Although I haven’t had any direct experience with procurement myself, I’ve caught glimpses of the processes in some previous jobs. When I worked in a restaurant, I often had to go back into storage to refill our supply of cups, takeout bags, etc. When I went back there, I noticed that there was typically a huge amount of whatever I needed to get, probably enough to last the entire year. The restaurant’s procurement plan probably relied on a lot of bulk purchases to save money. One con to this that I found was that unless inventory is properly tallied every so often, the diminishing amount of one item can easily be overlooked. This was exactly the case when one time we ran out of takeout bags. The manager didn’t realize we had no more in storage and thus we had to go 2 weeks before more came in. Perhaps this may have been a good time to consider other suppliers (this is probably why it took so long for more to come in) but I wasn’t privy to that information.