The energy transition gets talked about in big terms: capital investment, new technology, national infrastructure. What gets discussed far less is a much quieter shift happening underneath all of it, in the procurement functions that have to actually manage the supplier relationships, contracts and risk that transition depends on.
Consider what happens to a procurement function when an energy business’s supplier base changes shape. New categories of supplier appear, often in unfamiliar geographies, often subject to different regulatory regimes. Existing suppliers are asked for new kinds of evidence, ESG credentials that weren’t part of the conversation a few years ago. Contracts that used to be relatively standard now need to account for risks nobody was tracking before.
We saw a version of this challenge with Genel Energy, an independent oil and gas exploration and production business operating across a genuinely complex international footprint, listed on the London Stock Exchange, running exploration and production operations in Northern Iraq through offices in Turkey. Its procurement function had been managing this complexity through a heavily customised enterprise asset management system, one that could raise and approve standard purchase orders automatically but required significant manual effort for almost everything else. Reporting was limited. Processes were cumbersome. The result was excess cost and a persistent gap in control and governance around supplier risk and contract adherence.
The fix came in two deliberate phases. First, a single platform for all purchases and spend control across the enterprise, purchase-to-pay, giving immediate visibility into where money was actually going. Then, once that foundation was solid, a full source-to-contract layer, extending the same discipline to sourcing, contracts and supplier risk, integrated with the finance systems the business already depended on.
What this sequencing reflects is a genuinely useful principle for any energy business navigating its own transition: complexity doesn’t have to be solved all at once, but it does have to be solved in an order that builds real visibility first, rather than trying to bolt sophistication onto a foundation that still can’t answer basic questions about spend and supplier risk.
The energy transition will keep adding new categories of supplier, new geographies, new evidence requirements. Procurement functions that can absorb that complexity without losing control will be the ones actually enabling the transition, not the ones quietly becoming its bottleneck.
