The go-live party was on a Friday.
Balloons. Cake. A VP who flew in from headquarters to shake hands and take photos. Eighteen months of work, $2.4M in consulting fees, and a project team that hadn't slept properly since Q3.
By Monday, the tickets were already coming in.
"The approval workflow doesn't match how we actually work." "Suppliers can't figure out the portal." "Nobody told us we had to re-enter all our contracts."
By Wednesday, the VP had stopped replying to emails.
I've heard this horror story more times than I'd like to admit. And every single time, the post-mortem says the same thing: "We should have tested this with users earlier."
Which is a polite way of saying: we built the wrong thing.
Quick question before we get into today's note:
When your last ProcureTech implementation went live, how well did it match the original vision?
I’ll share results next week.
But today? I want to show you why this keeps happening…
And why the answer has been hiding in your favorite Pixar movies the whole time…
Just because “anyone can cook”, doesn’t mean they should (yet)! 😅
Onwards!
📰 In this week’s edition:
📄 Meet MarketPay: The Future of Tail Spend Payments (sponsored)
🌙 The Pixar Method for Procurement Transformation
📢 This week’s “Must Reads”
🏆 The Road to the ProcureTech Cup: Episode 19
📋 3 procurement jobs that caught our eye
Note: Some of the content listed above is only available in the email version of this newsletter. Don’t miss out! Sign up for free to get the next edition.
What Pixar Can Teach You About Procurement Transformation
A French rat wants to cook at the finest restaurant in Paris.
That's the idea behind Ratatouille. Six words. Not a requirements document. Not a configuration spec. Not a business case with 47 appendices.
Six words.
Pixar turned that idea into a masterpiece in eight years. Eight years of writing, drawing, scrapping, rewriting, screening, arguing, and starting over.
And here's the thing that should shake every procurement transformation leader reading this:
They didn't animate a single frame until the last 9 months.
The Way Most Procurement Transformations Are Run
You know the drill.
An executive sponsor gets fired up after a conference. A compelling vendor demo. A competitor's case study. Something clicks.
Next thing you know, there's an RFP. Then a contract. Then a kickoff call where someone shares a project plan that reads like a construction schedule.
Design. Build. Test. Deploy. Train. Go-live.
You're animating on day one.
And six to eighteen months later, the beautiful thing you built doesn't match the world you're actually living in. Stakeholders didn't adopt it. The business requirements you documented in month two are already stale. Users found workarounds. You're $1M in and you're... somewhere between "close to go-live" and "we need to revisit the scope."
Sound familiar?
We know it does. Because 80%+ of digital transformation initiatives fail. Not because the technology didn't work. Because we treated a fundamentally human problem like a templated construction project.
What Pixar Actually Does
Pete Docter, the director behind Up, Inside Out, and Monsters, Inc., had a realization early in his career.
He'd assumed creativity worked the way legends described it. That the greats just... knew.
"I figured that people like Walt Disney would be like, lying in bed, and suddenly shout 'Dumbo!' The whole thing would be in their head, and they could tell you the story from beginning to end."
Then he started making movies.
"It starts as a gray blob," he said.
Not a vision. Not a blueprint. A gray blob.
What Pixar discovered (and what they turned into a repeatable system) is that great things don't come out fully formed. They get iterated into existence. Tested against reality. Broken down and rebuilt. Again. And again. And again.
Here's how the Pixar process actually works:
The Idea. Six words or less. A French rat loves to cook. Not a 150-page functional requirements document.
The 12-Page Outline. No animation. No wireframes. Just: Where are we? What's going on? What happens? The rough bones of the story. Written by humans, for humans.
The Brain Trust. Directors, writers, artists, and executives read the outline and come back with honest feedback. Questions, criticisms, concerns. No sacred cows.
The Script. 120 pages. The director takes the feedback, or leaves it. Nobody can force changes. The director is in charge with only one rule: it has to get better.
The Storyboards. The director and a team of five to eight artists turn the entire script into hand-drawn panels. Each panel covers about two seconds of film. A 90-minute movie requires 2,700 drawings. They string them together with recorded dialogue and rough sound effects. It's called a "reel" (a rough simulation of the movie).
The Audience. Pixar employees (many with no direct involvement in the film) watch the reel. Their faces are watched as closely as the screen. Reactions are tracked, discomfort is noted, and the moments where attention drifts are catalogued. "You can really feel when you have the audience and when you don't," noted Docter. "Without anybody saying anything."
The Rewrite. The script gets substantially reworked. New storyboards. New voice recordings. New reel. Another audience. More feedback.
Repeat. A typical Pixar movie goes through this cycle eight times. The gap between version one and two is "usually huge." Two to three is "pretty big." By version seven or eight, the changes are surgical.
Only then does the real animation begin. After about eight rounds of exhaustive, audience-tested, painfully honest iteration animation starts with state-of-the-art computers, on a story that has already proven it works. The actual animation? The last 9 months of an 8-year process in the case of Ratatouille.
Why? Becauce it costs virtually nothing to iterate while in planning phases… But its ulta-expensive to change the story when animation has started…
Why Is Procurement Transformation Ignoring Human Behavior?
Humans are thinkerers but we often forget it in professional settings.
(Yes, that's a made-up word. Stick with it.)
In most cases, we think we already understand. We're absolutely convinced we know what "good" looks like before we've tested it against reality. We write requirements like we're scripting the final movie, and then we hire a vendor to animate it, on budget, on a deadline.
And then we wonder why the audience (your stakeholders) doesn't show up…
Humans are catastrophically bad at getting things right the first time. Even smart ones. Even experienced ones. Even with AI.
The most costly line item in any failed procurement transformation isn't the software license. It's the late-stage discovery that “the story” doesn't work, when you've already spent $1M animating it.
The Parallel Approach for Procurement
What if you ran your next ProcureTech initiative like a Pixar movie?
Step 1: Start with the idea, not the RFP. What's the six-word version of the transformation you're trying to deliver? "Stakeholders can spend without procurement’s direct involvement." "Suppliers onboard in hours, not months." If you can't say it simply, you haven't understood it yet.
Step 2: Write the outline, not the requirements doc. Where are we today? What's broken? What would "better" actually look like (step-by-step process) for the people doing the work, not the people approving the budget? Keep it to a few pages.
Attend conferences, discuss with peers, consult with vendors and consultants, read ProcureTech newsletters, watch the weekly ProcureTech Cup show. Your outline should be informed by the “art of the possible.”
Step 3: Build your brain trust. This isn't your steering committee. This is a small, honest, cross-functional group (AP, sourcing, a category manager, an IT business partner, a skeptical stakeholder) who will tell you when the story doesn't work. Give them permission to be brutal. No sacred cows… (“Maybe it would make more sense if we changed the org structure and RACI? 😦🫣🫢”)
Step 4: Prototype the experience before you configure anything. Storyboard it. Run “Conference Room Pilots”. Make clickable mockups on Figma. A Miro board walkthrough. Show people what using this thing will actually feel like. Let them react. Watch their faces. "You can really feel when you have the audience and when you don't."
This can be done with a specific piece of tech in mind (e.g. jointly with a vendor) or without.
Step 5: Iterate on the story before you “animate it”. Rewrite. Repeat. Do this until the changes become small. Bonus: as you’re cycling through different stakeholder groups, you’re also starting your change management activities (“Here’s why we’re doing this. We want your feedback. We haven’t built anything and what you say will shape where we go.”)
Step 6: Only then do you configure, build, and deploy. Now you're “animating” a proven story. Your vendor is working from a storyboard that's been stress-tested eight times, not a first-draft requirements document written by someone who'd never used the system.
If you did this without a software vendor partner, you’ll need to go through a few more “prototype iterations” with them to get on the same page based on their platform design/constraints. Do it.
Note: As for the RFP, you either run it with partnership criteria at step 3 to include a given vendor in your brain trust and design with a platform in mind. Or, you do it before Step 6, going to ask the market to realize your vision. Both are possible but carry different tradeoffs.
The first option reduces the risk of designing something that needs to be built from scratch, leverages vendor experiste around the “art of the possible” but “locks you in” to a vendor early on.
The second option allows for maximal possibilities but heavily relies on your internal team’s comprehension of the “art of the possible”. You can alleviate this by hiring talent or a consultant that’s already done something similar to what you’re trying to accomplish.
Loosely stated, this process is what we call the Procurement Innovation Garage approach.
The Reason We Don't Do This
It feels slow.
It feels like we're not "making progress."
Every day you spend planning and experimenting feels like a day you could have spent building and deploying. Leadership wants to see a Gantt chart with milestones. Vendors want to start the clock on the SOW. Your team wants to feel like something is happening.
But here's what's actually slow: an 18-month implementation that ends with a system nobody uses, followed by a re-implementation 24 months later.
Pixar's iterative process (the one that feels slow) is actually what makes Up make you cry in the first four minutes. It's what makes Wall-E work without dialogue. It's what turns a gray blob into something people actually care about and engage with.
Your procurement transformation deserves the same respect.
The story has to work before you animate it.
That’s the only way you get “to infinity and beyond.”
P.S. I first stumbled upon the Pixar story in How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner. I highly recommend this book. It's one of the best books I've read on why ambitious projects succeed or fail, and the procurement parallels are everywhere.
👀 In Case You Missed It…
The Last 3 Newsletters:
1/ Next-Gen SAP Ariba: An Insider's View from the Beta Program
2/ The AI Agent Nobody's Building in ProcureTech...
3/ Gartner Just Confirmed One of Our 2026 Predictions
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
2 other ways we can help this week:
A Skeptic’s Take on AI in Procurement. Our consulting principal recently took the stage at Zip Forward: LLM market overview, vendor motivations, and a framework to chart your own path… Without the hype. Watch the replay.
ProcureTech Unpacked (our inaugural 100% virtual conference) is happening April 22–24, 2026. Three half-days built around two things: making you at least one industry friend who's as serious about procurement transformation as you are, and walking away knowing how to navigate the ProcureTech market without getting played by vendor marketing. That's it. No fluff. Get your tickets.
See you next week {{FIRST_NAME|readers}},
— The Pure Procurement Newsletter Team
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