What a Procurement Diagnostic Actually Covers, and What it Does Not
Six months ago I sat down at my kitchen table, opened a blank laptop and realised there was no team behind me anymore. No procurement function to lean on. No IT ticket to raise. Just me, a client problem, and the clock.
Nineteen years in-house taught me how to build inside a structure. How to get budget approved, how to bring stakeholders along, how to land a business case with the right executive at the right time. Those skills still matter every week. But running QBE has taught me something in-house never could. It has taught me exactly what a procurement diagnostic needs to cover to be useful, and just as importantly, what it should leave out.
Most organisations that call me in already sense something is wrong. Spend is scattered. Contracts are managed differently site to site. Nobody can say with confidence who owns a supplier relationship or what it is actually costing them. What they usually cannot do is describe the problem in a way that leads to action. That is the gap a diagnostic closes.
What a diagnostic actually covers
A proper diagnostic answers four questions, in this order.
First, where is the money going. Not a category list. Actual spend, mapped to actual suppliers, reconciled against what finance thinks is being spent. The gap between those two numbers is often the first real finding.
Second, who is accountable for what. Most decentralised organisations have decision rights nobody has written down. People assume someone else owns a supplier relationship until a contract lapses and nobody notices.
Third, where is the risk sitting. Compliance exposure, single supplier dependency, contracts running on handshake extensions. This is where safety and audit findings usually surface, and where executives start paying attention.
Fourth, what would it take to fix it. Not a wish list. A realistic view of governance uplift, resourcing and sequencing, built around what the organisation can actually absorb.
What a diagnostic does not cover
It does not solve the problem. A diagnostic is not a procurement function. It is the evidence base that justifies building one, or fixing the one that exists. I have seen organisations commission diagnostic after diagnostic and never act on any of them, because nobody separated the finding from the fix. A good diagnostic ends with a decision point, not another document to file.
It does not require a large team to run. This surprises people. A diagnostic across a large, complex portfolio can be delivered by one experienced person working through structured data requests and a handful of stakeholder conversations. Scale of portfolio does not mean scale of team, if the process is disciplined.
It does not need six months. If a diagnostic is taking that long, the scope has usually drifted or the data requests were never fit for purpose in the first place.
An example
A property owner with a national portfolio and no dedicated procurement function engaged QBE to assess their facilities management spend. Within four weeks the diagnostic showed spend was 30 per cent higher than budget assumed, supplier contracts had expired without anyone noticing, and there was no single person accountable for any of it. The finding was not complicated. The organisation had grown faster than its governance had. That gap, once named clearly, gave the executive team what they needed to act. Not a large program. A clear next step.
Where this fits
This is the work QBE does at the start of most engagements. Not because every client needs a full transformation, but because you cannot build the right fix without first knowing exactly what is broken and why. A diagnostic done properly should feel uncomfortable in places. If it does not surface anything the client did not already suspect, it has not done its job.
Nineteen years in-house showed me how procurement functions are meant to work. Running QBE has shown me how quickly you can find out whether one actually does.
