Rim Nam Foods' carton supplier sends its 9% price letter to the plant manager, not to procurement. A production run is due on Monday, so he agrees on the phone. Finance spots the new price a month later, when the first invoice fails to match the purchase order. The buyer who ran the tender hears about it last.
Nobody in that chain did anything strange. Each person did their own job. The problem is that nobody had written down who owns a supplier price once the contract is signed, so everyone assumed someone else did.
A duties map fixes that. It's a one-page grid of every step from identifying a need to paying the invoice, showing which function owns each step and who has to be involved. In Part 1 and the RFP design post we covered two procurement tools. This post steps back and looks at the function itself: what procurement should own, where it meets the rest of the business, and how to map it.
Procurement duties map: source-to-pay steps against seven functions, with one owner per step and the supplier price change row added
What Does the Procurement Function Own?
The work splits into two halves. Source-to-contract covers choosing what to buy and from whom. Procure-to-pay covers ordering, receiving and paying under that contract. CIPS describes the full cycle in 13 stages:
- Specification
- Analysis
- Strategy
- Market
- Documentation
- Criteria
- Tender
- Evaluation
- Contract
- Delivery
- Performance
- Management
- Asset
For a duties map I compress that into eight working steps, because each row needs one clear owner:
- Define the need and the specification
- Analyse spend and the supply market
- Set the category strategy
- Run the tender and negotiate
- Sign and manage the contract
- Order and receive
- Match the invoice and pay
- Manage supplier relationships: performance, risk and development
In my experience procurement should own steps 2 to 5 and step 8. The business owns the need in step 1 and the day-to-day ordering in step 6. Finance owns the payment in step 7. Procurement still has a voice in all three, but it doesn't run them.
That split is a control as well as an organisational choice. UC Davis's internal control guidance, for example, says purchasing duties should be assigned to different people so no one person controls the whole buying process. The person who picks the supplier shouldn't also confirm the goods arrived and release the payment.
What Is Procurement Driving For?
Owning the steps is half the job. The other half is knowing what you're steering towards. We work with five drivers. There's no fixed order between them; the weighting changes by category.
- Cost. The total cost of using the item, not just the unit price.
- Quality. Consistently to specification, first time.
- Service. On time and in full, and quick to respond when something changes.
- Innovation. New materials, designs or processes the supplier brings to you.
- Continuous improvement. Cost and performance that get better every year, not only at tender time.
None of these is procurement's alone. Cost needs finance to agree how savings are counted. Quality needs QA and R&D. Service needs operations and logistics. Innovation needs R&D and sales, and continuous improvement needs operations on both sides of the relationship. Procurement drives all five, but every one is cross-functional work.
Most teams still weight one driver far above the rest. In Deloitte's 2025 survey, 72% of CPOs put margin through cost reduction at the top of their list. Cost matters. But a supplier picked on cost alone, and managed on cost alone, will usually give you cost alone.
Supplier Relationship Management Is Where the Drivers Get Delivered
Step 8 on the map is where the five drivers turn into results. CIPS describes supplier relationship management as managing and maintaining the relationship between buyer and supplier, and lists among its aims access to supplier innovation, better service and priority capacity, and lower total cost and waste. That's most of the list above. The evidence that it pays is reasonable too: McKinsey reports that companies which collaborated with suppliers regularly outperformed their peers on growth, operating cost and profitability.
The practical consequence comes earlier than most people expect. If you want quality, service, innovation and improvement from a supplier, you have to select for them, which is why the RFP asks non-price questions and why the evaluation weights them. A supplier that can't run an improvement program will hand you the same price, plus an increase, every year.
Where Does Procurement Meet the Rest of the Business?
Almost every step is shared, so the map has to show the joins. These are the ones that break most often:
| Function | What it owns | What procurement needs from it | Where it usually breaks |
| Finance | Budget, payment, savings reporting | Agreement on how savings are counted | Savings that never show up in the P&L |
| Operations | Demand, ordering, receiving | Forecasts and early warning of changes | Side deals with suppliers at plant level |
| Quality and R&D | Specifications, supplier approval | Room to question the specification | Specs written around one supplier |
| IT | Systems and data | Clean master data, ERP controls | Tools bought without procurement |
| Legal | Contract terms and risk | Fast, standard templates | Contracts stuck in review |
| Sales | Customer pricing | Visibility of cost increases | Customer prices that ignore input costs |
The survey data shows how wide some of these gaps are. In PwC's 2021 survey of Dutch finance and procurement leaders, 64% said the two functions were not fully aligned, and 70% of finance leaders rated procurement a technical beginner. Ardent Partners' interviews with CPOs and CFOs found the biggest obstacle was disagreement over how procurement performance and savings should be measured. Deloitte's 2025 survey of 265 CPOs reports better collaboration with IT and Legal, but room to improve with R&D, Sales and Marketing, and Tax. Technology is a shared job too: in ProcureCon's 2025 report, only 45% of respondents saw the CIO and CPO as equal partners in technology buying.
Why Does This Matter More Right Now?
Procurement teams are being asked to do more with fewer people. The Hackett Group's 2026 study expects procurement workload to rise 8% while headcount falls 0.9%, with supply continuity ahead of cost reduction as the top priority. When there's no slack, two people doing the same job and nobody doing another both cost real money.
Food exporters in Thailand feel both pressures. Industry bodies forecast 2026 food exports down 7.3%, with Middle East disruption pushing up energy and logistics costs, and price competition making increases hard to pass on. A supplier price increase that nobody owns lands straight on a margin that's already thin.
Structure doesn't fix this on its own. As one recent analysis of operating models puts it, a centre-led setup without clear boundaries tends to give you overhead at the centre without control, and buying in the business without accountability. The org chart says who reports to whom. The duties map says who decides what.
How Do You Build the Duties Map?
I use a simplified version of the familiar RACI matrix with three letters: O for owns, C for contributes, I for informed. In our experience it takes about two hours with the right people in the room. (Slightly adjusted from the real RACI)
- List the eight steps as rows. Add rows for anything specific to your business, such as supplier price increases or new product launches.
- List the functions as columns. Procurement, Finance, Operations, Quality and R&D, IT, Legal and Sales. Add Logistics if it's a separate function.
- Fill in one letter per cell. The rule is exactly one O per row. If two functions both claim a step, split the step until each part has one owner.
- Run the gap check. Any row with no O, or more than one, is a gap. These are almost always where your recent problems came from.
- Test it with a real case. Take a recent incident, such as a price letter, a late delivery or an off-contract purchase, and walk it through the map. If the map doesn't tell you who should have acted, it isn't finished.
- Get it signed and review it once a year. The heads of procurement, finance and operations sign it. Review it whenever the operating model or the ERP changes.
What Did Rim Nam's Map Show?
Rim Nam had no row for supplier price changes during a contract. Once they added one, procurement took the O. Operations and finance took a C each: operations to flag the letter on the day it arrives, finance to block any invoice above the contract price until procurement approves the change. Sales took an I, so the customer price list gets reviewed when a big input moves.
The next price letter went straight to the buyer. She ran it through the index clause from the RFP design post and had an answer back to the supplier within a week.
They also changed step 8. The quarterly carton supplier review used to cover price and late deliveries. It now covers all five drivers, with operations, quality and R&D at the table. At the second review, Supplier B proposed a lighter board grade that passed Rim Nam's stacking test. That was an innovation and a cost saving in one, and it came from the supplier.
Back to the plant manager's phone call. In a company without a map, he agrees to the 9% because nobody told him it wasn't his decision. In a company with one, he forwards the letter to the buyer, and the supplier gets a reply quoting their own cost breakdown.
Remember we follow Rim Nam Foods, a made-up curry maker outside Bangkok that buys about 2.4 million 5-ply export cartons a year.
I'm not good with Graphic Design, all the images are AI generated.