Max HenryFounder & Executive Director, Global Supply Chain Council (GSCC) · Founder & Executive Director at Global Supply Chain Council (GSCC)

Procurement is judged on price long after the job stopped being about price

10 Aug 2026 · 1 min

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In this brief monologue, the speaker critiques modern procurement scorecards for still prioritizing price, even though procurement teams now handle broader responsibilities such as supplier risk, resilience, and compliance. He argues that AI has not fundamentally changed the procurement role; instead, it has stripped away excuses, turning buying into a judgment exercise. However, incentive structures have not kept pace—organizations continue to reward savings while neglecting resilience metrics, only noticing them when a disruption occurs. The speaker challenges listeners to examine whether their scorecards truly reflect strategic goals and invites them to join the chain.net community for further discussion.

Chapters

Go look at your procurement scorecard. Count the lines about price. That number is what your company actually wants, whatever the strategy deck says. 35 years ago, that was the whole job: squeeze the supplier, move the volume somewhere cheaper. Now the same team has to survive a port closure and prove the Tier 2 supplier is clean. Same headcount, same bonus formula. My read on AI: it did not rewrite the job, it removed the excuse. Buying becomes judging. But expectations move fast and incentives do not. Pay for savings, you get savings. Nobody scores resilience until the week it goes missing. So count those lines. Has your scorecard caught up with your strategy? Join us at chain.net.