A Practical Map of Five Organisational Models That Will Define Procurement’s Future

By Hervé Legenvre with Hani Alsaigh

How can procurement leaders adapt to market volatility, rising sustainability demands, and AI disruption? Discover five organisational models and how combining them can strengthen resilience, expertise, and strategic value.

Every year, the Peter Kraljic Award recognises procurement leaders who have pushed the boundaries of the profession. Past winners have built innovative organisational models, not just new processes. This column draws on their experience. It also draws on a workshops facilitated in EIPM events in 2025, where practitioners debated what procurement organisations should look like next. Hani Alsaigh, from Tahakom, joined Hervé Legenvre in shaping the ideas that follow by presenting how they have been implemented within Tahakom. What we offer here is not a theory. It is a map, built from practice, of five directions procurement can take.

Why the old organisation chart no longer works

Procurement organisations were built for a more predictable world. Categories were stable. Supply markets moved slowly. A well-run category team, with clear ownership and clean processes, was enough.

That world has gone.

Supply markets are volatile. Geopolitical shocks, energy price swings, and shortages arrive with little warning. Digital technologies, especially artificial intelligence, are changing what procurement people actually do each day. Sustainability and resilience are no longer side projects. They sit at the center of industry changes. And value chains have become more complex, stretching across industries and geographies, so that no single company controls its own destiny anymore.

Traditional organisational models show their limits in this context. A structure designed for stability struggles with multi sided disruptions. A structure designed for control struggles with speed. Something must change!

Sustainability and resilience are no longer side projects. They sit at the center of industry changes.

The question is not whether procurement organisations should evolve. It is how. And here, we think, is where things get interesting: there is no single right answer. There are several credible answers, each suited to different conditions. We call them scenarios.

Five scenarios, five logics

We identified five scenarios depicting specific organisational models (Figure 1). Each one reflects a distinct logic of value creation, governance, and capability development. None of them is complete on its own. Together, they form a repertoire that procurement leaders can draw on to build their future procurement organisation.

Figure1: The five scenarios for the future of procurement organisations.

Agile Squads: built for speed

The first scenario borrows from software development. Instead of stable category teams, procurement organises around small, empowered squads. These squads form and reform as demand requires, moving across categories, geographies, and markets.

This model responds directly to volatility. When conditions shift quickly, a rigid category structure cannot keep pace. Agile squads can. Authority is pushed down. Sourcing happens in short, iterative cycles rather than long linear processes.

Making this work requires more than good intentions. Staff must rotate between squads, so they build broad exposure rather than narrow expertise. Legal, technical, and operational perspectives need to sit inside each squad, not outside it. And leadership must genuinely prioritise learning over control, or the model collapses into micromanagement dressed up as agility.

The upside is real: faster response, better resource balancing, and accelerated talent development. The downside is just as real: strategic coherence can erode, and deep category expertise can thin out. Agile squads suit fast-moving, non-strategic needs. They struggle with genuinely complex procurement domains.

Tahakom offers a good illustration. For a civil works project project, the company hand-picked a squad spanning integrating Local Content, Procurement, Engineering, Finance, and Legal, and ran a 10-day sprints to identify, qualify, and approve local suppliers in priority categories. Localisation “clinics” with suppliers helped co-create solutions and close capability gaps. This squad logic enabled local supplier adoption, reduced import dependency, and contributed to Tahakom’ s Vision 2030 localisation goals. Speed came from putting every relevant function in the same room from day one, not from removing oversight.

Analyst-Centred Teams: built for insight

The second scenario shifts procurement’s source of influence. Instead of executing sourcing projects, procurement builds dedicated analyst teams that turn data into strategic intelligence. Market foresight cells, integrated risk teams, and cost intelligence units become the visible face of the function.

This scenario responds to a specific trend: the growing appetite of the C-suite for foresight and risk anticipation. Boards want to know what is coming, not just what was spent. Procurement, sitting close to supply markets, is well placed to answer that question, if it builds the analytical muscle to do so.

The condition for success is not analytical talent alone. It is connection. Analysts must understand operational realities, and interfaces with buyers and business leaders must be designed with care. Otherwise, insight sits in a report nobody reads.

Done well, this model turns procurement into a genuine partner in corporate decision-making. Done poorly, it produces detachment from the business, and misplaced confidence in data of uneven quality.

At Tahakom, this logic underpins a should-cost modelling capability. Analysts build price baselines for high-value equipment and services from market indices and technical specifications, then benchmark suppliers on quality, reliability, and cost structure. Working alongside engineering under a design-to-cost approach, they have used this intelligence to strip unnecessary specifications and put negotiations on a factual footing, rather than a positional one.

AI-Orchestrated Procurement, Supervised by Humans: built for scale

The third scenario is the one everyone asks about first. Artificial intelligence takes on operational decisions. Sourcing, category support, and long-tail spend management shift to AI agents. Humans step back into a supervisory role, intervening on exceptions, ethics, and strategic calls.

This is a direct response to the AI trend reshaping every function, procurement included. But the interesting finding from our discussion was this: automation does not reduce the need for critical thinking. It increases it. Someone still has to catch the bias, the hallucination, the bad recommendation dressed up in confident language.

Organisations that succeed here start small, typically with lower-risk, long-tail spend. They involve end users in system design from the outset, because adoption depends on usability, not just capability. And they build governance structures that address accountability head-on. AI does not eliminate responsibility. It redistributes it, often to people who did not expect to hold it.

Tahakom’s procurement team has put this into practice at scale, using AI to draft RFPs, build scoring matrices, and evaluate vendor submissions on more than twenty tenders, alongside a bot that handles routine supplier queries and compliance checks, and AI monitoring that flags mismatched invoices and expiring contracts. Humans step back in only for high-value exceptions, ethical questions, and cases where the AI itself signals uncertainty. As Hani Alsaigh puts it: AI will not replace you; AI-enabled people will.

Ecosystem Transformers: built for systemic change

The fourth scenario asks procurement to start reshaping value networks. Procurement becomes a system architect, initiating multi-player collaborations to tackle challenges no single company can solve alone: decarbonisation, circularity, digital interoperability.

This scenario answers directly to the complexity of modern value chains. Many of today’s hardest problems, carbon reduction across a supply base, or building circular material flows, new operating models supported by data sharing cannot be solved bilaterally. They require new coalitions, shared data, and governance that extends well beyond a standard contract.

This requires a different kind of procurement professional: an entrepreneur Systems thinking becomes essential. Momentum has to be built deliberately, because these initiatives do not happen by default.

The reward is large-scale transformation and shared risk. The cost is complexity. Governance across multiple organisations is harder than governance within one, and consensus-building is, by nature, slower.

Tahakom runs two examples worth noting. It has set up joint innovation platforms with strategic suppliers and technology partners, under shared roadmaps and joint governance committees, to co-develop AI cameras, IoT sensors, and smart mobility devices. Separately, it has built circular-economy partnerships that refurbish and recover components from end-of-life cameras, sensors, and IT equipment, tying supplier contracts to ESG scoring and carbon metrics. Neither initiative could have been achieved by sourcing projects alone.

Category-Centric Models: built for depth

The fifth scenario is the most familiar. It is also, still, highly relevant. Value is managed at category level, with procurement integrating supplier innovation, risk, sustainability, and performance within coherent market domains. Category councils coordinate stakeholders. Influence comes from credibility and expertise, not authority.

This model remains the right answer wherever deep market knowledge genuinely matters, and where long-term supplier relationships create disproportionate value. It delivers predictability and strong relationships. Its risk is rigidity: in volatile environments, categories can calcify into silos that resist change, exactly when adaptability is most needed.

Tahakom applies this to its largest spend areas, mobility devices, cameras, software, fleet, and IT hardware, where category experts set multi-year strategies, sign framework agreements, and shape vendor roadmaps. Category teams also run demand-challenge workshops with business units to question purchase requests before they are placed, and vendor-consolidation programmes to concentrate spend and strengthen leverage. It is the model best suited to spend that is concentrated and strategically important.

Choosing, and combining

None of these five scenarios is a universal answer. Each respond to a different trend: agility to volatility, analytics to the demand for foresight, AI orchestration to emerging technologies, ecosystem transformation to interconnected value chains, and category models to the enduring value of deep expertise.

In practice, most organisations will combine elements of several. A procurement function might run category councils for its most strategic spend, agile squads for fast-moving tail categories, an analyst team feeding the C-suite, an AI layer handling routine transaction, and an ecosystem initiative on large innovation, all at once.

But combination should not mean confusion. Before hybridising, leaders need clarity about each model on its own terms. What logic does it follow? What capabilities does it need? What can it not do well? Blending models without understanding them individually produces neither agility nor depth. It produces muddle.

The case for moving people, not just structures

One point deserves particular emphasis, because it is easy to overlook amid talk of organisational design: people need to experience these different modes over time, not just be assigned permanently to one of them.

A buyer who has only ever worked in a category council thinks differently from one who has run an agile sprint, supervised an AI agent, or convene a multi-company ecosystem project. Each mode builds a different muscle. Speed and iteration in agile squads. Analytical rigour and communication in analyst teams. Critical judgement and comfort with ambiguity in AI supervision. Systems thinking and coalition-building in ecosystem work. Depth and relational skill in category management.

Governance across multiple organisations is harder than governance within one, and consensus-building is, by nature, slower.

Rotating talent across these modes does two things. It builds more versatile professionals, better equipped for a function that will keep changing. And it prevents any single logic from calcifying into dogma. An organisation full of category specialists who have never worked any other way will resist agility instinctively, not because agility is wrong, but because it is unfamiliar. The same is true in reverse.

A closing thought

The future of procurement will not belong to organisations that pick one model and defend it. It will belong to those that build a coherent configuration, one that fits their strategy, their maturity, and their appetite for risk, and that keeps evolving that configuration as conditions change.

That is the real lesson from the Peter Kraljic Award winners we have worked with over the years. They did not follow a single template. They built organisations deliberately, learned from several logics, and combined them with intent. The five scenarios described here are not a menu to choose from once. They are a repertoire to draw on continuously, as the world keeps turning.

About the Authors

Hervé Legenvre is Professor and Research Director at EIPM. He manages education programmes for global clients. He conducts research and teaches on digitalisation, innovation, and supply chain. He has been one of TEBR’s esteemed columnists since 2023, contributing thought-provoking insights to the publication since 2019.

Eng. Hani AlSaigh is the Vice President of Shared Services at Tahakom, bringing more than 28 years of leadership experience in procurement and supply chain. A Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply (CIPS) and an Electrical Engineering graduate from King Saud University, he is recognized for advancing operational excellence, digital transformation, sustainability, and local content. His leadership supports Saudi Vision 2030 by positioning shared services and supply chain as strategic drivers of economic growth and organizational impact.