As Chief Procurement Officer at Pillsbury and Ball Packaging, Rod Sherkin found a problem. Price negotiations were always a 1-way street. Suppliers continually raised prices for their products, justified by raw material cost increases. But never the reverse: lowering prices when their costs fell! This was a glaring omission since raw materials were commodities and obviously fell as well.

So he started tracking commodity costs associated with the key raw materials his suppliers used. Whenever costs fell, he turned the tables and negotiated price decreases, using suppliers’ own logic: changing raw material costs justify changing finished goods costs.

When he left corporate life to consult, he saw the same gap everywhere. Procurement teams on the same 1-way street, overpaying without knowing it because they lacked access to supplier raw material cost data. Working with manufacturers across North America, he consistently helped them claw back 5–15% in direct material costs—not through dramatic intervention, but simply by measuring the right things and arming their procurement teams.

That gap became ProPurchaser: a platform that tracks manufacturing commodities and turns this market data into the negotiation leverage: cost tracking and should-cost modeling that procurement teams had always needed, but rarely had access to.

Twenty-five years later, ProPurchaser remains the market intelligence platform of choice for thousands of procurement professionals. Rod remains at the helm—still hosting webinars, still actively invested in the success of every procurement professional on the platform, and still working to ensure that competitive success at the negotiating table is never a lottery.