How Procurement Savings Become a Measurement Fiction
On how procurement teams measure savings and why the numbers often don't add up
The standard unit of procurement success is "savings"—the gap between opening quote and final price. But that opening quote is phantom data: deliberately inflated, designed by the vendor to create room for negotiation. This essay explores why procurement teams measure against vendor-invented anchors, why the system persists despite its dysfunction, and how to recover leverage before the negotiation table is set on the vendor's terms.
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The Three Taxes of Software Pricing
On vendor pricing strategy and where software costs actually come from
Enterprise software pricing is not transparent. Vendors build layered pricing structures that exploit information asymmetry: the Requirements Tax (you don't know what you need), the Attention Tax (you can't evaluate everything), and the Leverage Tax (you're always negotiating from weakness). This essay breaks down how each tax works and where the real negotiating leverage actually lives.
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