Indirect Procurement as a Weak Point in the Supply Chain

Indirect procurement: the blind spot in supplier management

While companies now often keep a close eye on their direct suppliers, indirect requirements remain largely uncontrolled. These are the spontaneous orders from departments for specialty parts, services or consumables, often without a long-term supplier relationship.

These decentralized individual purchases create an enormous administrative burden. Each individual transaction can take anywhere from several hours to weeks of effort, from supplier onboarding and quote comparisons to the review and approval of invoices.

At the same time, an opaque supplier landscape emerges that not only ties up resources but also makes it harder to meet regulatory obligations. For companies that are required to review their supply chain for risks, human rights and sustainability, this is a significant problem.

At a Glance

• At a single Pedlar customer, orders went to more than 600 different suppliers in twelve months, and the customer's ERP lists one creditor for them.
• Spontaneous individual purchases from departments create an opaque supplier landscape that ties up resources and makes it harder to review the supply chain.
• In the Single Creditor Model, every one-off order runs through a controlled channel and is documented, traceable and centrally accessible.

Efficient procurement: the Single Creditor Model as the solution

Pedlar meets this challenge with a simple but effective principle: the Single Creditor Model. Instead of handling every single order through a new or existing supplier, Pedlar acts as the sole creditor for all indirect, irregular purchases.

The suppliers stay in the background. Procurement's workload goes down. Accounting receives standardized, correct documents.

Pedlar's own order data shows how many suppliers come together behind one creditor this way. At a single Pedlar customer, orders went to more than 600 different suppliers in twelve months. The customer's ERP lists a single creditor for them. The basis is the orders from October 2025 to September 2026. Whoever sold the goods counts as the supplier.

Without a central channel, each of these suppliers would have needed its own route into accounting: a supplier onboarding, a posting to the one-time vendor account or a credit card statement.

Strengthening compliance and risk management in the supply chain

The mix of geopolitical tensions, fluctuating commodity prices and a growing regulatory burden means that companies today must not only optimize their supply chains but, above all, stabilize them. Traditional procurement processes risk becoming a drag in this situation, especially when it comes to indirect and one-off requirements.

This is exactly where procurement becomes the Achilles' heel. When manual workflows, breaks between systems and countless suppliers shape day-to-day work instead of agile processes, speed and transparency are missing. Transparency and responsibility in the supply chain have become a corporate obligation, and Pedlar steps in where traditional procurement reaches its limits.

By concentrating the many individual business partners in one place, Pedlar makes it possible to build clean data and processes even for orders that were previously hard to pin down. All orders are documented, traceable and centrally accessible. On request, Pedlar names the supplier behind each order, for example when a company reviews its own supply chain.

This helps companies meet their responsibility in the supply chain. Every transaction becomes transparent. Every purchase runs through a controlled channel, and there are no more shadow suppliers escaping traceability.

Pedlar therefore creates not only efficiency in procurement but also the structural prerequisite for compliance and risk management.

Find out how to handle your one-off requirements through a controlled channel with Pedlar's Single Creditor Model, without a lengthy implementation: Book a call →