Every dollar matters right now.
Across manufacturing, logistics, and global supply chains, organizations are facing renewed pressure on operating margins at the same time that costs from capital to labor to transportation remain elevated. Procurement teams are being asked to move faster, spend smarter, and eliminate waste — often without additional resources.
Supporting this shift, PwC’s 2024 Digital Procurement Survey, which included approximately 1,000 companies across nearly 60 countries, found that cost control remains the top priority for procurement organizations globally while investment in digitalization and data management continues to accelerate.
What’s becoming increasingly clear is that many of the biggest cost leaks in procurement aren’t caused by bad sourcing decisions. They’re caused by blind spots.
When procurement operates without accurate, real-time visibility into the assets an organization already owns, inefficiency quietly takes hold. Equipment is reordered unnecessarily. Assets sit idle in one facility while another location waits weeks for delivery. Capital is tied up — not because it needs to be, but because teams don’t have confidence in the data guiding their decisions.
This is where Information Technology Asset Management (ITAM) moves from a supporting role into a strategic one.
Friction Is Expensive — Especially at Scale
Most organizations are familiar with friction in their operations. Systems designed to create efficiency end up creating more work — manual follow-ups, redundant approvals, and last-minute workarounds. Over time, that friction becomes normalized.
In global operations, the cost of that friction compounds quickly. Procurement teams often rely on outdated spreadsheets, siloed systems, or incomplete inventories to understand what assets are available and usable. When information is fragmented, decision-making slows. To avoid disruption, teams default to over-purchasing or expedited orders — driving up costs and eroding margins.
This challenge is becoming more visible across procurement organizations. KPMG’s 2024 Future of Procurement research found that 77% of procurement executives identified supply disruption risk as a critical external challenge, pointing to predictive analytics and better operational intelligence as central to helping teams make faster, more resilient decisions.
Procurement’s Visibility Gap
Procurement has traditionally focused on vendor management, pricing, and contract negotiation. Those responsibilities remain essential. But procurement decisions are inseparable from asset intelligence.
In manufacturing environments, production delays often trigger new equipment purchases. Without clear insight into asset utilization across plants, procurement may not realize that functional equipment already exists elsewhere in the organization.
In logistics operations, similar challenges arise with vehicles, handheld devices, scanners, sensors, and material-handling equipment. When teams don’t have confidence in asset data — location, condition, lifecycle status — procurement becomes reactive rather than strategic.
ITAM addresses this gap by creating a reliable source of truth. It connects procurement decisions to operational reality.
Why ITAM Has Become a Procurement Imperative
In periods of growth, inefficiencies are easier to absorb. That has changed.
ITAM enables procurement teams to make decisions based on facts instead of assumptions. With accurate asset data, organizations can redeploy equipment, extend asset lifecycles, and align purchasing with actual demand — translating directly into cost control and improved capital efficiency.
More importantly, ITAM improves coordination across procurement, operations, maintenance, and finance. When all stakeholders are working from the same data, decisions move faster and with greater confidence.
That evolution mirrors broader procurement trends. KPMG’s 2024 research also noted that procurement leaders increasingly have an opportunity to reposition their function as a strategic influencer — enabled by automation, analytics, and stronger operational visibility — rather than purely a transactional cost center.
From Back Office to Strategic Function
Too often, ITAM is still viewed as a tactical or compliance-driven function — necessary, but peripheral.
When ITAM is integrated into procurement workflows, it becomes a strategic enabler. It supports better forecasting, strengthens supplier negotiations, and provides insight into total cost of ownership across the asset lifecycle.
Most importantly, it reduces risk. Procurement leaders are increasingly accountable not just for savings, but for continuity. Knowing what assets are available, where they are, and whether they are fit for purpose is foundational to delivering on that mandate.
PwC’s 2024 procurement research also found that organizations continue increasing investment in procurement digitalization — targeting substantially higher levels of process digitization over the next several years to improve visibility, resilience, and decision quality.
A Seat at the Table
Procurement will play a central role as organizations navigate an increasingly complex operating environment. That role cannot be fulfilled without accurate, trusted asset intelligence. ITAM will not replace procurement expertise — but it can sharpen and improve it.
Giving ITAM a seat at the procurement table is about eliminating uncertainty and ensuring that capital is spent intentionally and assets are fully utilized. In the face of disruption, ITAM is one tool procurement leaders can no longer afford to overlook.
Author: Syed Ali
Syed Ali is the founder and CEO of EZO. He brings nearly three decades of technology experience to the field of asset management, having founded EZO in 2011 to address critical operational challenges in enterprise environments. His background includes leadership roles at Sun Microsystems and TRG.
