Design the process for the people who use it twice a year

The process was built for buyers, and buyers were not the ones using it

An 8 to 10 week sprint, July 2025. A €3B global speciality chemicals company. One senior analyst and two analysts, 30 employee interviews, 67 survey responses, 4 regions. Capability: Operational Improvement.

Indirect tail spend is the long tail of small, low value purchases that never become a product: a software licence, a replacement sensor, a contractor for one job. Each is individually too small to question, and together they are a real number passing through a process nobody designs with care.

The client wanted to improve how it handled those purchases. It lacked clear roles, consistent supplier onboarding, meaning the steps a supplier completes before it can be ordered from and paid, and effective user support across regions.

The people raising these purchases are engineers, site supervisors and office managers, not buyers. They are the requestors: anyone who starts a purchase without purchasing being their job. They met fragmented tools and unclear instructions, and the result was delay, more support requests, and inefficiency in the process.

Without a standard approach, purchasing cycles slowed, indirect costs rose and system adoption stayed low. Adoption was lowest of all at manufacturing sites, where purchases were infrequent but complex. That last point is the problem in one line: the hardest purchases were being made by the people with the least practice.

The evidence sat with the people who had least reason to gather it

A speciality chemicals company of this size employs procurement professionals who understand sourcing better than we do. Domain knowledge was not the gap, and we will not pretend it was.

The gap is who holds the evidence. Knowledge of where this process breaks does not sit with the procurement team, because the procurement team does not use the part that is broken. It sits with several hundred people across 4 regions who each touch it two or three times a year. Each holds one fragment, and a fragment on its own looks like one person having one bad week. From inside a single experience nobody can tell whether the process is wrong or the person was unlucky.

Then there is who could assemble it. The procurement team's attention goes to the contracts that carry the money, and the tail is by definition not where the money is. The requestors have no reason to learn a system they use twice a year, no time to map it, and no standing to redesign it. So the work sits in a gap: real, costed, and owned by nobody whose job it is.

That is the trade, and it is worth naming plainly. Not expertise the client lacked. Reach across 4 regions, and protected time to assemble what the reach collects, which nobody inside had spare.

Anecdote became evidence, and the evidence has an owner

What that enables. The client can now make the case on tail spend from evidence rather than anecdote, and send each fix to the function that owns it. It can also tell a requestor who needs help from a process that needs changing, which it could not do before, because both reached the support desk looking identical.

Two figures size an opportunity, and the third is left out

Two figures are published here with the qualifier they carry. 30% reduction in support requests, potential identified. 2x faster vendor onboarding, potential identified. Both are modelled potential rather than time or money banked, and no baseline volumes are stated behind them, so they size an opportunity and do not report an outcome. An 8 to 10 week sprint ends at a recommendation, and what happens next belongs to the client.

A third figure is left out, and the reason is worth stating. A count of requestors re-engaged appears on the record. It carries no qualifier, no denominator and no date, and the line supporting it describes the re-engagement as already achieved. An engagement that ended at a handover cannot show that.

Source. Every figure in this article comes from the SprintlyWorks engagement record for Improving Indirect Tail Spend Management, a €3B global speciality chemicals company, July 2025, an 8 to 10 week sprint with 30 employee interviews and 67 survey responses across 4 regions. Clients are described and never named. Where a figure is identified or modelled rather than banked, this article says so.

Buy the first map, then run the method yourself

We put one senior analyst and two analysts on one defined question for 8 to 10 weeks. You get the fieldwork, the analysis and the handover, and you keep the method, so the second time you run it you do not need us.

If small purchases at your company generate support requests nobody has counted, that is the shape of problem this sprint is for. Write to rahul.abhisek@sprintlyworks.com and we will say in the first call whether it is worth the time. If a sprint is the wrong tool, we will say that instead.