Procurement and operations teams play a significant role in protecting both day-to-day and long-term business performance. Cost, supply, and quality control are the biggest challenges, and when they slip, it can quickly affect store efficiency and the customer experience. Over time, across multiple stores, these inefficiencies can put real pressure on budget and profit margins.
Procurement leaders can drive major cost savings across the business, but the answer isn't just lower unit costs. Often, the larger, more sustainable cost savings come from better spend visibility, stronger supplier relationships, and simpler purchasing processes.
In this article, we'll look at how to tackle the three biggest challenges in retail procurement: supply chain disruptions, maverick spending and poor supplier performance.
Want to understand where purchasing is creating unnecessary cost for your retail business? Book an Acopia Operational Consumables Procurement Health Check.
Every retailer and category has its specific challenges, but the following three are well known to most procurement and ops leaders. As well as being a major time drain, they also eat into profitability, affect brand reputation, and reduce operational resilience. Let's look at how to solve each one in turn.
Retail supply chains have become very resilient and can recover quickly from small delays. But more widespread and consistent supply chain disruptions hit harder. Stockouts and reactive purchasing are costly and time-consuming, and frequent shortages put pressure on teams.
Of course, you can't avoid port congestion, extreme weather, geopolitical events, and cyberattacks. What you can do is put practical contingencies in place and get closer to your suppliers.
Solutions:
These solutions help make supply more reliable and, when disruption inevitably occurs, give you more options. That means fewer emergency purchases, less pressure on teams and more cost control.
When store teams are under pressure, they will often do what they need to do to keep things moving. One or two ad hoc purchases might not be cause for concern, but multiplied across tens or hundreds of stores, it can hit budgets hard.
Operational consumables like cleaning products and POS material are particularly vulnerable as they are low value and are often needed urgently. Beyond the obvious cost of paying locally, the hidden administrative cost can be huge.
Solutions:
Research from The Hackett Group links greater use of guided buying and approved catalogues with a 69% reduction in maverick spend leakage. Here's how:
The goal isn't to make every purchase a head office decision, but to maintain control while giving store teams the freedom they need to keep operations running.
The right supply partner, backed by a procurement platform such as MyAcopia, can change how store teams buy their consumables. Ordering becomes quicker and simpler for stores, while head office keeps control of spend without having to sign off every purchase.
Further reading: How to Improve GNFR Spend Visibility Across Your Retail Estate
Retail teams rely on suppliers for accuracy, efficiency and quality. When performance dips, teams waste time chasing deliveries, handling complaints, replacing damaged goods or finding their own workaround.
The answer is to adopt a more structured approach to supplier relationship management:
“Different suppliers, different prices and different qualities of boxes”, Rob O’Shea, Operations Manager, TLC Electrical.
Working with multiple suppliers can result in inconsistent products. In TLC Electrical's case, it was packaging, which led to more breakages and a fragmented supply to their customers. Watch this short video about how Acopia helped them achieve consistent, reliable procurement.
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For retail procurement teams, good SRM is the difference between firefighting and proactively managing risk. It's about building partnerships that go beyond mere transactions. It urges buyers to ask not just, "What does this product cost?" but, "How can we improve cost, availability, quality and efficiency by working together?"
By collaborating more closely, you gain a partner that can actively help you manage costs and reduce supply risks.
Not all suppliers will require the same level of management. Focus on those that you have the most dependence on, those that pose a bigger supply threat, and where the most strategic benefits are.
Technology should simplify purchasing and SRM, not add complexity. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case.
At Acopia, we often see retailers struggling with multiple layers of disconnected technology and procurement tools. Teams end up switching between systems, re-entering information and piecing data together manually. At that point, the technology is creating work rather than removing it.
A centralised ordering system can overcome many of those problems by giving stores one clear route to purchase operational consumables, while giving procurement teams the visibility and controls they need centrally.
MyAcopia is Acopia’s single-source ordering platform for multi-site organisations. It brings consumables purchasing into one place, using approved product lists, tiered authorisation and flexible budget controls to help keep spending, product choice and quality within agreed parameters.
Rather than trying to piece the picture together afterwards, procurement teams can see site-level spend, product usage, delivery charges and budget performance, as well as wider ordering patterns across the estate.
It also cuts down the admin around purchasing. Stores order through one portal, while consolidated invoicing can replace large numbers of separate invoices and petty cash transactions with a format that works for finance.
Most importantly, the data becomes useful. It can help identify unusual ordering patterns, products that could be standardised, changes in demand and areas where supplier or fulfilment issues may be driving off-contract spend. That gives procurement teams better evidence for supplier reviews, negotiations and continuous improvement.
With the right technology and stronger supplier relationships, retail procurement doesn't need to be a compromise: stores get the freedom to order what they need, central teams gain better visibility and control, and margins are protected.
Acopia works with multi-site retailers to identify where fragmented supply chains, purchasing processes, and stock management create unnecessary cost and complexity. Our Operational Consumables Procurement Health Check is a practical starting point for finding those gaps and deciding what to tackle first.
If you have questions, please drop us a line, and we'll be in touch.
Frequently asked questions about procurement in retail
Maverick spend isn't always simple non-compliance. It happens when approved processes aren't working: a product might be out of stock, delivery is too slow, the ordering process is too complex, etc. When the priority is keeping the store running, people naturally find another way to get what they need. For procurement teams and ops managers, it's important to understand why and where maverick spending is happening, rather than treating it simply as a compliance problem.
For large, multi-site retailers, having very few suppliers is impractical. However, too many suppliers and processes add complexity that can get expensive when multiplied across the estate. Consolidating suppliers where possible helps reduce admin, simplify ordering, improve visibility and strengthen buying power.
The goal of measuring performance is to define what 'good' looks like, get ahead of potential issues and hold suppliers accountable. Set the measures that have the most impact on operations, for example, on-time delivery, fulfilment, availability, defect rates, invoice accuracy and response times.
