How to build and scale a procurement department

Procurement has changed. What was once a back-office function focused on cutting costs has become one of the most cross-functional and strategically important roles in a company. To explore what that means in practice, we brought together two procurement leaders with very different experiences.

‍

Carole is VP Global Procurement at Contentsquare, where she has spent her career building procurement functions from the ground up in high-growth Tech companies.

‍

Clément leads procurement transformation at Accor, one of the world's largest hospitality groups. Between them, they covered everything from hiring and team structure to AI and sustainability.

‍

The buyer has changed

The image of the tough negotiator sitting across the table from suppliers is outdated. "I'm a real advocate of not reducing the role of the buyer to that of cost killer," said Carole. "If you start out with that label, it really closes doors for you afterwards."

‍

Today's procurement professionals are expected to be:

• Facilitators who break down silos between departments
• Project managers who can drive cross-functional initiatives
• Relationship builders, both internally and with suppliers
• Learners, keeping up with digital tools, regulations and ESG requirements

‍

Negotiation still matters, but it is now one skill among many.

‍

Building and organizing the team

How you build a procurement team depends on where your company is.

‍

 At Contentsquare, Carole was looking for entrepreneurial profiles: people with enough structure in their background to bring rigor, but comfortable enough with ambiguity to start from scratch. "You need to be on a very tactical level at the beginning," she explained, "before you can put strategies in place and project yourself onto something more ambitious."

‍

As the team grows, structure matters more. At Contentsquare, each major function has a dedicated procurement business partner, much like an HR or Finance business partner. This keeps procurement embedded in the business rather than operating at arm's length.

‍

At Accor, the challenge was different. With 260 people in the procurement function and 2.5 billion euros managed annually, the question was not how to build but how to reorganize. The team recently restructured around its 40 hotel brands, separating economy and midscale from luxury and lifestyle, recognizing that a cost-savings message lands very differently depending on the audience.

‍

Scaling the function

Knowing when to staff up is one of the trickier questions in procurement.

‍

At Contentsquare, Carole sees two directions of growth running in parallel. There is a vertical dimension, where team members deepen their expertise within a category, and a horizontal one, where the function takes on more spend, more projects and more cross-company responsibility.

‍

“We haven’t reached a glass ceiling yet,” she said. “There’s plenty to do.” That confidence comes in part from the business partner model, which naturally expands as the business grows. Each new function or entity that joins the company creates a new surface area for procurement to cover.

‍

At Accor, scale brought a different challenge: how to avoid a one-size-fits-all approach across 40 very different brands. The answer was to restructure around the needs of the brands being served rather than around purchasing categories alone, creating both ambassadorial roles close to the business and operational excellence centers to support local buyers on the ground.

‍

The broader trend supports this ambition. According to a Michael Page study cited by Clément, more than 50% of procurement directors now sit on the executive committee, and close to half of Chief Procurement Officers report directly to the CEO. Positioning matters: the closer procurement sits to the top, the more influence it can have as the function grows.

‍

Navigating the ProcureTech landscape

The ProcureTech landscape has exploded, and navigating it requires curiosity, skepticism and peer knowledge in equal measure. Both speakers agreed that the era of one platform doing everything is over.

‍

To stay informed without getting overwhelmed, they recommended:

• Following trusted voices on LinkedIn 
• Engaging with procurement clubs and communities for honest peer feedback
• Attending events like Digital Procurement Week in Amsterdam
• Testing tools with clear use cases rather than chasing every new product

‍

The direction of travel is towards interoperability: open platforms that can be enhanced with best-of-breed solutions, rather than monolithic systems that promise everything and deliver a frustrating user experience.

‍

What AI means for procurement

On AI, both speakers were optimistic. Generative AI is already being used for negotiation preparation, drafting RFI questions and exploring procurement strategies quickly. Clément described a future of guided buying, where employees express their needs in plain language and are guided through the sourcing process, freeing buyers to focus on higher-value work.

‍

"In three to five years, generative AI will have totally turned the world upside down, and purchasing even more so."

‍

The vision is not AI replacing buyers, but acting as an exoskeleton: handling time-consuming, repetitive tasks so that procurement professionals can concentrate on relationships, strategy and judgment.

‍

Sustainability is now a core part of the job

ESG has moved from a side conversation to a central part of how procurement teams operate.

‍

At Accor, sustainability is embedded into supplier selection, with suppliers assessed on:

• Carbon reduction ambition
• Quality of governance
• Actions implemented to reduce their footprint
• How they measure and report on their impact

‍

At Contentsquare, the approach is earlier in its journey but no less intentional. The company is rolling out EcoVadis assessments for its top suppliers and developing its first procurement policy with CSR commitments built in. The main levers are cloud infrastructure and travel, two areas where even a Tech company can have a meaningful impact.

‍

Where procurement is heading

Procurement is no longer a support function. It sits close to the top of the organization, connects internal teams with external partners, and is expected to contribute to financial performance, innovation and sustainability all at once.

‍

Whether you are building a team from scratch or transforming an existing one, the fundamentals are the same: hire people who can collaborate and adapt, position the function where it can have real influence, use tools thoughtfully, and treat sustainability as a core part of the job rather than an afterthought.

‍

Ready to build a procurement function that goes beyond cost-cutting? Get in touch with Pivot.