Tail Spend | Killing Budgets by Stealth
Procurement teams spend most of their time on strategic categories, the big suppliers, major contracts, and negotiations that actually move the needle.
And rightly so. That’s where the leverage is.
But sitting underneath all that is a different kind of problem: thousands of small purchases, spread across hundreds of suppliers, that never get the same attention.
That’s tail spend.
And unlike maverick spend—where people go rogue and buy off-contract—tail spend happens entirely within the rules. It’s just never actively managed.
