Why Treating Procurement as an Admin Function Weakens Both Margin and Resilience

Procurement still gets framed as a cost-control function, even as volatility, supplier concentration, and design choices increasingly determine financial outcomes. Mauro draws on transformations across steel, aerospace, and machinery to show how value is actually created upstream-through specification decisions, supplier ecosystems, and operating models that connect procurement directly to margin management. When procurement stays transactional, organisations don’t just lose savings; they lock in fragility.

About Mauro Erriquez

Mauro Erriquez, podcast guest

Senior Partner at McKinsey Reimagining Data-Driven Procurement and Industrial Resilience

Global Lead McKinsey product development and procurement13 Published McKinsey works listed9 Recent transformation engagements highlightedGeneral Motors Early-career purchasing team leader

Mauro Erriquez spends his days where volatility, technology, and industrial reality collide. A senior partner at McKinsey & Company based in Frankfurt, he leads the firm’s global Product Development and Procurement Practice, advising materials, chemicals, automotive, machinery, and other industrial clients on performance transformations, resilient growth, and supply-chain strategy.

Before joining McKinsey, Mauro began his career in industry as a purchasing team leader at General Motors. That early experience on the factory and supplier side still shapes how he talks about procurement today: not as a back-office cost cutter, but as a strategic function that directly shapes margin, resilience, innovation, and sustainability.

Over his career at McKinsey, Mauro has led large-scale procurement and supply chain transformations for global pulp and paper, steel, aerospace, machinery, telecoms, and advanced electronics players, including private-equity-owned businesses. His work ranges from designing “spend digital twins” to give procurement teams real-time pricing power, to helping industrials rethink their energy strategy in the face of shocks, decarbonization targets, and tariff uncertainty.

Mauro’s writing and research focus on what procurement looks like in an AI-enabled, net-zero world—covering topics such as generative AI in negotiations, data-driven decision making, digital marketplaces, long-tail spend, and the role of procurement in the energy transition.

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