Off-contract spend because site teams never see contract terms. FTI Consulting documented this directly — a global mining company across billions in transactions found frontline teams accepting supplier quotes with off-contract items included because they didn't know the contract terms. Vehicle maintenance invoiced against "breakdown rates" for years after sites qualified for lower "labour hire" rates. Ghost labor billed on manual booking sheets that never set foot on site. Multi-page invoices with 130 line items per sheet that no human reviews comprehensively.

Input variability priced against static contracts. Refineries forecast demand, compare crude inventories, evaluate crude quality, and choose between spot cargoes and long-term term contracts. The procurement problem is that crude quality variance can be invisible in the invoice — a lower-quality crude billed at a premium grade rate, or a specification that shifts between contract and delivery without a corresponding price adjustment. MRO fragmentation across a complex asset base where every asset is critical to the production chain compounds the problem: the missing bearing that stops the refinery costs more per hour than the bearing itself.

MRO is the category that receives the least procurement rigor and produces the most leakage. The average manufacturer works with 83–92 MRO suppliers. The proportion using more than 250 suppliers rose from 6% to 15% in a single year. With that fragmentation comes pricing inconsistency, duplicate billing, off-contract charges that accumulate invisibly across thousands of line items, and supplier sprawl that hides total exposure to any single economic entity. Tariff shifts in 2025–2026 compounded the direct materials problem — every BOM tied to steel, aluminum, or copper is now priced against a 50% tariff that didn't exist when the contract was written.

Pricing inconsistency across supplier locations and entities. The same product priced differently by what is effectively the same economic owner across twelve branch locations or acquired subsidiaries — and the buyer has no consolidated view of what they're actually paying. Entity sprawl is where distributor margin disappears. A distributor running 82% of spend through procurement claims to have strong visibility — but when three of their top five "suppliers" are subsidiaries of the same manufacturer, total concentration risk is invisible until the relationship breaks. In a tariff environment, the distributor who doesn't track commodity price movement against their supplier's published price lists is absorbing margin erosion every quarter.

The quote-to-invoice delta. A contractor bid the job using supplier quotes obtained at a specific date. The invoice that arrives reflects different pricing — items not in the quote, quantities adjusted after the work was done, unit prices that drifted from the approved rate. In a tariff environment where copper, steel, and aluminum moved 50% in 2025, every procurement contract written before June was priced against a different cost structure. The forensic question is whether the supplier's price increases reflected actual tariff exposure — or margin extraction beyond what the tariff justified. Average contractor material markup: 15–35%. The math is transparent. When it stops being transparent, that's a finding.

Commodity traders earn by arbitraging geographic spreads, quality spreads, and forward spreads. They spot price gaps between markets, lock in profit by buying in the cheaper market and selling in the more expensive one. The edge is information — who has a cleaner, faster, better-verified dataset on physical flows, basis relationships, freight rates, and supply chain bottlenecks sees the opportunity before the trader who doesn't. Public procurement data — what institutional buyers are committing to buy, in what volumes, at what awarded prices — is a demand signal layer that most trading desks have never assembled as a structured dataset.

By the time a public RFP is posted, the procurement is 60–70% complete. Specifications have been shaped, relationships formed, and evaluation criteria written by whoever engaged early. Budget discussions in city council and school board meetings signal procurement activity 6–12 months before the formal solicitation. Sole-source thresholds range from $5,000 to $150,000 depending on jurisdiction — a contractor who prices at $45,000 closes in 30 days in one state and triggers a full RFP in another. Government procurement is publicly auditable, competitively structured, and almost never analyzed as a dataset by the suppliers and contractors who stand to win from it.