. Good results do not come from promises, but from the “physics” of the process – that is, from the characteristics of a solution that determine in day-to-day operations whether additional effort or relief is created.
The “physics” behind lower costs
Lower costs do not arise from a single feature, but from the interplay of several structural prerequisites. First, pre-negotiated procurement channels must be centrally findable: from catalogs and contracts to internal inventories, preferred suppliers, and, where useful, marketplaces. Only when these sources are brought together in a uniform search and user logic does the share of unnecessary free-text orders decline. Second, guided intake and ordering paths are needed that enforce procurement policies directly in the process instead of checking them only afterwards. Added to this is access to current ERP data so that budgets, supplier status, account assignments, and approvals can be checked reliably. In addition, artificial intelligence should provide support where it can accelerate workflows and noticeably relieve processes involving high levels of search, checking, or clarification effort – namely in search, free-text enrichment, document review, and status communication.
If this “physics” is in place, the role of procurement also changes. Operational procurement teams have to spend less time on queries, manual checks, and follow-up, and can focus more strongly on exceptional cases, negotiations, and strategic issues. At the same time, the workload in the specialist departments also decreases because their requirements are captured more quickly, in a more compliant manner, and passed on for further processing with fewer coordination loops. This is precisely where the economic effect of modern operational procurement lies: not in an isolated KPI, but in the simultaneous reduction of several types of costs.
Conclusion
Operational procurement will remain under pressure in the coming years: due to increasing cost pressure, growing regulation, higher expectations for self-service, and the need to handle processes faster while remaining compliant. This makes it all the more important to consider cost drivers not in isolation, but in interaction. The decisive question is not: Where can we reduce one block of costs today? Rather, it is: Which costs are we really reducing—and which are merely being shifted to other parts of the organization, into additional process steps, or into the system landscape? Real efficiency only arises when spending, process effort, the time required from requesters, and the costs of the digital process logic all decrease together. Modern procurement platforms such as BeNeering’s [3], which guide requesters more quickly into suitable procurement channels, structure free text, apply rules directly within the process, and use AI functions in a targeted way, help companies achieve this goal.
[2] https://a.storyblok.com/f/104752/x/2876722085/leseprobe_top-kennzahlen-durchschnittswerte-2025.pdf