Ask what a sourcing event costs and you will hear about tool licences and maybe consulting fees. Almost nobody prices the third component: the internal hours. A senior analyst spends a week building scenario dashboards for a single round. Multiply by rounds, add the stakeholder decks, the data cleaning, the supplier question rounds, and a strategic tender quietly consumes a quarter of a senior person, for months.
Those hours are real money at senior rates. But the accounting is not even the point.
The most expensive event is the one you never ran
Because internal capacity is the binding constraint, the event calendar is written by staffing, not by value. The category with the messy supplier base and the genuine savings potential waits, because the team that could run it is buried in the tender that was already due. The most expensive line in sourcing is invisible: the value of the events that never ran because nobody could staff them.
Elevation, not elimination
The answer is not fewer people. The senior judgment in your team is the scarcest asset in the function; the problem is where its hours go. Building dashboards is not judgment. Deciding the award is.
A delivered event, the Wave-3 shape, moves the analytical workload onto the engagement itself: the sourcing project that does not need a sourcing project team. We support your team to elevate further, not to step aside. Your team's hours move up, from assembling scenarios to interrogating them, from formatting supplier feedback to deciding what it changes. More per FTE: the same team runs deeper, wider events than its headcount could ever staff for, and reaches the categories that used to wait.
Count it once, honestly
Two questions for your last strategic tender: how many internal senior hours did it consume, end to end? And which event did your team not run in the same period? Put a number on both and the third line item stops being invisible.
Bring us a live category, including one you currently cannot staff, and compare the arithmetic on your own numbers.