Redesigning a Global Procurement Process

For a Fortune 500 company operating in a fast-moving acquisitions environment, speed matters. Their Ventures and Acquisitions process was taking twice as long as it should. What should have been a three-month integration was routinely running to six, creating delays, absorbing management time, and slowing the company's ability to act on new opportunities.

The problem was not capability. The teams involved were experienced and capable. The issue was structural: a process that had grown over time without ever being fundamentally redesigned. Steps that once made sense had become embedded habits. Nobody had stood back and looked at the whole system in years.

Compounding this, the company needed to align ways of working between its US, UK and Ireland teams. Both were operating with different rhythms and different assumptions about how the acquisition process should run. Getting to a single, shared approach meant addressing a people and culture challenge as much as a process one.

Red Mountain worked with the procurement and acquisitions teams to map the existing process end to end. This meant following the work as it actually happened, not as it was documented, identifying where time was genuinely being lost and where steps were creating friction without adding value.

Rather than arriving with a recommended redesign, the process was built with the people doing the work. This approach consistently produces better outcomes: the people closest to the process know where the real blockers sit, and involving them in the redesign creates the ownership that makes change stick.

The cross-country dimension required a different kind of facilitation. Red Mountain brought US, UK and Ireland teams into structured joint sessions designed to surface the differences in how each team operated, understand the reasons behind them, and build a shared approach through conversation rather than through instruction from the centre.

The redesigned process cut integration time from six months to three, a 53 per cent improvement, while establishing a consistent way of working across both countries. The company moved from a process that absorbed resources to one that freed them up, giving the acquisitions function the capacity to operate at the pace the business needed.

The efficiency gain was substantial. But the more lasting outcome was something just as important: a cross-country team genuinely aligned around a shared process they had shaped together, with the conviction to sustain it because they understood why it worked.