Corporate Procurement

Ah yes, corporate procurement. We're not capable of ordering our own things and negotiating our own price. Instead we outsource it to idiots who use their incredible buying power to negotiate higher prices!!
There must be a Dilbert cartoon for this somewhere.

Our procurement has been outsourced. I contacted our contact. I emailed him a price I had agreed with the only supplier in Australia for this software product. He emailed my email to their outsourced software supplier, yes you got it, an outsource of an outsource! And yes that means the price is doubled or squared! And even though I'd given them both the price and contact name, number and email, they managed to come back with a price significantly higher than the one I told them they could get it for!!
That takes some beating.
I learnt many years ago, that grouping buying power together in a corporate and assuming you can get a better deal, never works compared to letting lots of people all go off and do their own thing!! I learnt this with car fleet sales, where you can go with the company fleet price which looks very favourable, or a few of you can off to a local supplier, and say, "What deal will you give us for buying 5-10 cars from you!!" Point proven. The reason this seems to always work is because procurement always seems to be stocked with low grade idiots. I hope there are no procurement people reading this. You'd think that companies would have learnt by now to put their absolute best people into procurement and save themselves Billions. I've never seen it yet! Unless you procurement people can show me otherwise!