5 Common Procurement Mistakes SMEs Make
Over the years, I’ve seen small and medium businesses lose more money from poor procurement decisions than from actual business downturns. Not because they didn’t have good intentions, but because they didn’t have structure. Procurement mistakes in SMEs are rarely about fraud or waste; they’re about blind spots — habits that seem harmless but quietly drain profit.
Here are the five most common mistakes I see Nigerian SMEs make when it comes to IT procurement.
1. Treating Procurement as a One-Time Event
Too many organizations approach procurement like a shopping trip — something you do once, tick off, and move on. But technology doesn’t work that way. Every piece of equipment you buy comes with a lifecycle: setup, maintenance, updates, replacement. When you ignore that cycle, you end up reacting to failures instead of planning for them.
Strategic procurement is continuous. It means tracking performance, knowing when warranties expire, and planning replacements before problems occur. If you wait for downtime to remind you that your systems are old, you’re already too late.
2. Focusing on Price, Not Value
This is the single biggest trap SMEs fall into. There’s a difference between saving cost and reducing value. Buying cheap often feels like a win — until it leads to unreliable performance or constant repairs. The real cost of ownership is not the purchase price; it’s the total cost over time — including energy use, maintenance, support, and replacement frequency.
In procurement, value is the balance between quality, reliability, and support. The goal isn’t to buy cheap or expensive — it’s to buy right.
3. Ignoring Compatibility and Integration
Procurement shouldn’t happen in isolation. When departments make independent buying decisions — marketing buys new laptops, operations buys routers, accounts buys printers — the result is a fragmented ecosystem. Systems don’t communicate, licenses overlap, and data security becomes harder to control.
Every new device or software must fit into the company’s existing structure. That’s why at Gitech, we always start with a compatibility review before recommending anything. The goal is to make technology work together, not side by side.
4. Buying Without a Support Plan
Many SMEs assume that after purchasing equipment, the job is done. But even the best systems fail without proper maintenance. You can’t outsource accountability. Whether it’s your vendor, an internal technician, or a service partner, someone must own the support plan.
A smart procurement process includes service-level agreements (SLAs) and periodic health checks. It’s not just about what you buy — it’s about who will stand behind it six months later when something goes wrong.
5. Overlooking Documentation and Policy
Finally, one silent killer of efficiency — the lack of documentation. Many SMEs don’t keep records of what they’ve bought, from whom, when, or at what warranty level. When something breaks, the next purchase starts from zero. That’s a direct cost in both time and money.
Having a simple procurement policy and asset register doesn’t require a large team. A spreadsheet or a free tool can do the job. What matters is accountability and traceability. Every organization, no matter the size, should know exactly what technology assets it owns and what they’re worth today.
These mistakes are not unique to Nigeria — they’re common anywhere SMEs grow faster than their systems. The good news is, every one of them is preventable. Once you treat procurement as a process instead of a purchase, everything changes — performance improves, costs stabilize, and downtime drops.