Procurement quick wins: picking your first three

Published 25 October 2026 · 5 min read

Every procurement team has more possible projects than time. The ones that build credibility early share three traits: they are visible in the data, they need few stakeholders, and they show a result within a quarter. Here is how to find yours, and the procurement quick wins that most often qualify.

A simple scoring method

Take your categorised spend and, for each Level 2 category in the top twenty by value, score one to three on:

Value — annual spend in the category.
Fragmentation — number of suppliers for what is essentially the same thing.
Ease — few stakeholders, no long contracts, a competitive market.

Multiply the three. The top three scores are your first projects. It is crude, and that is the point: it takes an afternoon and gives you a defensible list instead of a debate.

Quick wins that usually qualify

Consolidate a fragmented commodity. Gloves, cleaning chemicals, packaging, stationery — bought from many suppliers at many prices. Move to one or two. See the rationalisation playbook.
Re-quote a category nobody has tested. Spend that has renewed automatically for years is often above market.
Bring off-contract spend back on. Where a contract exists but people buy around it. See maverick spend.
Move the tail to a catalogue or P-card. The saving is mostly process cost, not price. See tail spend management.
Standardise specifications. Five versions of the same item, one would do.

What does not qualify

Anything needing a system implementation first.
Categories under a multi-year contract with no break clause.
Strategic categories with one supplier and high risk — important, but not quick.

Measuring the win

Agree the baseline before you start: twelve months of spend in the category, at the same categorisation you will use afterwards. Then compare like for like. Our guide to calculating procurement savings covers the methods finance will accept.

The step everyone skips

All of the above assumes you can see spend by category. If your data is a list of supplier names and free-text descriptions, the first quick win is getting it categorised — because until then you are choosing projects by instinct.

How Structera helps

Structera categorises every line of your spend into a three-level taxonomy, so the scoring above takes an afternoon instead of a month. The choices stay with you. Try it on a free sample.