r/procurement

Based in Chicago, mid size manufacturing company. We have been trying to fill a supply planning manager role since December. Posted on LinkedIn and Indeed. Got 200 applications. Most were irrelevant. The few decent ones ghosted after the first interview.

I am wondering if we are looking in the wrong places. Do we need a recruiter who understands supply chain or is the market just this bad right now. How do you find passive candidates who are not actively job hunting. I am tired of wasting time on people who cannot explain what S&OP stands for.

The procurement sub is now riddled with fake posts asking for help with something and then an alt account posting their new AI tool. Can we now ban any discussions about finding a “better way to manage these emails / finding suppliers / analysis” and keep them in a weekly or monthly thread regarding tools and AI?

I’m US-based and sourcing custom mailer boxes across Asia right now, and the hardest part lately hasn’t even been finding suppliers. It’s waking up and trying to decode what happened overnight.

I’ll open my inbox and see a quote in one email thread, carton details in a PDF attachment, packaging photos on WhatsApp, and one random sentence answering yesterday’s MOQ question in a completely different chain. Then I spend the first hour of the day piecing together who actually answered what, what’s still missing, and which conversations are even worth continuing.

At this point, half the job feels like communication archaeology.

Would honestly love to know if anyone has figured out a cleaner way to manage this without turning every morning into reconstruction work.

Quelqu’un ici a commencé sa carrière en achat avec un an d’expérience seulement ? Comment avez-vous fait ? Je ne trouve rien sur Paris. Les entreprises ne recrutent pas de vrais profils junior.

I took FAI.gov CON 1100, 1200,1300,1400. I took the CON 3900V and nailed it!. I have applied to several Contract Specialist jobs I do work Procurement work but not contracts. I have applied but can't get in the seat so to speak. I get referred but not selected for interviews often (Only had one didn't get selected) I need at least 1 year of contracting cradle to grave to get certified. Anybody looking for a determined aspiring contract specialist I'm that person.. Currently and GS9 looking for and 11/13.

From the supplier side, I know manufacturing can go wrong in 100 ways:

- raw material delays
- plating issues
- machining tolerance problems
- labor shortages
- dispatch chaos

But I want to understand what procurement teams hate the most when dealing with vendors.

What causes the biggest headaches for you?

- late deliveries?
- inconsistent quality?
- suppliers overpromising?
- poor communication?
- constant follow-ups?
- pricing games?

Interested to hear real experiences from people handling sourcing/procurement daily.

So we are procuring an engineering system for our company. The discussions have been going on since months.

Our procurement team during negotiations with this particular vendor negotiated heavy discounts. I think this pissed the sales person off - they provided it anyway.

During the final procurement meeting with our engineering team, this sales person behaved extremely condescendingly and unprofessionally. I registered a verbal protest to another person but I am feeling humiliated.

My boss is fixated on this system, and therefore, I can't even look for another alternative as it will delay our urgent project by months again.

TLDR: Got humiliated by an unprofessional vendor salesperson.

My team and I are trying to build out a platform that is based on labor rates. One of concerns is that with verifying invoices, we don’t have visibility into the work being performed, so we have no way to confirm number of hours that services take.

Is there anything in COUPA, that allows a user to select services, but not input hours/quantity up front? Instead, going back after a service has taken place and entering quantity of hours for the service.

Probably a no and a stupid question, but I have no idea what COUPA can and can’t do.

Spending a lot of time around enterprise procurement teams this year, and the framing in most vendor decks is backwards. Everyone's pitching "how much can the agent automate." The teams actually getting value are asking the opposite question first.

Quick context on where things are: the category genuinely shifted in 2026 from copilots that suggest to agents that act — an agent finds a supply need, negotiates inside pre-set parameters, routes the PO, and a separate compliance agent clears or escalates it. Gartner pegs supply chain software with agentic AI going from under $2B in 2025 to $53B by 2030, and McKinsey notes procurement is still only ~6% of enterprise AI use cases with just 36% of teams running a real GenAI deployment. So lots of forecast, much lower floor.

Here's the heuristic that's actually held up: don't sort by how complex the task is. Sort by what happens when the agent is wrong.

Automate the stuff that's high-frequency, bounded, reversible, and data-rich:

• transactional sourcing, reorder routing
• RFQ generation, bid normalization
• 3-way invoice matching
• supplier-risk monitoring (continuous scanning of financial/geopolitical/ESG signals)

Keep humans on the stuff that's high-stakes, relational, ambiguous, or irreversible:

• sole-source strategic supplier selection
• multi-year contract terms
• escalating a relationship that's gone bad
• anything with ethical/reputational weight

The biggest failure I see is automating a high-stakes decision because the data looks clean. Gartner says 74% of procurement leaders admit their data isn't AI-ready — and an agent on bad data just makes the wrong call faster. Gartner also expects 40%+ of agentic AI projects to get cancelled by 2027, and it's almost never the model's fault. It's missing guardrails, unclear ownership, and data.

Curious what others here are seeing:

• Where have you actually let an agent execute without a human in the loop, and did it hold up?
• Anyone drawn an explicit "never automate" list, or is it ad hoc?

(Disclosure: I work at Heizen, we build supply chain systems for enterprise CPG/manufacturing — not pitching anything, genuinely want the practitioner read on where the human line should sit.)

We submitted a detailed tender for a large project. Site visits, detailed proposals, three rounds of revisions. 12 months of work.

The feedback we received after losing :

"We went with someone more aligned to our vision."

That was it. No scoring breakdown. No criteria. No timeline explanation. Nothing actionable.

I've been in B2B long enough to know this happens constantly — but I'm curious how widespread it really is.

Three questions for this community :

1. Have you ever lost a bid without receiving any structured feedback ?
2. Did you ask for a debrief ? Did you actually get one ?
3. Do you think buyers have any obligation to explain their decisions to non-retained suppliers ?

Not pitching anything. Genuinely trying to understand if this is a systemic problem or just bad luck on our end.

WhatsApp threads. Excel sheets. Alibaba and ThomasNet rabbit holes. "Trust me bro" certifications. Samples that don't match photos.

How is THIS still how we find suppliers?

Anyone else can relate ? I want something else than this ... What's the one thing you'd actually want instead?

For context I’m in my mid 20’s. Six years experience in supply chain and four in procurement.

Company A: Fully onsite
Role: Buyer/Planner
$70k-$75k salary
Cons: Onsite, 35 min drive 1 way, less pay.
Pros: Easier to get promoted/noticed when in person. Less lay off risk/more stable.
NOTE: Huge company, OEM, name looks great on resume. Job title is great also, upward move in my resume.

Company B: Fully remote
Role: Procurement Specialist
$75k-$90k
Cons: Not easy to get promoted/noticed while remote.
(I’m currently fully remote and getting laid off because the company wants people onsite, I don’t want a repeat)
Pros: more pay, flex able schedule, fully remote no driving.
NOTE: Great company, but the name has little to no recognition (unless you’re in the same field). Job title is really good but not great either.

Should I go for the fully onsite lower pay, or easy peasy remote more money.

Potential schooling I would do is:
Bachelors (WGU, online school)
A&P license
(In this order)

Company B would be nice for online school, I can still make Company A work tho.
A&P license school is up north near where Company A is.
Company A also offers tuition assistance up to $5k a year.

pls, i need a new job.

I'm a procurement & purchasing analyst with 2+ years of real-world experience managing 19+ suppliers, cutting costs 10–15%, automating invoice chaos with Python, and generally being the person who asks "wait, why are we paying that much for this?"

Hey everyone, I (25M) looking for some advice from people already established in procurement/sourcing because I’m starting to feel stuck in my job search.

I currently have about 2 years of experience working in purchasing/procurement in manufacturing. My current role involves vendor communication, PO management, sourcing materials, tracking inventory needs, expediting orders, and working with suppliers to keep production running smoothly.

Right now I’m working in a hybrid setup, and honestly I’ve found that I really thrive during my WFH days because I do my best work in quieter environments with fewer distractions. Long term, I’d love to transition into a fully remote procurement/sourcing role, but it’s definitely not a deal breaker for me.

For the past several months I’ve been applying to buyer, procurement specialist, sourcing specialist, and entry-level sourcing roles, but I’ve had almost no traction. I have not gotten a single interview and every response I have gotten is an automated email tell me they are going a different direction. I truly feels a lot of applications seem to disappear into a black hole with no response at all. At this point I’m trying to figure out if I’m applying incorrectly, targeting the wrong positions, lacking the right keywords on my resume, or if the market is just this difficult right now.

I’d really appreciate any resume advice or job search strategies that helped you break into higher-level procurement/sourcing roles.

For context, I’m currently in Alabama and am actively looking to relocate to Jacksonville, Florida around this time next year, so I’m especially interested in hearing from anyone familiar with the procurement/sourcing market in that area.

Thanks in advance for any insight — I’d genuinely appreciate honest feedback.

I previously worked in spice exports from India, and I noticed that a lot of the sourcing process still depends heavily on manual checks, referrals, and trust.

Curious to hear from procurement and sourcing teams here:

• How do you evaluate whether a new supplier is reliable?
• What information is usually missing during supplier evaluation?
• What causes the most delays or friction in onboarding suppliers?
• Are there any sourcing/procurement workflows you wish were easier?

Trying to better understand real operational pain points from the buyer side.

Hello everyone,

i've done some material/procurement planning during an 8 month long internship last year but now im unemployed and i was wondering if there is somethings i can do to increase my chances of getting an interview. although i know the chances are small.

I live in morocco and i think people don't give quiet people many chances here although ive done my best to change and i think i improved but still have a long way to go.

Thank u guys for any suggestion

Genuinely curious from people working in steel and metals procurement right now.

What’s been the most annoying part of it lately?

Price swings? Late deliveries????...

Just feels like there’s always something going wrong in the chain, wondering what others are actually dealing with day to day.

Hey folks,

I’m 26 years old with 2.5 years of experience in purchasing at a Tier 1 automotive supplier. I have a degree in supply chain management, and I recently accepted a 3-year rotational program at my company.

I started this month in operations as a production supervisor. After this year, I’ll rotate into finance and then program management. At the end of the program, I’ll have some flexibility in choosing which department I’d like to continue in at a management level.

I’m very grateful for the opportunity, but I’ve been questioning whether it was the right move. Long term, I see myself going back into procurement, and part of me wonders if I should have just stayed in purchasing instead.

Was this the right career move? Will other companies value the experience of working across multiple departments, even if I ultimately want to return to procurement?

Planning to start exporting construction materials from India...currently exploring categories where India is actually price competitive.

I already know ceramics/tiles are strong and have identified some regions too, but curious what other products could have any potential?

Considering things like:

• stone/granite
• Sanitary ware
• engineered wood - not sure about this
• hardware/fittings
• industrial chemicals
• prefabricated materials

Can anyone help with knowledge of importing/exporting in this space or working in EU construction procurement.

Are there any products that are actually competitive in pricing?