Preparing your SME for international growth with strategic IT procurement

For SMEs with few in-house IT employees, their outsourced IT partner, often a Managed Service Provider (MSP), is a critical part of the team, helping the business to scale. The right IT partner does significantly more than ensure employees have the equipment they need and maintain systems. They are at the centre of a process that aligns IT with the organisation’s strategy and delivers long-term business value: the IT procurement process.

IT is rarely mentioned among the drivers of SME growth. Yet the innovation, market expansion, efficient operations, and strong governance traditionally associated with fast-growing companies all depend on effective IT infrastructure.

With UK Government data indicating a 19% productivity gain for ‘technology adopters’, IT is a vital enabler, helping SMEs to scale. If procurement doesn’t keep pace, it soon becomes a bottleneck, hampering operations and adding unnecessary friction to customer experience.

Existing IT procurement challenges are magnified when companies scale. We’ll explore some of these issues and highlight the warning signs that suppliers aren’t keeping pace with your growth. We’ll also outline a practical framework for building scalable IT procurement models, based on solid IT infrastructure foundations.

Table of contents

1. What is the IT procurement process? A definition for SMEs

2. Why international expansion puts IT procurement under stress

3. 6 signs IT procurement is failing your company’s international growth

4. Why your IT partner is a critical part of the team as you grow

5. How choosing the right IT partner streamlines IT procurement and cuts costs

6. How to assess if an IT supplier can scale with you: A framework for SMEs

7. Practical steps for building a scalable IT procurement model

What is the IT procurement process? A definition for SMEs

IT procurement is a strategic approach to sourcing and buying IT in line with your organisation’s financial and business goals. It includes software, hardware, and the infrastructure that supports them, such as cloud services and security solutions, such as firewalls.

The process goes beyond researching and selecting vendors to negotiating agreements, establishing key performance indicators, setting out IT governance frameworks, and managing suppliers once they’re contracted.

Why international expansion puts IT procurement under stress

A period of rapid growth tests the resilience of any IT procurement process, and international expansion brings additional complexity. It relies on an IT procurement process that can move quickly within strong governance parameters, whilst maintaining a consistent approach across each location. This depends on having a standardised, unified IT infrastructure across the business.

Yet, just when their customers need them the most, vendors often struggle to keep up. While SMEs may be frustrated to find it’s their procurement process that’s holding them back, it’s surprisingly common. Over half (51%) of procurement leaders have encountered vendors who couldn’t grow with their business.

Establishing a scalable IT procurement process before expansion helps to ensure that your SME isn’t facing an unnecessary bottleneck to growth.

6 signs IT procurement is failing your company’s international growth

International expansion offers significant growth potential for SMEs. However, there are considerable complexities to manage, from differing tax and regulatory regimes to unfamiliar working and employment practices.

When IT procurement doesn’t match company expansion, it creates operational drag. While management and employees notice that decision-making has slowed, manual workarounds have crept in, and customers are feeling frustrated, it may not be immediately obvious that the root cause is IT procurement.

We’ll explore how this affected an SME’s international growth in practice, but first, these are some of the signs that ad hoc IT procurement is slowing your growth:

1. Slow onboarding across locations

With multiple systems, onboarding new employees becomes a time-consuming process.

2. Information isn’t flowing between teams or offices

Siloed data is a sign of fragmented systems and haphazard IT infrastructure, often caused by vendor fragmentation.

3. Delayed decision-making and low productivity

Without compatible IT and easy data sharing, employees must navigate hard-to-use systems, turning to workarounds and manual processes. Inaccuracies creep in, and decision-making is hindered.

4. IT costs spiral

Without centralised oversight, maverick spending leads to software and system duplication. The company may be missing out on economies of scale.

5. Inconsistent standards and guidelines

When IT infrastructure isn’t designed to scale, centralised governance becomes much harder. Offices may use local suppliers that meet regional data protection and compliance levels, but not international standards.

6. Falling service standards

Fragmented vendors, combined with a lack of centralised governance, make it difficult to monitor service level agreements (SLAs) and hold suppliers to contracts.

Why your IT partner is a critical part of the team as you grow

When IT infrastructure isn’t supporting business growth, the impact is soon experienced through declining productivity and increased risk. Teams or departments may even circumvent procurement channels and buy software to complete tasks or projects.

While this type of ‘maverick spending’ may solve a short-term need, it adds to vendor fragmentation. With insufficient oversight, new software may not be compatible with existing systems, resulting in a haphazard, accidental IT infrastructure.

Vendor fragmentation like this is extremely common in company mergers, and was a challenge faced by the UK learning and development company, Mindtools during a phase of international expansion. Providing accessible, on-demand skills development for managers and leaders, Mindtools acquired an Australian business as part of its strategy to create a global training company. However, it also inherited the company's existing systems and suppliers during the merger.

With both organisations used to operating independently in their regions, the merged company experienced significant IT fragmentation, decentralised infrastructure, and overlapping software.

The signs that IT Procurement was proving a bottleneck were soon visible with rising costs and increased risk exposure, the early red flags. With no centralised reporting, the issue was already affecting decision-making, directly impacting customer service.

How choosing the right IT partner streamlines IT procurement and cuts costs

An experienced, global-facing Managed Service Provider (MSP) will help address the challenges of international expansion. They understand the IT infrastructure that underpins business growth and scalable IT procurement, including unified systems and centralised governance.

In fact, when Mindtools asked Texaport to support its merger and expansion to Australia, creating a unified cloud system was the starting point. By improving data integration, Texaport established a single source of truth (SSOT) and implemented a federated IT governance model. This set global standards for the entire organisation but gave regions the flexibility to respond to local market conditions.

With a solid IT infrastructure foundation, Mindtools’ IT procurement process began delivering multiple benefits, including:

• Reduced overheads: Texaport centralised and streamlined Mindtool’s procurement processes. Automated management of the system and procurement requests reduced the administrative burden, freeing employees to work on other tasks.

  With improved visibility, the number of suppliers was consolidated, and only essential software applications were retained. This reduced costs and improved operational efficiencies. 

• Improved negotiating position: By consolidating suppliers, Mindtools could negotiate better pricing, for example, tiered discounts from global software providers.

• Reinforced third-party risk management: A SSOT-enabled centralised governance and improved vendor oversight.  All suppliers could be assessed against the company-wide risk management and compliance frameworks.

• Enforced company-wide SLAs: Consistent SLAs across all regions cut complexity and ensured both suppliers and regional offices knew the service levels to expect.

How to assess if an IT supplier can scale with you: A framework for SMEs

1. Verify regional presence and capabilities

Choose a supplier whose growth plans align with your business. Ask questions about the company’s core business operations and check if its supply chains operate across your intended markets.

2. Check for multi-language and multi-time-zone support

If your systems crash during peak business hours, will there be someone at the help desk to get you back up and running? Your IT provider must be able to support you across all the regions where you operate.

3. Evaluate global case studies

Ask to speak to previous clients the supplier has worked with on expansion projects. Suggest a small pilot project before committing to a large, global rollout.

4. Insist on audit openness & compliance maturity

Compliance should be an ongoing, transparent process. Evaluate the supplier’s third-party risk processes to check they comply with international standards such as NIST.

5. Confirm the supplier can standardise hardware & software

Your IT service provider can help you manage international expansion by ensuring all systems are set up consistently and to agreed standards across devices, teams, and regions. IT infrastructure should be strategic, not accidental.

Practical steps for building a scalable IT procurement model

IT procurement needn’t be the bottleneck for your SME’s growth. What’s more, streamlining IT procurement reduces your exposure to third-party risks such as ‘Shadow IT’ and ensures regulatory compliance.

Follow these steps to create a scalable IT procurement model:

1. Create a unified procurement policy

Set out clear standards for governance and compliance that all employees can access and adhere to, including:

• Compliance with relevant laws such as taxation and regulations

• How purchases must be added to systems for accounting and auditing

• Risk management compliance

• ESG standards

2. Establish an approved list of hardware and software

This ensures that all new software can be integrated with core systems, leading to faster onboarding and improved data integration.

3. Introduce a centralised evaluation framework

Set up scorecards for core criteria, including for pricing, service levels, data transparency, and ESG. This accelerates the procurement process, reduces risk, and ensures all regions apply the same standards.

4. Run quarterly supplier performance reviews

Establish realistic SLAs at the beginning of the vendor relationship. With KPIs in place to measure performance, both vendor and business are clear on the service levels that must be met.

IT procurement shouldn’t be the factor that slows SME growth, but it’s often overlooked in long-term growth strategies. Procurement challenges that were manageable at a smaller scale are magnified as businesses grow, especially during mergers and international expansion.

A strong IT infrastructure is the prerequisite for scalable, streamlined IT procurement. Unified systems, centralised governance, and free-flowing data establish the foundations for future growth, but also bring efficiencies and cost savings today.

To discover how IT infrastructure and procurement can support your growth plans, get in touch with us at Texaport.