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Procurement Guide: The Weekly Cost Review

Which commodities are working against your budget this quarter? How much cushion should you hold against the ones that are? Should you lock in prices now, or wait? And when the question comes from above, what do you actually say? This guide turns those four questions into one repeatable routine — a weekly cost review you can run in about 20 minutes every Monday morning. Each step names the screen to open, what to look at, and the budget decision it feeds, in plain business language throughout.

The seven-step weekly routine

1. Start at the Procurement Dashboard — Open the Procurement Dashboard — your one-page command centre for the week, always showing current numbers. Two panels decide how the rest of your week goes. The Cost Alert banner names the commodities whose 12-month forecast is flagging serious budget risk; the Budget Impact table translates those forecasts into money against your run-rate. Sort that table by money at risk and work down it, so your time goes where the exposure is largest. The remaining panels — price outlook, hedging, regimes, reports — are context to come back to. If the Cost Alert banner is empty, your week is quiet: close the tab. If the alert level needs tuning for your organisation, your account manager can arrange it.
2. Open the 12-Month Forecast Outlook — For each commodity the Cost Alert banner flagged, open its forecast detail page and select the Monthly view. You get actual price history, how closely the model has tracked reality so far, and a forward forecast wrapped in a shaded confidence band that widens the further out — and the more volatile the market — you look, with a table below listing each month's forecast value alongside its low and high bounds. Read the centre line as the likely path and the band's width as your uncertainty. For example, a central forecast of +8% by Q4 with a high bound of +19% means budgeting to survive the +19% case, not just the expected one. If this view is not enabled for your organisation, your account manager can arrange it.
3. Check the Worst Case on the Risk Dashboard — Open the Risk Dashboard and look up each flagged commodity's Value-at-Risk and Expected Shortfall — both framed here as a worst-case cost increase rather than a technical statistic (see the table below). Read Value-at-Risk as the size of the cushion to hold against a single bad month, and Expected Shortfall as how deep the pain runs once that cushion is breached. The bigger these two numbers, the stronger the case for locking prices in at Step 5.
4. Read the Market Regime — Open Market Regimes and check whether each commodity is currently calm or turbulent, and rising or falling; a fresh DE-RISK flag marks a market that has just turned riskier. Regime tells you how much weight to put on the smooth forecast line and how urgently to act — a calm market lets you plan on a deliberate timeline, while a turbulent or freshly de-risked one argues for buying forward, hedging, or holding extra cushion sooner rather than waiting for next week's review.
5. Decide Whether to Hedge — Open the Hedge Pair Explorer for any commodity where Steps 3 and 4 say your exposure is large or growing. Each pair carries a hedge ratio — for every 100 units of one commodity, how many units of the other to trade — and a plain verdict of Strong, Natural, or Unstable (see the table below). Hedging here is a financial position, separate from your physical purchasing: use this screen to identify and size it, then hand the ratio to whoever executes financial positions for your organisation. If the only pair available is Unstable, don't build on it — fall back to budget cushion or purchase timing instead.
6. Time Your Purchases with the Smart Buyer Calculator — Open the Smart Buyer Calculator and enter your real numbers: current stock on hand, storage capacity, safety stock, monthly consumption, and budget. It returns a month-by-month buying schedule overlaid on the 12-month forecast that front-loads purchases into the cheap months, an immediate buy-now recommendation, and a what-if slider. Drag that slider to the worst case you found on the Risk Dashboard and confirm the plan still fits your budget before you print it and attach it to a purchase requisition.
7. Brief Management with an Advisor Report — Open the Advisor and generate an Executive Cost Briefing — an AI-written, management-ready PDF of the cost outlook, available in English, French, German, Spanish, Czech, and Dutch. Download the latest version or generate one on demand to capture the most current forecast, then attach it to your weekly summary or bring it to the budget meeting. It packages the forecast, the risk picture, and the recommended actions into something your CFO or category director can read in five minutes — in their own language, for multi-country teams. The three report types, the languages and how to generate a missing one are covered in AI Advisor Reports.

How to read the worst-case numbers

Hedge verdicts at a glance

What good looks like

• Every week, open the Procurement Dashboard and triage the Cost Alert banner first.
• For each flagged commodity, check the 12-month outlook for the likely path and the Risk Dashboard for the worst case — that's your budget cushion.
• Read the regime to judge how much to trust the forecast and how fast you need to move.
• Lock in via hedging when exposure is large and a Strong or Natural pair exists.
• Time purchases with the Smart Buyer Calculator, stress-tested against the worst case, and print the schedule for approval.
• Share the Executive Cost Briefing with management so the budget conversation starts from the same numbers.

Run this routine every week and you stop reacting to invoices after the fact. You start managing cost forward — protecting the budget with cushion or hedges before prices move, and buying at planned-cheap moments instead of whenever stock happens to run low.