Managed Procurement Services Are Solving the Wrong Problem

The procurement industry has spent years perfecting the wrong thing. Vendor negotiations? Optimized. Approval workflows? Streamlined. Dashboards tracking every dollar spent? Beautiful, comprehensive, utterly useless for solving the actual problem.

Because here's what nobody wants to admit: the money you're losing happens after you hit 'approve' on that purchase order. You can negotiate the best laptop deal in history, but if that laptop takes six weeks to reach your new hire in Berlin, gets shipped to the wrong address twice, or sits in a drawer for three months because nobody knows it exists, congratulations. You just turned savings into losses.

I've spent the last seven years helping companies manage IT equipment across 150+ countries, and I'm tired of watching the same expensive mistakes on repeat. The gap between procurement and deployment is where companies actually hemorrhage money, and it's the one area managed services consistently ignore.

TL;DR

• Traditional managed procurement focuses on purchase optimization while ignoring the 40-60% of asset costs that occur post-purchase through delays, redundant shipping, and poor offboarding
• Your procurement team's vendor discount celebration is premature (sorry)
• Real-time asset visibility across global locations matters more than bulk pricing when you're managing distributed teams
• Reverse logistics = biggest missed opportunity
• Configuration and deployment speed should be tracked as procurement KPIs, not just IT metrics
• Effective procurement for distributed workforces requires integration between purchasing, IT, logistics, and HR that most managed procurement service providers don't offer. This isn't optional anymore.
• Offboarding processes that recover and redeploy assets can reduce new purchase needs by 30-40%, but most companies recover almost nothing

The Money Pit Nobody's Measuring

You negotiated a 15% discount on your laptop fleet. Your procurement team celebrated. Finance was happy. Someone probably got a bonus.

Three months later, you're paying for emergency shipping because those laptops didn't arrive in time for new hire onboarding. You're buying additional devices because nobody knows where the first batch ended up. You're paying for duplicate software licenses because the devices weren't configured correctly.

Procurement services sell you on savings at the point of purchase. Spreadsheets everywhere. Charts showing 12% reduction in per-unit costs. What they won't show you is what happens in the 90 days after that purchase order gets approved.

The real financial impact of digital procurement decisions shows up in the operational chaos that follows the transaction. Every delayed shipment. Every misconfigured device. Every piece of equipment that vanishes into the void between purchase and deployment. That's money you'll never recover through vendor discounts.

The Real Cost Structure Nobody Shows You

Purchase price represents somewhere between 40-60% of what you'll actually spend on assets for distributed teams. I'm being generous with that range.

The rest breaks down across shipping (especially international, which gets stupid expensive), configuration time, deployment delays, tracking and management overhead, and eventual recovery and disposal.

Most procurement managed services optimize that first 40-60%. They stop measuring success the moment the invoice gets paid.

I've seen companies save $200 per device through procurement negotiations, then spend $350 per device on redundant shipping, emergency replacements, and unutilized inventory. The math doesn't work, but nobody's tracking it as a procurement problem.

And before you ask, yes, I've checked this across dozens of companies. Nobody's actually tracking this as a procurement problem.

Here's what the complete cost picture looks like when you're managing equipment for remote workers:

The gap between what managed procurement services measure and what actually impacts your bottom line is staggering. They're optimizing a fraction of the problem while the majority of costs run unchecked.

When Savings Become Losses

Your procurement team secured excellent pricing on monitors. Those monitors shipped to your office in Austin. Your new hire works remotely in Portugal.

Someone has to coordinate reshipping, pay international freight costs, handle customs documentation, and wait another three weeks.

The monitor that cost $180 through your optimized procurement process just became a $400 monitor that arrived a month late.

Last year I watched a fintech company celebrate a massive win. They'd negotiated a bulk purchase of 200 laptops at $1,200 each, saving $300 per unit compared to their previous vendor. The procurement team was thrilled. Finance was thrilled.

They shipped all 200 devices to their San Francisco office for central distribution. Over the next six months, they had new hires starting in 23 different countries.

Each international shipment from San Francisco cost $180-350 in freight, $50-120 in customs processing, and added 12-18 days to deployment time. They spent an additional $52,000 on reshipping costs and bought 47 additional laptops for urgent hires who couldn't wait for the SF inventory to arrive.

Their $60,000 in procurement savings turned into a $39,000 net loss before accounting for productivity costs from delayed onboarding.

This happens constantly with distributed teams, and traditional managed procurement services have no answer for it because they're not designed to think past the vendor relationship when providing equipment for remote workers across multiple geographies.

That Expensive Gap Between 'We Bought It' and 'They Can Actually Use It'

The gap between "we bought it" and "they're using it" is where budgets go to die. This phase includes multiple handoffs, unclear ownership, and processes that weren't designed for remote-first operations.

Every day that passes between purchase approval and productive deployment costs you money. The device depreciates. The employee can't work at full capacity. Your team scrambles to coordinate across time zones and departments. The carefully negotiated savings your digital procurement strategy delivered start evaporating.

The Handoff Problem

Procurement buys the device. IT needs to configure it. Facilities need to ship it. HR needs to coordinate timing with the new hire's start date.

Four different teams, four different systems, zero integrated visibility.

I watched a company spend three days playing phone tag between their Austin office, IT team in Poland, and a new hire in Singapore, just trying to figure out if the laptop had shipped yet. Three days. The new hire's manager eventually just bought a loaner from Best Buy and expensed it. The 'optimized procurement' laptop showed up two weeks later. They now own two laptops for one employee.

Each handoff introduces delay. Each delay costs money. You're paying that new hire whether they have equipment or not. Each team optimizes for their own metrics without seeing the total impact.

Traditional procurement managed services did nothing to solve the fact that your new developer in Berlin is starting Monday and their laptop is still sitting in a warehouse in New Jersey, driving up the cost of onboarding a new employee with deployment delays.

Configuration Bottlenecks

Devices don't ship ready to use. They need OS updates, security protocols, company-specific software, user profiles, and compliance configurations.

Nobody knows who handles this or when it's supposed to happen.

Some companies try to configure everything before shipping, adding days or weeks to deployment. Others ship unconfigured devices and walk new hires through setup. Terrible experience. Security risk. Massive time sink.

The configuration phase alone can add 5-12 days to your deployment timeline. That's 5-12 days of reduced productivity that your procurement savings report never mentions.

What Actually Needs to Happen Before You Ship That Device

(And no, you can't skip steps. I've seen what happens when you try.)

• OS updated to current approved version, not the version it shipped with in 2019
• Disk encryption enabled and verified (seriously, verified, not just checked a box)
• Company security certificates installed (all of them, even the annoying ones)
• VPN client configured with user credentials
• Required software suite installed (productivity, communication, role-specific)
• User profile created with correct permissions
• Multi-factor authentication configured
• Asset tag applied and registered in tracking system
• Compliance verification completed for destination country
• Backup and recovery software configured
• Device tested and quality check passed
• Shipping label generated with correct residential address
• New hire notification sent with tracking information

Every item on this list represents work that happens after the managed procurement service considers their job done. Every skipped item creates problems that cost more to fix than they would have cost to prevent.

Geographic Complexity

You hired someone in Singapore. Your procurement contract is with a US-based vendor. Your IT team is in Europe. Your shipping logistics run through three different providers depending on the destination country.

Coordinating this shouldn't require a project manager, but it often does.

I've watched companies spend more on coordination overhead than they saved through their managed procurement contract. The complexity scales with every new country you operate in, and traditional procurement managed services treat it as someone else's problem.

Why Knowing Where Your Stuff Is Matters More Than What You Paid For It

You can't optimize what you can't see. For distributed teams, real-time asset visibility across locations, users, and lifecycle stages matters more than any vendor negotiation.

The best price in the world doesn't help if you can't find the device you already bought. The most optimized digital procurement process fails if you're buying duplicates because you lack visibility into existing inventory.

The Duplicate Purchase Problem

Your sales team in Austin requests five new laptops. You approve the purchase. Three weeks later, your sales team in Austin requests five new laptops again because they never received the first batch.

Did the first order get lost? Is it sitting in a warehouse? Did it ship to the wrong address?

Nobody knows because there's no integrated tracking from purchase through delivery.

You just bought ten laptops when you needed five. This happens more often than companies admit, especially when teams are distributed and there's no central visibility into what's been ordered, what's in transit, and what's been delivered.

Redeployment Opportunities You're Missing

An employee in Canada leaves your company. They had a laptop, monitor, keyboard, mouse, and webcam. Total value: roughly $2,500.

That equipment could be refurbished and sent to your new hire in Mexico. Instead, it sits in the former employee's home for three months because nobody has a process for recovery. Eventually, you buy new equipment for the Mexico hire and write off the Canada equipment as lost.

You just spent $2,500 you didn't need to spend because your managed procurement service doesn't track assets post-deployment or handle reverse logistics.

Companies with good asset visibility can redeploy somewhere around a third of their equipment, give or take, instead of buying new. Companies without it buy new every time.

A SaaS company with 800 employees across 40 countries implemented comprehensive asset tracking and recovery processes using employee equipment management software that provided real-time visibility across all locations. In their first year, they recovered 156 complete equipment setups from departing employees, refurbished them within 7-10 days, and redeployed them to new hires.

At an average equipment value of $2,400 per setup, they avoided $374,400 in new purchases. Their previous year, operating without visibility or recovery processes, they recovered only 23 equipment setups and wrote off the rest as lost or unrecoverable.

The difference in asset visibility alone delivered more value than three years of vendor discount negotiations.

Compliance and Audit Risks

You need to prove that all devices in Europe meet GDPR requirements. You need to show that devices with access to financial data have appropriate encryption. You need to demonstrate that all assets are accounted for during your security audit.

Can you do that right now?

Most companies can't. Can you generate a report showing every device, its location, its configuration, and its compliance status?

If your managed procurement service is just handling vendor relationships, the answer is probably no. The risk exposure here often exceeds the cost savings they delivered.

Reverse Logistics: The Procurement Blindspot Costing You More Than Bad Contracts

Getting devices back from departing employees, ref

Getting devices back from departing employees, refurbishing them, and redeploying them should be a core procurement function. Instead, it's usually an afterthought that costs companies millions in unnecessary new purchases.

Every employee departure should trigger an asset recovery process. Every recovered device should be evaluated for redeployment. Every redeployable device should reduce your new purchase requirements. This is basic digital procurement logic, but almost no managed procurement service actually delivers it.

Why Nobody Owns This Problem

Procurement bought the device, so they think their job is done. IT configured it, but they're not responsible for getting it back. HR knows the employee left, but they don't handle equipment. Facilities might coordinate shipping, but they don't track inventory.

The device falls into a gap where nobody owns the recovery process.

I've seen companies with hundreds of devices sitting in former employees' homes because there's no clear process, no assigned owner, and no system to track what needs to be recovered. Every one of those devices represents a future purchase you shouldn't need to make.

The Global Recovery Challenge

Recovering a device from someone in the same city is straightforward. Recovering a device from someone in another country involves international shipping, customs, potential taxes, and coordination across time zones.

Most companies simply don't bother. They write off international assets as unrecoverable and buy new equipment for the next hire in that region.

The math is brutal. You're potentially losing $2,000-3,000 per international employee departure. If you have 20% annual turnover and 100 international employees, that's $40,000-60,000 in unnecessary spending per year.

Your managed procurement service saved you 10% on laptops. You're losing 200% on failed recovery.

Most companies simply don't bother with international recovery because their employee offboarding process doesn't account for the complexity of global equipment returns.

Refurbishment and Redeployment Economics

A recovered device isn't immediately redeployable. It needs data wiping (to compliance standards), hardware inspection, potential repairs, OS reinstallation, and reconfiguration.

Who handles this? Where does it happen? How long does it take?

Companies that solve this can reduce new equipment purchases by 30-40%. Companies that don't solve it keep buying new equipment while warehouses fill with perfectly functional devices that nobody knows how to process.

The cost difference between refurbishing a device ($100-200) and buying new ($1,500-2,500) is obvious. The organizational capability to actually do the refurbishment is what's missing.

Why Speed Matters As Much As Price (And How to Actually Measure It)

Procurement success should be measured by time-to-productivity, not just cost-per-unit. How fast can you get a fully configured, compliant device into a new hire's hands?

Traditional managed procurement service providers celebrate when they shave 5% off purchase prices. They don't track how long it takes for that discounted device to become productive. They don't measure the cost of deployment delays. They don't connect procurement decisions to business outcomes.

This needs to change. Speed matters as much as cost, sometimes more.

The Productivity Cost of Slow Deployment

Your new senior engineer starts Monday. Their laptop arrives Thursday. They spend the first three days in meetings without being able to contribute, review code, or access systems.

You're paying them $150,000 per year (roughly $600 per day). You just lost $1,800 in productivity, plus the intangible cost of a terrible first-week experience.

Your procurement team saved $200 on that laptop. The slow deployment cost you nine times that amount.

This calculation applies to every hire, but most companies don't connect procurement decisions to onboarding experience and time-to-productivity.

A cybersecurity firm hired a senior architect at $180,000 annually ($720 per day). Their procurement process took 14 days from requisition to configured device delivery. The new hire spent two weeks attending meetings, reviewing documentation, and waiting for equipment, unable to contribute to active projects or review code. Total productivity loss: $10,080.

The company's procurement team had celebrated saving $250 per device through their vendor contract. For this single hire, the deployment delay cost 40 times the procurement savings. When they calculated this across 60 hires that year, slow deployment had cost them $604,800 in lost productivity while procurement savings totaled $15,000.

Geographic Deployment Standards

Can you deploy a fully configured device to someone in Tokyo as quickly as you can deploy to someone in your headquarters city?

Most companies can't. They have optimized processes for local deployment and improvised processes for everywhere else.

This creates a two-tier employee experience where remote and international hires get slower, more frustrating onboarding. It also creates competitive disadvantage when you're trying to hire in markets where candidates have multiple offers.

Procurement services should be evaluated on their ability to deliver consistent deployment speed regardless of geography. Almost none of them track this metric.

Configuration Standardization

Every device should ship configured to the same standard, with the same security protocols, the same software, and the same user experience.

Achieving this requires integration between procurement, IT, and security that most companies don't have. It requires clear specifications, automated configuration processes, and quality control.

When it works, new hires receive devices that are immediately productive. When it doesn't work, IT spends hours on setup calls, security protocols get skipped, and employees start their tenure frustrated.

The difference in employee experience (and productivity) is massive. Your procurement service should own this outcome, not just ship you a box and consider their job done.

Deployment Speed Evaluation Template

Metric: Time from requisition approval to device in employee's hands, powered on and productive

Target Benchmarks by Region:

• Domestic (same country as primary office): 3-5 business days
• Regional (same continent, different country): 5-7 business days
• International (different continent): 7-10 business days
• Complex customs regions: 10-14 business days

Evaluation Questions:

1. What percentage of deployments meet target timelines?
2. What is the average delay beyond target for missed deployments?
3. Do international hires experience longer delays than domestic hires?
4. How many emergency purchases occur due to deployment delays?
5. What is the cost per day of deployment delay (employee salary divided by working days)?
6. How many IT support hours are spent on post-delivery configuration?
7. What percentage of devices arrive fully configured and immediately usable?

Red Flags:

• Deployment speed varies by more than 100% between regions
• Less than 70% of deployments meet target timelines
• IT spends more than 30 minutes per device on post-delivery setup
• Emergency purchases exceed 5% of total device procurement

Why Your Procurement Team Can't Solve This Alone

The problems we're describing span procurement, IT, logistics, HR, and facilities. Solving them requires integration across all these functions, not just better vendor negotiations.

Your procurement team can negotiate amazing contracts all day long. Without coordination across IT, logistics, HR, and facilities, those contracts won't deliver the outcomes your distributed workforce needs. The organizational structure that worked when everyone sat in the same office breaks down completely when you're managing equipment across 40 countries.

The Silo Problem

Procurement optimizes for cost and vendor relationships. IT optimizes for security and standardization. Logistics optimizes for shipping costs and speed. HR optimizes for employee experience and onboarding timelines. Facilities optimizes for space and asset tracking.

Each team has different goals, different systems, different metrics. Spoiler: it's nobody. Everyone thinks it's someone else's job.

A new hire needs a laptop. That simple requirement touches all five functions, and most companies have no integrated process to coordinate them.

Your managed procurement service sits in one of those silos. They can't solve problems that require cross-functional coordination because they don't have authority or visibility across the other functions.

Data Integration Gaps

Procurement has a system for tracking purchases and vendor relationships. IT has a system for tracking configurations and security compliance. Logistics has a system for tracking shipments. HR has a system for tracking employees and start dates.

These systems don't talk to each other. The data doesn't flow. Nobody has a complete view of asset lifecycle from purchase through deployment through recovery.

You can't optimize what you can't measure, and you can't measure what exists in five different disconnected systems.

Solving this requires either massive systems integration (expensive, slow, often fails) or a service that provides integrated visibility as a core feature (rare in traditional managed procurement).

Process Ownership Confusion

Who owns the outcome of getting a new hire fully equipped and productive by their start date?

HR thinks IT owns it. IT thinks procurement owns it. Procurement thinks logistics owns it. Logistics thinks facilities owns it. Facilities thinks HR owns it.

Nobody owns the outcome, which means it happens inconsistently, slowly, and with frequent failures.

Effective procurement for distributed teams requires clear process ownership across the entire lifecycle. Most companies don't have this, and most managed procurement services don't provide it.

Building Procurement Systems That Account for the Entire Asset Lifecycle

Procurement needs to evolve from a purchasing function to a lifecycle management function. This requires different capabilities, different metrics, and different vendor relationships.

The vendors who can deliver 10% savings on bulk laptop orders aren't necessarily the vendors who can deploy those laptops globally in five days or recover them efficiently when employees leave. The skills are different. The infrastructure is different. The entire business model is different.

Lifecycle Metrics That Actually Matter

Stop measuring procurement success by cost per unit. Start measuring by total cost of deployment, time from requisition to productive use, asset utilization rates, recovery and redeployment percentages, and compliance coverage.

These metrics tell you whether your procurement function is actually serving your distributed workforce or just processing transactions efficiently.

A procurement service that delivers devices 20% cheaper but 40% slower is failing you. A service that can't track assets post-deployment is failing you. A service that has no reverse logistics capability is failing you.

The metrics you choose determine the behavior you get. Most companies are measuring the wrong things and wondering why their procurement costs keep rising despite "optimized" vendor contracts.

Technology Requirements

You need a single system (or tightly integrated systems) that tracks assets from requisition through purchase, configuration, deployment, active use, recovery, refurbishment, and redeployment or disposal.

That system needs to integrate with your HR system (to trigger equipment requests based on hiring), your IT systems (to manage configurations and security), your logistics providers (to track shipments globally), and your financial systems (to capture true total cost).

Most companies try to build this integration themselves. It takes years, costs millions, and usually delivers partial functionality that breaks whenever any component system updates.

The alternative is working with a service that provides this integration as a core offering. These services are rare in the procurement space because most providers are focused on vendor relationships, not operational integration.

Global Logistics Capabilities

Your procurement service needs relationships with logistics providers in every region where you have employees. They need to understand customs requirements, import restrictions, tax implications, and shipping options for dozens of countries.

They need to coordinate device delivery to residential addresses (not just offices), handle returns from those same addresses, and manage the complexity of moving equipment between countries when employees relocate.

Most traditional procurement services have strong logistics capabilities in one or two regions and improvised solutions everywhere else. This doesn't work when you're hiring globally and need consistent deployment speed regardless of location.

Configuration and Security Standards

Devices should ship configured to your exact specifications, with all required software, security protocols, and user settings already in place.

This requires your procurement service to either have configuration capabilities themselves or integrate tightly with your IT team to ensure configuration happens before deployment (not after).

The difference in employee experience is massive. Receiving a device that's immediately usable versus receiving a device that requires hours of IT support and setup is the difference between a great first day and a frustrating one.

Your procurement service should own this outcome, not just ship you a box and consider their job done.

What Happens When You Treat Offboarding as Seriously as Onboarding

Companies obsess over onboarding experience and ignore offboarding completely. This creates massive waste and missed opportunities for asset recovery and redeployment.

Think about the resources you dedicate to onboarding. HR workflows, IT checklists, manager training, buddy systems, welcome packages. Now think about offboarding. An exit interview and a vague request to "return your equipment sometime."

The imbalance is costing you thousands per departure.

Automated Offboarding Triggers

An employee gives notice. Your HR system should automatically trigger equipment recovery processes, notify the right teams, generate shipping labels

An employee gives notice. Your HR system should automatically trigger equipment recovery processes, notify the right teams, generate shipping labels, schedule pickups, and track the return through completion.

This rarely happens. Instead, someone manually emails someone else who manually coordinates with someone else who eventually gets around to requesting the equipment back (maybe).

The delay costs you. Every week that equipment sits unreturned is a week you can't redeploy it. If you're hiring at the same time (which you usually are), you're buying new equipment while perfectly good equipment sits idle.

Automated triggers eliminate the delay and ensure nothing falls through the cracks. Your procurement service should provide this capability or integrate with systems that do.

Geographic Recovery Logistics

Recovering equipment from international employees is complex enough that most companies simply don't do it. They write off the assets and move on.

This is expensive. A full equipment setup for a remote employee (laptop, monitor, accessories) typically costs $2,500-3,500. Losing that equipment on every international departure adds up fast.

The solution requires relationships with logistics providers who can handle residential pickups internationally, manage customs and import/export requirements, and coordinate timing across time zones.

These capabilities exist, but most procurement services don't offer them because they're focused on the purchasing side, not the recovery side.

Data Security in Recovery

You can't just ask employees to ship their devices back. Those devices contain company data that needs to be securely wiped before the device leaves their possession or immediately upon return.

Some companies try to walk departing employees through remote wiping procedures (unreliable, security risk). Others receive devices with data intact and wipe them centrally (compliance risk during shipping).

The right approach involves clear protocols, verification steps, and integration between your IT security team and your recovery logistics. Your procurement service should facilitate this, not treat it as someone else's problem.

Refurbishment Standards and Speed

A recovered device needs inspection, potential repairs, data wiping, OS reinstallation, and reconfiguration before it can be redeployed.

How long does this take? Who does it? Where does it happen?

Companies that can turn around refurbished devices in 5-7 days can redeploy them to new hires and avoid new purchases. Companies that take 4-6 weeks lose the window and end up buying new anyway.

Speed matters. Your procurement service should either provide refurbishment capabilities or integrate with partners who can deliver the speed you need.

GroWrk Solves the Procurement Problem You Didn't Know You Had

Okay, look. I've spent 3,500 words explaining why traditional procurement services are broken. And now I'm going to tell you that we built GroWrk specifically to solve this.

I know how that sounds. But here's the thing: we built it because we were drowning in these exact problems. Clients asking us to ship laptops to 47 countries, then asking where the hell the equipment from departing employees went, then panicking because new hires were starting Monday without devices.

We handle the entire lifecycle: procurement, configuration, global deployment, asset tracking, and reverse logistics. Your new hire in Singapore gets their fully configured device as quickly as someone in your headquarters city. When employees leave, we coordinate recovery, refurbishment, and redeployment so you're not constantly buying new equipment.

You get real-time visibility into every asset, regardless of location. You get consistent deployment speed across 150+ countries. You get recovery rates that actually reduce your new purchase requirements.

This isn't traditional managed procurement. This is procurement designed for how distributed teams actually work.

Ready to stop losing money on the procurement problems nobody talks about? See how GroWrk delivers end-to-end asset lifecycle management.

Final Thoughts

Look, I'm not saying vendor discounts don't matter. I'm saying they matter about 40% as much as everyone thinks they do, and we're ignoring the other 60% because it's harder to measure and doesn't fit in a nice quarterly report.

Managed procurement services have spent decades perfecting the purchase transaction while ignoring everything that happens after. They'll negotiate great pricing, optimize vendor relationships, and deliver detailed cost savings reports.

Then your devices sit in warehouses, ship to wrong locations, arrive late for new hires, and disappear when employees leave. The savings evaporate in operational waste that nobody's tracking as a procurement problem.

The future of procurement for distributed teams isn't better vendor discounts. It's integrated lifecycle management that accounts for the total cost and total timeline from requisition through deployment through recovery.

You need procurement services that measure success by time-to-productivity, not cost-per-unit. Services that provide visibility across your entire global asset base. Services that handle reverse logistics as seriously as forward logistics.

Most companies are still working with procurement services designed for office-based workforces where everyone sat in the same building and equipment never moved. That model is broken for distributed teams, and the financial impact of continuing to use it is massive.

The gap between what traditional managed procurement services offer and what distributed companies actually need has never been wider. Closing that gap requires rethinking procurement as a lifecycle function, not a purchasing function.

The companies that make this shift will reduce total asset costs by 30-40% while improving deployment speed and employee experience. The companies that don't will keep celebrating vendor discounts while hemorrhaging money on operational waste they're not measuring.

So here's what I'd do if I were you: Pull your actual deployment timelines from the last quarter. Not what they're supposed to be, what they actually were. Then calculate what those delays cost in salary for people sitting idle.

Compare that number to your procurement savings for the same period.

Then we can talk about whether your current approach is actually working.