Many companies still treat cost control as a blunt exercise in restraint, but the more effective approach is often to treat it as a design problem. That is the argument at the heart of Soren Kaplan’s piece for Inc, which suggests that the most resilient cost strategies look less like austerity and more like innovation.
The logic is simple enough: if finance, procurement, HR and other support functions are expected to deliver more value with tighter budgets, they need a framew...
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ork that goes beyond trimming spend line by line. Gartner’s survey of more than 200 chief financial officers found that 56% ranked enterprise-wide cost optimisation among their top five priorities, while Deloitte’s 2025 Global Chief Procurement Officer Survey showed that procurement leaders are facing pressure from supply chain disruption, regulatory change and rapid technological shifts even as they accelerate investment in digital transformation and artificial intelligence.
That convergence matters because it reframes cost reduction. Gartner’s research argues that spending should be repositioned to create value rather than merely reduced, with unnecessary outlay cut, enterprise performance improved and savings reinvested in higher-value capabilities. In practice, that means cost discipline is no longer a back-office clean-up exercise; it is part of how companies compete.
Kaplan describes this as a form of incremental innovation, where digital tools, AI and process redesign are applied not to launch new products, but to make existing functions materially better. The point is not to chase moonshots. It is to identify friction inside the business, understand who is affected, and then redesign the work so it is faster, cheaper and more useful to internal customers.
That approach can be applied across the organisation. A procurement team, for instance, might stop seeing itself as a contract-processing unit and start acting as a strategic partner to the business. Instead of merely negotiating terms, it could redesign supplier onboarding to shorten cycle times, standardise legal review across categories or restructure vendor tiers to lower total ownership costs. Deloitte says top-performing procurement teams are already allocating a significant share of their budgets to technology, underscoring how digital investment is becoming central to the function’s ability to manage cost, risk and complexity.
Finance teams can follow the same pattern. Kaplan points to work with Randstad, where internal finance leaders examined pain points across the organisation to improve service to the business while also cutting waste. The lesson was that cost savings emerged not from a separate reduction programme, but from rethinking how the function served its internal stakeholders. In a similar vein, HR teams can use AI to streamline goal-setting, generate job descriptions and simplify performance processes, while still improving the experience for managers and employees.
The broader backdrop is that CFOs are being asked to balance opposing demands. According to Gartner, cost optimisation is now a top priority, but so is funding growth. A separate CFO.com report on the same survey said 47% of CFOs ranked capital allocation for new growth opportunities among their urgent actions, highlighting the tension between preserving margins and investing for the future.
Kaplan’s practical method is to start with internal customers. Map the leaders or business groups that depend most on the function’s work, define the problems they most need solved, then generate ideas and score them by impact and effort. The process is deliberately structured: it forces teams to think less about their own workflow and more about the business problems they exist to solve.
That is also why the next meeting matters. Rather than using off-sites or quarterly reviews to look backwards, Kaplan argues that teams should use them to run an innovation exercise focused on cost and performance. Done well, that can turn a routine planning session into a strategic conversation about how to improve the business without simply asking people to do more with less.
The underlying idea is increasingly relevant. With margin pressure, AI adoption and continued uncertainty across supply chains and regulation, many leaders are discovering that the sharpest cost strategies are not defensive at all. They are inventive.
Source: Noah Wire Services
