Purchasing & Procurement: A Field Guide

by Richard Patrick

This is a book about understanding purchasing and procurement.

For anyone working in sales this book reveals why procurement can be so difficult to work with at times. It explains why some companies will win, and why some won’t…

It seeks to understand the true meaning of the work that we do in procurement. NASA needed 10,000 suppliers to land a man on the moon. 'A small step for man – a giant leap for procurement’…

For our customers, it explains the unwritten rules of the procurement game. The ones that are never discussed. The procurement etiquette…

It seeks to achieve understanding through a discussion of actual experiences. It is more a book of short stories than it is a text book – think of it as a ‘field guide’ to procurement , one based on personal experiences, both the good and the bad. I worked for over 30 years in procurement working for both the public sector and in financial services. I spent almost exactly half of the time in each.

It is set out in three

Part 1 Understanding purchasing

Part 2 Understanding procurement

Part 3 Running a major tender

387 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 25, 2025