Running a small business can take up a big chunk of its owner’s time. Even something as simple as ordering the breakroom snacks each month can add up, and as small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) face mounting pressure to do more with less, the time spent ordering supplies, managing vendors and tracking inventory is attracting new scrutiny.
“A lot of this time is hidden,” Walmart Business Senior Vice President and General Manager Ashley Hubka told PYMNTS. “Because it’s fragmented or spread across the organization, spread across people’s days, you don’t have a sense of how it all comes together and how impactful it can be across the organization.”
For many SMBs, the larger cost may not be what they buy, but the time spent buying it. These aren’t the strategic sourcing decisions that dominate enterprise purchasing departments, just the mundane, recurring work of buying office supplies, break-room snacks, cleaning products, technology accessories, and other workplace essentials that keep organizations running.
“One of the things that we did the math on, is that four to seven hours a week spread across an organization adds up to a full one month of productivity in the year,” Hubka said.
Viewed through that lens, SMB procurement stops looking like an operational task and starts looking like a strategic issue.
Small Business Procurement Has an Invisible Labor Problem
Procurement responsibilities inside smaller organizations are often distributed across multiple employees and departments. Operations managers, office administrators, team leaders and business owners may all participate in purchasing decisions without any centralized oversight. But every minute employees spend navigating vendor portals, placing orders or tracking down purchase information is time that cannot be spent on customers, employees or growth initiatives.
“Find these hidden costs,” Hubka said. “And then think about the opportunity costs. That puts a different lens on how you want to address procurement.”
What is emerging is not simply a new approach to purchasing but a new understanding of how operational friction affects growth for SMBs.
“What we are seeing smart small businesses do, medium-sized businesses do, is consolidating suppliers and streamlining their purchasing workflows,” Hubka said.
The objective is not simply convenience. Consolidation creates cleaner purchasing data, reduces administrative burden and lays the foundation for more sophisticated procurement management.
Analytics and Automation Add to Small Business Owner’s Toolkit
Historically, spend analytics and procurement intelligence were capabilities associated with large enterprises. Today, those tools are becoming increasingly accessible to smaller organizations, where the ability to identify recurring purchases, forecast demand and optimize order sizes can create meaningful savings.
“The opportunity here is to look at what are the purchase patterns,” Hubka said. “Can we look at some spend analytics, understanding our purchase patterns that lets us kind of be on top of those?”
Hubka pointed to common purchases such as paper towels and workplace essentials as examples. Businesses often reorder the same products repeatedly without recognizing larger purchasing trends. But analytics can help transform SMB procurement from a reactive process into a proactive one.
And as businesses gain better visibility into purchasing patterns, many are turning to automation to eliminate repetitive work.
“I do think SMBs have the opportunity to use AI to help them track inventory levels, compare products, remember when they need to reorder supplies,” Hubka said. “For the most regular, most needed [items], where they have the greatest confidence, you can actually automate some of that through recurring purchasing and subscriptions.”
“AI can surface recommendations, it can flag potential issues, predict shortages, help them anticipate replenishment needs, and sort of stay ahead of that curve to have the operational efficiency,” she added.
Small Businesses Buy Back Time With Better Procurement
Ultimately, the growing interest in procurement technology reflects a broader reality facing SMBs: time has become one of their most valuable resources. For many SMBs, the promise of automation, analytics and artificial intelligence is not merely operational efficiency. It is the opportunity to reclaim hours previously lost to routine purchasing and reinvest them in customers, employees and expansion.
“I think SMB owners, operators, managers, they are looking for any amount of time they can get back in their week,” Hubka said. “What they want is capacity.”
That capacity is increasingly being redirected toward the activities that drive business performance.
“Every hour they get back in the week is an hour they can put towards what matters most to them or their highest priorities,” she said.
And in an economy where growth is often constrained by limited resources rather than limited ambition, procurement may be emerging as an unlikely competitive advantage.
More importantly, it generates data. As recurring spending becomes digitized and centralized, businesses gain visibility into employee behavior, operational rhythms, and consumption patterns. That visibility creates opportunities for optimization that were previously unavailable.
Or, as Hubka put it, “Creating that capacity for business owners and teams hour by hour is where we think there’s opportunity.”
