Redesigning internal buying journeys: A practical approach to modern tail spend management

By Pete Davison and Thomas Karger

Tail spend is a common source of tension. In many organisations, tail spend is treated as administrative noise: too fragmented to control and too small to prioritise. But for most business stakeholders, tail spend is procurement. It is where internal customers directly experience procurement – where they raise requests, navigate approvals, and experience delays. However strong its strategic sourcing capability may be, Procurement is often judged by the day-to-day and ends up being perceived as “difficult” when the business needs to buy something.

The root issue is rarely capability. Instead, it is usually structural design – specifically, how the buying journey is architected, including fragmented systems, unclear routing, manual intervention, and governance applied retrospectively rather than embedded upstream.

Procurement leaders are seeing opportunity in new technologies: AI-enabled sourcing tools, intelligent demand orchestration software, and modern marketplace solutions that can transform the entire buying experience. But technology cannot fix structural flaws. It enables orchestration, but design and governance determine whether that orchestration works. Without that, new systems simply digitise existing inefficiencies instead of solving them.

To realise the promise of modern buying technologies, Procurement must first redesign how a business need turns into a purchase, informed by the lived experience of internal customers. This article outlines the practical steps to do so.

Where buying breaks down

In large organisations, tail spend typically represents around 20% of total spend, but a disproportionate share of administrative burden and operational frustration. Common symptoms include:

• Free-text purchase orders and non-guided buying 
• Limited price transparency and benchmarking 
• Manual triage of small requests 
• Low compliance to preferred suppliers 
• Slow cycle times for low-value purchases 
• High internal cost per transaction 
• Little visibility into real demand patterns 

The consequences are wide-reaching. Business users face unclear or cumbersome processes and avoidable delays. Finance lacks real-time insights into money flows. Procurement spends time managing noise instead of creating strategic value. These issues are the by-product of buying channels that were never architected with purpose.