Written By Sean Galea-Pace
Tail spend is notoriously overlooked. Today’s Chief Procurement Officer is being pulled in multiple directions. Amidst a challenging geopolitical backdrop, a global digital transformation and ever-increasing ESG requirements, change is demanded and usually quickly.
Procurement leaders are tasked with spending the majority of their time focusing on strategic spend centred on high value purchases key to a company’s operations. But while this approach is important, to completely disregard tail spend – which often consists of low value but highly frequent purchases that are traditionally regarded as less strategic – is a mistake.
And it’s a subject that Nick Petheram, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Nomia, is very familiar with.
“I think it’s just a bit hard,” Petheram tells us, in response to why tail spend is such an untapped area of opportunity. “In some of the organisations we talk to, there are perhaps two or three thousand strategic vendors but 25,000 tail vendors so it’s a big mountain to climb. I understand the reasoning that people are focusing on the bits that are a little bit easier because everyone is trying to do more with less now. A lot of people focus on strategic spend and walk straight past some areas of huge compliance risk and great opportunities.”
NOMIA: CLOSER LOOК
Aiming to change that view is Nomia. Petheram’s company is a procurement management firm that empowers organisations to take control of their non-strategic spend. Founded in 2016 under the name of Bell Procurement Management within Bell Integration, Nomia, as it is today known, became an independent company in April 2024.
Nomia’s model blends advanced Al, cognitive search and deep procurement expertise. Backed by its cloud-based platform, Nomia’s experienced teams bring category and geographic insights that help streamline sourcing, optimise supplier relationships and improve contract performance. Nomia works closely with its customers to transform fragmented and often overlooked spend into a strategic advantage. By enhancing visibility, reducing costs, improving compliance and minimising supply chain risk, Nomia helps drive measurable ESG impact and long-term value.
Nomia’s Al procurement platform offers a plethora of benefits to transform operations. These include the likes of autonomous sourcing, supplier recommendations, invoice management, analytics, RFx collaboration and controlled supplier governance. Nomia’s advanced capabilities allow for a personalised experience. Users can engage with the
Al assistant, peruse catalogs or request a customised quote.
“Al gives us speed and scale – but it’s people who give it purpose. The future belongs to those who blend artificial and human intelligence”
Nick Petheram, Founder, Chairman and CEO, Nomia
NOMIA’S DIFFERENTIATOR
But what truly sets Nomia apart is its ability to go through the entire procurement cycle. According to Petheram, this flexible approach empowers customers to have complete visibility through Nomia via the likes of demand sourcing, contract management, onboarding and onto payments. “There aren’t many options that go through the whole cycle,” reveals Petheram. “Most procurement tools I’ve seen tend to have come about by resolving one of the problems that someone has found or faced during their career. What we are endeavoring to do is give one version of events where all the terms mean the same thing which means there’s a simplicity of engaging end-to-end. I think that’s probably why we’re a little bit different.”
Another of Nomia’s main draws is the way in which it reduces complexity for customers, especially those managing thousands of small suppliers across global operations. And
according to Petheram, procurement leaders even often question why they can’t do what Nomia does themselves. “But I always say that you can’t take 20,000 vendors away and give one back who is responsible for all that compliance risk and control,” he says. “What we do is take responsibility for onboarding and contracting with all those vendors. We will take thousands of vendors away from these companies and give them just one back in return. That in itself saves so much because there’s so much effort in accounts payable, accounts receivable and contract management but all of that just gets handed over to us.”
NOMIA X VODAFONE PROCURE & CONNECT
In September 2025, Nomia announced it had started working with Vodafone Procure & Connect to help the organisation manage its tail spend across global operations. As a result of the move, Vodafone is creating a single system of record for non-strategic spend by consolidating fragmented supplier relationships through Nomia’s end-to-end tail spend platform. Through Nomia, Vodafone’s aim was to create greater transparency, stronger governance and improved purchasing power across markets.
Speaking at the time in a press release announcing the move, Ninian Wilson, Global Supply Chain Director at Vodafone and CEO of Vodafone Procure & Connect, said: “Tail spend can be fragmented and complex to manage. Nomia gives us the confidence that we’re managing it with the right level of oversight, compliance and governance. It’s about applying greater rigour to sometimes overlooked areas of procurement that can’t and shouldn’t be ignored.”
“We’ve been providing services to Vodafone for the last 25 years and they face a lot of challenges that large organisations generally have,” explains Petheram. “Why is this important to us? They’ve got 26 operating companies and 57 divisions. What it enables us and Vodafone to do is endeavour to get some of the controls that they’d like to have in some of the areas that they haven’t got time to spend doing it themselves. And the alliance looks after some of their spend in multiple geographies while we’re going out to market to some of their customers to offer a combined Vodafone/Nomia procurement service. This relationship is really important to us.”
Al + HI REVOLUTION
Given the challenging global conditions the procurement industry is up against, discovering ways to optimise procurement strategies has never been so critical. As a result, ensuring there is a strategy to accommodate tail spend can be a real differentiator in a flooded market – and this is also where Al can be leveraged to help.
Indeed, Al is changing the world in both a personal and a professional environment. The era of innovation is here and organisations are increasingly seeking to automate in a bid to cut costs and scale efficiency. However, as promising as advanced technologies are, Petheram believes it is still important to retain the human factor, in the form of Human Intelligence (HI), despite the tempting draw of digital tools. “If you listened to Elon Musk 10 years ago, every one of us would’ve an electric car now,” he tells us. “I think everything takes a little bit longer than you might originally think. At the moment, people are trying on Al and figuring out how it works and how it is embedded into their processes and systems and it will undoubtedly grow and become even more important than it is today. But in our view, you can’t disregard the people angle because it’s really important in terms of ethics and judgement. Al delivers remarkable speed and scale, but it’s human intelligence that gives it depth and direction. The organisations that will lead the next wave of procurement transformation are those that recognise the power of combining data-driven automation with human judgement, ethics, and contextual understanding.
“Al gives you the information so you can make the right decisions – that is why the human factor is key. Al gives us speed and scale – but it’s people who give it purpose. The future belongs to those who blend artificial and human intelligence.”
With an eye on the next few years, Petheram reveals Nomia is growing in North America, Europe, Middle East and Asia Pacific, stressing there are no plans to slow down anytime soon. “I think if you speak to most CPOs, the tail market never makes their top five most important things to do. The important thing for us is to continue to try and meet their demands and develop our product in line with that.”
Source: CPO Strategy Magazine, Issue 66 https://cpostrategy.media/blog/magazines/issue-66/
