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Capital projects are getting more expensive, more complex, and harder to deliver on time. According to an IDC survey of more than 500 construction project owners across the U.S. and Canada, 75% of projects exceed their planned budgets and 77% are delivered late.

Meanwhile, supply chains remain volatile, lead times are unpredictable, and the margin for error on major builds keeps shrinking. Everyone in the industry knows this. Fewer know what to do about it.

Here’s what makes the problem persistent: most organizations still treat procurement as a downstream task, something that kicks in after design decisions are already locked. Engineering specs get finalized, scope gets set, and then someone hands a package to procurement and says, “Go buy this.” By that point, the leverage is gone. The window for strategic sourcing, value engineering, and supplier collaboration has largely closed. Teams end up paying more, waiting longer, and absorbing risks they could have mitigated months earlier.

The cost of this sequencing problem is real. Industry data shows that up to 70% of a product’s total cost is determined during the design phase. If procurement isn’t at the table during that window, the savings opportunity passes before anyone realizes it was there.

The shift: procurement as a strategic, integrated function

Agile procurement reframes the discipline entirely. Rather than treating purchasing as an administrative handoff at the back end of the design phase, it embeds procurement expertise into the design and engineering process from the start. The objective is straightforward: speed to market, speed to savings, speed to revenue.

It represents a fundamental change in how cross-functional teams collaborate. When procurement professionals engage alongside engineers and designers during pre-construction, they bring market intelligence, supplier relationships, and commercial strategy into the room while decisions are still fluid. Material selections get pressure-tested against real-world pricing and availability. Specifications get refined with input from strategic suppliers who understand manufacturing constraints and lead times. The result is a project that’s been optimized for constructability, cost, and schedule before the first order is placed.

Early engagement with procurement and strategic suppliers has been shown to drive 10–20% cost savings in construction by enabling value engineering, optimizing material selection, and aligning purchases with project schedules to avoid costly rework. That’s where the often-cited 17% average savings figure comes from: not from squeezing vendors on price, but from making better decisions earlier in the lifecycle.

What progress actually looks like

Moving from traditional procurement to an agile, integrated model requires cross-functional alignment, a clear accountability structure, and deep expertise in both the technical and commercial dimensions of a project.

Progress starts with embedding procurement into design-phase conversations, where teams can surface risks, identify long-lead items, and engage suppliers while there’s still room to influence outcomes. From there, it means building a procurement strategy that’s tightly coupled to the project schedule, with capacity planning, warehousing, and logistics coordinated in parallel rather than bolted on after the fact. Organizations that adopt this approach have seen time-to-market accelerate by 20–40%, with corresponding reductions in development costs.

But the complexity is real. Integrating procurement with design and engineering requires people who understand both worlds. It requires supplier networks that go beyond transactional relationships. And it requires a single point of accountability, someone who can manage the full procurement lifecycle from pre-design through post-delivery without letting scope, schedule, or cost fall through the cracks.

This is not work that benefits from fragmented ownership. The more handoffs in the process, the more opportunities for misalignment between what was designed, what was specified, and what actually gets built.

The hurdles, and how to clear them

The most common barrier to agile procurement adoption is cultural, not technical.

Teams underestimate procurement’s impact on schedule because they’ve always treated it as an administrative function rather than a critical-path activity. Long-lead item planning, supplier lead times, internal approval cycles: these are the areas where projects quietly lose weeks or months. The cost shows up as idle labor, schedule delays, and budget overruns, but the root cause is a procurement process that started too late.

Another persistent challenge is the gap between design intent and supply chain reality. Engineers may specify materials or systems without full visibility into current market conditions, availability constraints, or total installed cost. Without procurement’s input, those blind spots don’t surface until the project is already committed to a path that’s harder and more expensive to change.

Overcoming these hurdles takes a deliberate operating model. Organizations that succeed with agile procurement typically share key characteristics: they establish procurement as a continuous function rather than a discrete phase, they invest in supplier relationships that go beyond bid-and-buy, and they create feedback loops between field execution and upstream planning so that lessons from one project inform the next. The shift is from reactive problem-solving to pre-construction mitigation, where the biggest risks (design-driven cost overruns, long-lead item delays, buildability issues) get identified and addressed before they can threaten the schedule.

How Salas O’Brien can help

If any of this resonates with the challenges you’re navigating, you’re not alone, and you don’t have to solve it from scratch.

Salas O’Brien’s agile procurement practice delivers optimized end-to-end procurement solutions engineered for impact, from pre-design through post-delivery. Our turnkey model provides a single point of accountability, streamlining vendor management so your teams can focus on execution rather than coordination.

What sets our approach apart is integration. We don’t bolt procurement onto your project after the fact. We embed it into the design and engineering process, aligning technical and operational requirements with real-time market conditions and dynamics. That means you get the commercial, technical, and operational advantages of early supplier engagement, plus greater visibility into risk management and continuous improvement across the project lifecycle.

Our teams bring cross-sector depth, practical experience in complex builds, and a culture built on collaboration and innovation. Whether you’re managing a single capital project or scaling across a portfolio, we’re structured to meet you where you are and deliver measurable results.

If you’re ready to rethink how agile procurement fits into your next project, let’s start a conversation.

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