Procurement & Technology Background
Revised 17 August 2026. This page is a summary. It is not evidence. The dated posts in the Procurement Insights archive are the record, and where this page and a dated post differ, the dated post governs. Posts are never edited. This page is maintained.
The short version
Jon Hansen entered the high-tech sector in 1983 and moved into procurement specifically in the early 1990s. Two clocks, kept separate: 43 years in technology, roughly three decades in procurement.
Procurement Insights launched in May 2007 and has published continuously since, carrying zero vendor sponsorships. Posts are never edited after publication. Where a later view supersedes an earlier one, the later view is published as its own dated post beside the original — the Cisco thread, running 2007, 2018, 2023 and 2026, is a worked example anyone can open.
That is the whole basis of what follows. The value of the archive is not that it was always right. It is that it cannot be revised to say it was.
In 2026 the Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply awarded Fellowship on the basis of that record — unsolicited, and assessed against the published archive rather than an application.
The 1998 Department of National Defence engagement
The foundational work. A national defence maintenance operation was delivering next-day MRO parts against a contractual requirement it was failing, and the engagement was to automate the process.
The work started from the failure rather than the plan. Tracing it led out of procurement into the service department, back into procurement, out again to couriers and customs, and finally into finance — four departures from the mapped process, none of which a forward-built process map would have produced.
Documented outcomes, as reported contemporaneously:
| Result | Detail |
|---|---|
| Delivery performance | 51% → 97.3% next-day, within three months |
| Cost of goods | 23% reduction, sustained over several years |
| Buyers | Reduced from 23 to 3 |
These figures are drawn from a contemporaneous account first published on Procurement Insights in July 2007 — Dangerous Supply Chain Myths (Part 7) — and have been reported consistently since.
The platform built from this engagement was subsequently sold, with its patent, to a public company for $12 million, a transaction reported in the press.
Three figures are distinct and are often conflated: 23 buyers reduced to 3 · 23% cost-of-goods reduction · 23 firms examined in a separate 2005 eProcurement market report.
The causal ordering matters and is often reversed in retellings. The improvement was produced by alignment and readiness work carried out before platform selection. The technology came afterward, onto a system that had been made real first.
Acres of Diamonds — fall 2004
A white paper on the value of effectively managing low-dollar, high-transaction-volume spend. It contains the passage that states the architectural position, in the language of the time:
“It is my position that a true centralization of procurement objectives requires a decentralized architecture that is based on the real-world operating attributes of all transactional stakeholders starting at the local or regional level. In other words, your organization gains control of it’s spend environment by relinquishing centralized functional control in favor of operational efficiencies on the front lines. This is the cornerstone of agent-based modeling.”
The paper is dated fall 2004. The PDF is available here, and the passage above appears verbatim inside the 4 July 2007 archive post.
Commodity characteristics
Two categories identified through a multi-year tracking exercise and used throughout the later work:
Historic Flat Line — closer to direct materials. Negotiated, with price stability over extended periods. Long-term contracting works.
Dynamic Flux — no reliable list price, with material daily fluctuation. Locking a multi-year price is the failure mode, because the flexibility to reach the widest supplier base in the shortest time is the actual source of value.
The distinction explains a class of initiative failure that looks like poor execution and is actually a category error: applying a contracting method suited to one type to a commodity of the other type.
The archive, 2007 to present
Nineteen years of continuous publication, unsponsored and unedited.
It is a contemporaneous record: observations dated at the time they were made, including the ones later revised, with the revisions published separately under their own dates.
It can be checked. Dates are timestamped by a third party. Claims made before outcomes existed can be compared against what subsequently happened. Where the wording of a 2007 post differs from a 2026 restatement of the same event, both stand in their own dated sources — the expected signature of a record kept over decades rather than assembled afterward.
Other published work
- Procurement at a Crossroads — J. Ross Publishing, 2016. Available on Amazon
- Dangerous Supply Chain Myths — 2007 series, Procurement Insights
- Blog Talk Radio programme — ran from 2009, with several hundred recorded interviews across the procurement and supply chain field
- Thinking With the Machine: A Worked Record of Human–AI Collaborative Reasoning — 2026
Institutional
Fellowship of the Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply (FCIPS), awarded 2026 on the basis of the published record. Not applied for.
CIPS Americas board member. Speaker, CIPS North America Inaugural Conference, New York, 9–10 November 2026.
Truth Is Believing. Accuracy Is Knowing. Outcome Is Proof.™
Procurement at a Crossroads: Career-Impacting Insights into a Rapidly Changing Industry
Overview:
Any book discussing the future of procurement must go beyond the mere recognition of this shift. To be truly useful, a book must also embrace the unique challenges of developing practical approaches to conditions that do not yet exist from a generational business perspective. It must also consider the ripple effects of any changes, including but not limited to solution providers, analysts, associations, standards-setting bodies, and news/opinion sites. In this book, we aspire to better understand the choices procurement professionals face, both individually and as a collective group, and how the decisions that are made today will affect the trajectory of their careers and the profession as a whole. Procurement at a Crossroads aspires to be the book that shows practitioners and the business community at large the impressive future that awaits if we are prepared to make smart, bold choices today.
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