OTB-MIDAS
Insights

Practical thinking on
procurement, IT and supply chain.

Perspectives from practitioners — written by people who have delivered inside the organisations they write about.

Procurement StrategySeptember 2026·4 min read

Why procurement needs embedded delivery, not consulting advice

The consulting industry has a delivery problem. Firms produce excellent strategy decks, present detailed recommendations, and leave implementation to clients who often lack the specialist capability to execute on them. The result: organisations pay twice — once for the advice and again when the advice doesn't stick.

The embedded delivery model changes this equation. When your procurement professionals work inside your organisation — using your systems, sitting alongside your teams, owning delivery milestones — the outcome is fundamentally different. Knowledge transfers. Frameworks get used. Capability grows. The measure of success is not the quality of the document handed over. It is what the organisation can do six months after the engagement ends.

ProcurementDelivery modelConsultancy
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Financial ServicesAugust 2026·5 min read

The hidden costs of vendor lock-in in enterprise IT

Long-term technology contracts feel like stability. In practice, they often become the single largest drag on an organisation's ability to modernise. Understanding lock-in economics — and how to structure contracts that preserve commercial flexibility — is one of the most valuable skills in enterprise IT procurement.

The typical pattern is familiar: a five-year contract is signed, integration deepens, switching costs mount, and by renewal the client has almost no negotiating leverage. The vendor knows this. Breaking this cycle requires upstream commercial discipline — exit provisions, data portability guarantees, performance-linked terms — not firefighting at renewal. The organisations that achieve sustained IT cost reduction treat procurement as a strategic function, not an administrative one.

IT ProcurementVendor managementContract strategy
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Supply ChainAugust 2026·4 min read

Supply chain resilience in 2026: from visibility to control

Visibility is necessary but not sufficient. Organisations that survived recent supply chain disruption were those that had moved beyond dashboards to operational control — the ability to act on what they could see, not just observe it.

Supply chain visibility tools have proliferated over the last five years. Most organisations now have access to more data than they can act on. The differentiator is not the dashboard — it is the decision-making infrastructure behind it. Resilient supply chains combine real-time visibility with pre-agreed escalation protocols, pre-qualified alternative suppliers, and procurement frameworks that allow fast switching without renegotiation from scratch. Visibility without the operational architecture to respond is just an early warning system with no alarm.

Supply chainResilienceOperations
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Compliance & KYCJuly 2026·5 min read

KYC as a procurement discipline: structuring compliance at scale

KYC is often treated as a legal obligation — a checkbox to be completed before onboarding. The organisations that do it best treat it as a procurement discipline: structured, auditable, repeatable, and capable of scaling without proportional headcount growth.

Compliance-as-procurement means designing the onboarding workflow the same way you would design a sourcing process. Clear stages. Defined decision points. Documented rationale. Consistent data collection. When KYC is approached this way, it becomes an asset rather than a cost — building an audit trail that withstands regulatory scrutiny, reducing re-work on failed onboardings, and enabling teams to process higher volumes without expanding headcount. The due diligence framework is the procurement category strategy. The compliance officer is the category manager.

KYCComplianceFinancial services
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