BTW EP 25: The S-Word: Why Procurement Must Stop Saying "Savings" (and What to Replace it With)

Feb 18, 2026

Omer Abdullah, co-founder of The Smart Cube and author on supply chain risk, helps rethink procurement as a value-driven function. He argues for replacing “savings” with a defined value scorecard. Conversation covers preparing teams for a post-AI world, measuring supplier-led innovation, curbing short-termism with multi-year metrics, and selling broader value to the C-suite.

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INSIGHT

Replace Savings With Defined Value

Replace the word savings with a broader defined value metric that includes verified spend reduction, revenue generation, and company-specific priorities.
Philip Ideson frames value as a multi-dial KPI mix (emissions, resilience, process improvement) that replaces savings as the primary procurement KPI.

ANECDOTE

Omer's Three Decade Procurement Journey

Omer Abdullah described his 30-year procurement journey from Kearney to founding The Smart Cube and selling it, showing deep function experience.
He used that history to justify launching Procuria to prepare procurement for a post-AI future and advisory work with startups.

INSIGHT

Post-AI Means AI Is A Hygiene Factor

Post-AI means AI becomes hygiene: embedded, expected, and no longer a differentiator, not that AI disappears.
Omer warns that once transactional AI is standard, procurement won't automatically become strategic unless outcomes and measures are redefined.

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Procurement's biggest measurement problem isn't that "savings" is incomplete. It's that "savings" has become a substitute for truth.

In the first Buy: The Way…To Purposeful Procurement episode of 2026, co-hosts Philip Ideson and Rich Ham unveil the first of the show's new procurement "Buy-laws." It's the one that almost every serious practitioner agrees with, but very few organizations are ready to operationalize: replace savings with defined value.

That doesn't mean adding a few extra KPIs in addition to savings. It means removing the word entirely and replacing it with a primary metric that includes verified spend reduction and revenue generation, plus company-specific priorities like emissions reduction, process improvement, resilience, risk reduction, and anything else the business actually cares about.

To help map what this kind of "value" can and should include, Phil and Rich are joined by Omer Abdullah, co-founder of The Smart Cube and co-author of Risk and Your Supply Chain: Preparing for the Next Global Crisis. Omer has spent decades close to the function, advising teams, building intelligence services around procurement decisions, and now working at the intersection of startups, go-to-market strategy, and what he calls a "post-AI" future for procurement.

The idea of "post-AI" matters more than it sounds. Omer isn't talking about a world where AI fades away. He's talking about the moment when AI becomes a hygiene factor – embedded, expected, and no longer a differentiator. The result is uncomfortable: once AI takes the transactional load, procurement doesn't automatically become "more strategic." Not unless leaders define what that actually means, what outcomes it should produce, and how to measure those outcomes without defaulting back to the simplest (and most misleading) number on the page.

The conversation also goes straight at one of procurement's most corrosive incentives: short-termism. The function keeps making long-term sacrifices for short-term wins because the system asks it to. Rich calls it a "scourge," and Omer lays out what a healthier alternative could look like. He recommends a scorecard that includes in-year expectations, multi-year outcomes that reflect how value compounds over time, and a controlled level of discretionary evaluation to capture the contributions that matter but refuse to sit neatly inside a spreadsheet cell.

Underneath all of this is a truth that the episode doesn't dodge: none of it works without executive support. The CFO and CEO have to buy into procurement's expanded definition of value. Procurement can't wait to be understood; they have to be sold. Procurement is a business within a business, and the C-suite is its most important customer. If leaders don't see the function's potential, it's on procurement to advocate, educate, and prove (through better definitions and better scorekeeping) that the status quo isn't merely outdated. It's actively harmful.

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