On September 15, 2026, at FARETE, the Confindustria Emilia Area Centro event dedicated to business culture, Bonfiglioli Consulting brought to the Bologna Congress Center a workshop on the evolution of the purchasing function. The theme of the edition, “The courage to transform,” served as a backdrop for a simple question that seemed only at first glance: which component, or group of components, is today the most strategic for the company, regardless of its price? The entire course of the workshop, and of this page, stems from here.
Marco Brandalesi, Principal Supply Chain, Manufacturing and Operational Excellence at Bonfiglioli Consulting, led the discussion. Before joining the consultancy, he worked his entire career in the factory, from maintenance to plant management to general management, with more than ten years in the automotive industry. He is a faculty member at Bologna Business School, where he teaches change management in an executive master. Below is the full video of the workshop and a summary of the main topics covered.
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For years the answer would have been obvious: the most important supplier is the one on whom you spend the most. It worked in a stable world, governed by forecasting, and still holds up when the goal is resilience, that is, resisting occasional crises. Today events are continuous: tariffs changing from one day to the next, blocked routes between Hormuz and the Red Sea, materials that are not available. According to Marco Brandalesi, moreover, the next crisis might not be physical but cyber, because the networks that support information are the most fragile of all.
In this context, reacting better is not enough. What is needed is a dual-speed organization: a part that quickly solves today’s problems and another that, more calmly, builds a supply network capable of absorbing those of tomorrow. A principle that runs through the entire workshop.
Before looking externally, however, it is necessary to look internally within one’s own organization. A company cannot demand from its suppliers what it cannot do itself: asking direct suppliers to adopt shared digital tools when internal systems do not communicate with each other undermines the company’s credibility. And many of the problems attributed to procurement actually arise elsewhere, in product development, specifications, and quality standards.
It also means bringing decisions to the lowest possible level. In the factory, operators make most of the daily decisions; in the purchasing office, however, too many choices escalate because buyers and planners do not have the elements to make decisions. The data from the What’s next in Operations Observatory from Bonfiglioli Consulting confirm the wide margin for improvement: among a community of about 100 managers and entrepreneurs, the vast majority of companies are still in a reactive or, if proactive, digitally disconnected phase.
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To evolve, a shared reference model is necessary. Our approach is the Lean World Class® Procurement model: seven steps that guide the organization from the reactive to the preventive, proactive, and finally predictive phase. Strategic sourcing falls within steps 4 and 5, in the full preventive phase; the automation of decisions with AI agents arrives only at step 7. For this reason, it is essential not to skip the intermediate steps: without stable basic conditions, forecasts and algorithms yield unstable results.
Strategic sourcing, in turn, proceeds in three phases: data collection and analysis, evaluation and selection of suppliers, and implementation. To ensure a common language across all levels of the organization, from the junior buyer to the CEO, it is useful to accompany each communication with a brief glossary of key terms.
It is during the analysis phase that the less obvious issues emerge: the risk, in fact, does not necessarily concentrate where spending is highest. Every level of the cost base, right down to the raw material, can hide issues that have nothing to do with the price of the component. During the workshop, the case of a customer whose flagship product used brass was presented: the material became unavailable and its cost increased by 10–20 times. At that point, the question was no longer how much the part cost, but whether the historical subcontractor specializing in turning brass had the skills to switch to aluminum.
Cases like this show the limitations of the purchase price as the sole criterion. The Total Cost of Ownership extends the view to all the cost and risk factors of a supply, and on this basis an evolved portfolio matrix is built: it starts from the Kraljic model but considers many more risk and profit-impacting factors.
The matrix indicates where to intervene and how. The leverage categories are the preferred area of action for buyers; those with many low-impact suppliers should be streamlined; bottlenecks should be de-risked; strategic suppliers are governed through co-design and collaboration. For it to work, it must be stable enough to not require weekly updates, a condition made possible precisely by the work on the reactive phase. And it must be recognized as being true to reality by buyers and category managers: otherwise, the model remains out of touch with operational reality and loses effectiveness.
Once the critical suppliers have been identified, it is necessary to define the actions to be undertaken. For a bottleneck, the scenarios are three: reduce dependence on a second source, consolidate volumes with a more solid supplier, or grow the supplier to bring it into a strategic area.
Whatever the choice, the profile of the new supplier must be aligned with the company’s strategy. A professional cosmetics customer, certified B Corp with 125 points, cannot rely on a third-party that does not control emissions, labor, and waste, no matter how convenient it may be. Similarly, it is useless to start working with a supplier that does not meet the prequalification requirements, such as automotive certifications or eco-labels in textiles. Only then do negotiations, conducted by buyers based on the total cost, and implementation come into play: component qualification, for example with PPAP, and performance monitoring.
To govern these decisions over time, tools are needed that make them visible to the entire purchasing function. In the workshop, a real dashboard was shown: spending, risk matrix, focus on a critical category and sourcing scenarios, with an AI agent calculating the potential savings for each. Alongside, a 90-day sourcing plan with actionable spending, high-risk categories and quotas for dual sourcing, nearshoring, supplier development and fact-based tenders. Tools whose effectiveness again depends on the robustness of data and processes.
Technology, however, does not replace people. To support a dual-speed procurement process, an organizational model driven by categories is necessary, where the category manager knows everything about their category and the buyers know everything about their relationship with each supplier, down to tier 2 and tier 3 levels. It is these figures who are able to distinguish between the signals generated by software and AI agents that are truly relevant.
"Strategic procurement is a company capability, not a company department.« – Marco Brandalesi, Bonfiglioli Consulting
In conclusion, the workshop returned the course to the initial question, developing it into seven questions to be taken to the company:
Answering these questions is the starting point, but it takes time and method, often difficult to find amidst the daily urgencies. In a first discussion with our supply chain experts, we analyze together with you:
Since 1973, Bonfiglioli Consulting has been assisting companies in transforming their operations, with over 100 professionals in 12 locations across Italy, the United States and Asia.
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