Domo's Chris Sweeney: Making Procurement Truly Strategic

Procurement teams are under increasing pressure to move beyond operational efficiency and demonstrate real strategic value. But making that shift isn’t always straightforward.

Domo's Head of Procurement Practice, Chris Sweeney, shares how a structured approach to total spend visibility and opportunity assessment can help procurement teams demonstrate and deliver their full strategic potential within the organisation.

Chris spoke to Procurement Magazine to share practical insights on what it takes to make procurement truly strategic.

Many procurement teams want to be seen as strategic. What is it that you see that is still making that difficult to achieve?

One of the biggest reasons is that procurement is still often measured primarily through savings targets.

Historically that made sense. Procurement’s role was largely about cost control and negotiating better deals. But supply chains are now more complex, geopolitical risk is higher, and resilience has become a board-level priority, all of which has fundamentally changed what strategic value looks like.

Today, the real strategic value of procurement often sits in managing risk, strengthening supplier ecosystems and building resilient supply chains, not just delivering year-on-year savings. However, savings still play an important role.

Savings are often the most visible and measurable way for procurement to demonstrate value early on. When procurement can clearly show that it is improving profitability or releasing cash, it builds credibility with leadership. That credibility then creates the space for procurement to invest time and resources into the broader strategic priorities, such as supplier innovation, resilience, sustainability and risk management.

In that sense, savings are not the destination. They’re the vehicle that allows procurement to earn influence within the organisation. The key is ensuring that procurement doesn’t stop, but uses that credibility to move into more strategic territory.

Is there anything that in your experience helps in terms of a good place to start with moving into that strategic territory?

Something I use with clients is an Opportunity Assessment – it's a structured analysis of close to 100% of organisational third party spend, designed to identify and prioritise value creation opportunities.

Importantly, it’s not just a spend report or a benchmarking exercise. The goal is to answer these critical questions:

1. Where is the biggest opportunity?
2. What will it take to capture it?
3. What should we prioritise first?
4. What other benefits can we realise alongside savings? 

By quantifying opportunities across categories and evaluating them based on effort, risk and potential return, procurement can build a clear execution roadmap for the next 12 - 24 months.

This can help make procurement a function that is actively shaping where the organisation focuses its effort.

The key shift is conducting this analysis across total spend, rather than category by category, to build a holistic roadmap that speaks the language of the Executive team.

Why is total spend visibility such a critical starting point?

Because partial data leads to partial conclusions.

In many organisations, only 40 - 60% of spend is actively managed. The rest sits in blind spots such as corporate cards, unmanaged suppliers, legacy contracts or fragmented subsidiary data.

If those areas aren’t analysed, significant value can remain hidden.

A proper opportunity assessment starts by consolidating spend from all sources, cleaning the data and classifying it consistently across categories. Once you have a complete picture, you can start to identify contract gaps, supplier concentration risks and areas where sourcing strategies could unlock value. With that full baseline in place, procurement can direct its efforts with precision and make a compelling case for where to go next. 

Where does technology fit into this process?

Technology isn’t the strategy, but it can dramatically help to accelerate the process. Many procurement teams still spend months manually extracting data from multiple systems, cleaning it and building spreadsheet models to analyse opportunities before they can even start on their real work. That slows everything down.

Modern data platforms and AI tools like Domo can automate much of that work: connecting directly to systems, classifying spend, identifying patterns and surfacing potential opportunities much faster.

The real benefit isn’t just efficiency, it’s that procurement teams can spend less time preparing analysis and more time focusing on strategy, supplier engagement and business alignment, which is where the strategic value is created.

The teams making the biggest strides aren't necessarily those with the biggest budgets; they're the ones who have a clear, complete picture of where they stand.

Chris Sweeney is Head of the Procurement Practice at Domo, specialising in procurement intelligence and opportunity assessment programmes