So much emphasis is spent on direct procurement and often if you are looking for savings this is where you would look because of the magnitude of the spend. Yes, a 1% savings on $10m is $100k. Yet in fact, if you have a budget of $5m for indirect spend and you can get a 10% savings which is a reasonable target then you will end up with roughly a $500k savings. Same investment in time with 5 times the return.

Here is a nice reminder document put together by Mohamed Almansour Abdallah Ismail, MCIPS to get you started.