We know that tackling tail spend is a good way to control costs. But getting control of indirect spend is often easier said than done. In this blog, we're going to explore three key barriers to optimising your tail spend.

Tenders: a lengthy and complex process best used for procuring large contracts? It may be the generally accepted view, but it’s not necessarily the right one. This article will outline why competitive tenders are effective for the procurement of any services - big or small.

‘You need it? You buy it’ - if only procurement was so simple. The reality is, procuring goods - or services - sparks a chain reaction between different departments. The biggest challenge for businesses is to ensure that the process journey runs smoothly and compliantly. So where to start?

Total cost of ownership, or TCO for short, is a term most usually associated with assets, goods and software. Procurement takes the base price of the asset, add the cost of shipping, import duties and warehousing and then finally work out any forecasted costs of managing, repairing or decommissioning the asset through its lifetime within the business.

There's lots of info out there on tailspend, but we wanted to dig a bit deeper. So we teamed up with CIPS and Supply Manager Insider to run an in-depth survey. We had an incredible response, with almost 400 procurement professionals taking part and giving their valuable insights.

Maistro is proud to announce our recent attainment of ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certification. Gaining accreditation was the culmination of hard work and careful process planning spanning the last 12 months and is testament to how seriously we at Maistro take information security.

The procurement world is emerging from the paralysis of lockdown to discover the landscape before them is quite different.  The urgent need to cut costs, supplier chain disruption, longer lead-times, higher supply prices and rapid changes to internal budgets.

Digitisation is the talk of the town. For more than 6 months now businesses have had to adapt to a scattered, remote workforce with company crisis contingencies being tested almost across the board. Yet in our world, we’re seeing analogue working practices still commonplace in many procurement teams. So why the delay in adopting digital transformation?

For more than 6 months now, half of the UK's workforce has been working from home. So, is this likely to become the new "normal” as we move forward and start to put 2020 behind us, and if so, what needs to be taken into account to ensure minimal operational disruption?