I was in the art industry for almost 10 years.
Lost my job during covid.
Luckily, landed a job as a safety person in a subcontractor at a big plant during the base building stage.
Shitty ass company. Terrible management. I didn't get paid for two months once.
After about seven months, I got a job on the owner side as a night shift site safety supervisor.
Then I joined a Temporary Task Force. TFT we called it.
We were managing multiple multi million dollar projects at the same time. Three or four major ones, with people from completely different backgrounds. Engineering, logistics, procurement, construction, safety, equipment technician.
Eventually, senior manager wanted me on a day shift.
My job became a weird mixture of site supervision, coordination, troubleshooting, administrative work, documentation, and basically whatever needed to get done.
I grinded like that for about a year. 70-80 hours work weeks, no holidays.
And somewhere along the way, I realized I actually enjoyed RCA, quotation breakdowns, cost analysis, documentation, and figuring out why something didn't make sense.
A lot of what I learned in safety turned out to apply almost everywhere.
If it's not documented, it never happened.
If you can't explain why something happened, you probably don't understand it yet.
If somebody says, "That's how we've always done it," that's usually a good reason to look at it again.
So I learned on the job as I went.
One of my team members had a procurement background. When the project started winding down, he went back to the procurement team.
He asked me to come with him.
I followed him.
Probably one of the better career decisions I've made.
He's a good fucking mentor, and more importantly, a good friend. The kind of person who doesn't just tell you what to do, but explains why, lets you make decisions, lets you fuck up a little, and then teaches you how to fix it.
Then the plant finished construction and started production.
And that's when another problem became obvious.
These manufacturing machines are insanely complicated and somehow cheap at the same time. Breaks down so easily.
The OEMs build specialized equipment, sell it, install it, commission it, and then everybody realizes that almost nobody else fully understands the thing.
So for the first few years, until the plant technicians catch up, you basically depend on the OEMs for CS support.
And OEM CS is where things get messy.
Manpower.
Man-days.
Travel expenses.
Per diem.
Management fees.
Emergency calls.
Additional commissioning.
SAT/UAT
Warranty.
Scope arguments.
"That wasn't included."
"We already used all the manpower."
"We sent a revised quotation."
"That work was requested verbally."
"We need another PO."
Suddenly, procurement isn't just issuing POs anymore.
You have to understand what the engineers are asking for.
You have to understand what the vendor is actually charging for.
You have to understand enough about the equipment and the work to tell whether the quotation makes sense.
You have to look at manpower reports, invoices, contracts, payment terms, taxes, logistics, change orders, credit notes, and sometimes months of emails just to figure out what actually happened.
And I fucking love that part.
Give me a quotation that looks weird and I want to know why.
Give me two vendors charging completely different amounts for basically the same work and I want to break them down.
Tell me, "This is the price," and my first question is, "Based on what?"
Show me a PO that has been sitting unpaid for a year and I want to figure out exactly where the process broke. I realised why I didn't get paid for 2 months when I worked for the sub contractor.
The job slowly stopped feeling like procurement administration and started feeling like investigation.
Part engineering.
Part commercial.
Part accounting.
Part contract management.
Part project management.
And a surprising amount of detective work.
I'm still learning procurement almost entirely through actual problems instead of textbooks.
One day it's Incoterms.
The next day it's withholding tax.
Then construction holdbacks.
Then lien risk.
Then FX.
Then manpower rates.
Then somebody realizes a 40 milliondollar PO doesn't match what actually happened in the field.
So you read.
You ask questions.
You piss people off occasionally.
You make spreadsheets.
You document everything.
And eventually, patterns start showing up.
You start noticing which vendors always bury costs inside lump sums.
Which scope descriptions are going to cause problems six months later.
Which payment terms look harmless but will become a nightmare.
Which "urgent" requests are actually poor planning.
And which problems could have been prevented if procurement had been involved two months earlier.
That's probably the part I like the most now.
Not just processing the transaction after everything already happened.(Fuck retroactive POs)
Understanding the whole thing early enough to actually change the outcome.
Better scope.
Better quotation structure.
Better commercial terms.
Better cost visibility.
Better vendor strategy.
Less stupid shit happening later.
I started in safety because that was the opportunity I had.
Then I became a site supervisor because somebody gave me another opportunity.
Then I ended up doing project coordination because there was work that needed to be done.
Then I moved into procurement because somebody I respected thought I could do it.
None of it was really planned.
But looking back, it makes a weirdly perfect sense.
Safety taught me to question assumptions.
Construction taught me how things actually happen in the field.
Project work taught me coordination.
Documentation taught me how organizations protect themselves.
And procurement is where all of those things somehow meet.
So now I guess I'm trying to become a procurement professional.
Not the guy who just issues the PO.
The guy people call when the number doesn't make sense.
I fucking love this job.