Unlocking Cross-Company Flow and Accelerating SAFe Implementations with Lean-Agile Procurement
New SAFe Competency and Whitepaper
Press Release | November 2025
By Andrew Sales, Chief Methodologist, Scaled Agile, Inc. – andrew.sales@scaledagile.com
and Mirko Kleiner, Thought Leader & President, LAP Alliance – mirko.kleiner@lap-alliance.org
Organizations implementing SAFe are already mastering flow within their organization. However, to reach the next level—true end-to-end flow—they must extend agility across the entire value stream, including the partner and supplier ecosystem.
“Agility doesn’t stop at the organizational boundary, LAP gives SAFe enterprises the tools to engage external partners with the same speed and adaptability they expect internally — enabling true end-to-end flow and co-creation across the value stream.”
That’s why Scaled Agile, Inc. and the Lean-Agile Procurement (LAP) Alliance have joined forces to introduce the new SAFe Competency: Lean-Agile Procurement (LAP)—and a companion LAP Alliance Whitepaper How to boost your SAFe Implementation with LAP.
This moment marks a strategic shift: procurement is no longer a blocker but a key enabler of flow, speed, and innovation across supply chains. LAP becomes the missing link in every Agile transformation to help organizations:
Achieve up to 800% faster sourcing cycles, aligned with PI cadences.
Realize 80% better commercial outcomes through co-creative partnerships.
Transform traditional supplier relationships into long-term co-innovation ecosystems.
Build compliant yet adaptive procurement capabilities that match the speed of delivery.
Do you want your strategic procurement done in days/weeks, not months/years? Let’s make it happen.
Why Traditional Procurement Often Struggles to Keep Pace
Procurement—and other support functions—are not broken. They have simply been designed for another era: one focused on efficiency, control, and predictability. But the age of AI demands something else—responsiveness, partnership, and value creation across companies.
When delivery and sourcing run at different speeds, friction arises:
Teams move fast, but sourcing cycles remain sequential.
Contracts protect against risk but can’t adapt to change.
Partners are managed transactionally rather than engaged as co-innovators.
Procurement was never the problem; the way we organize it was. It’s time to equip them with new applicable tools and practices that match the pace of SAFe.
How to Create Cross-Company Flow?
The new LAP Competency extends SAFe’s concept of flow. Just as SAFe synchronizes delivery across Agile Teams and ARTs, LAP pushes these concepts to the next level, enabling collaboration across vendors, partners, and ecosystems—turning cross-functional flow into cross-company flow.
Source: LAP Alliance - Learn more about Procurement Platform Teams in our Whitepaper
Instead of operating as a gatekeeper, procurement becomes a capability embedded within every value stream. Agile Teams, ARTs, and Solutions take end-to-end responsibility for sourcing and managing external partners, supported by a Procurement Platform Team that provides:
Self-service tools, Guardrails, compliance frameworks, such as Agile contract templates
Market intelligence and supplier insights
Enablement, Mentoring, and Coaching
This platform-enabled model creates speed with safety, autonomy with alignment, and partnerships built for co-innovation. When Agile Teams own their partnerships and co-create agreements in real time, procurement becomes part of the flow—not apart from it.
In practice, this means:
During PI Planning, teams can identify a partner need, run a Lean-Agile Procurement Big Room Workshop, co-create a contract, and start delivering together within the same iteration.
The Procurement Platform Team supports just-in-time with insights and enablement.
Vendors become true partners, integrated into the same cadences and shared objectives.
Getting Started with Lean-Agile Procurement
Transforming procurement is not a top-down project—it’s an evolutionary journey.
Start with one value stream, one sourcing challenge, and one collaborative experiment.
From there, the momentum builds.
To deliver faster and smarter in an uncertain world, enterprises must build ecosystems that learn and adapt together. The Lean-Agile Procurement Competency helps make that possible—transforming procurement into an enabler of cross-company flow, co-innovation, and continuous value creation.
We are incredibly proud to see LAP formally recognized as a core SAFe competency. It proves that organizations can transform procurement into a key accelerator of business agility across the entire value stream — not just internally, but across companies and ecosystems.
Get started with LAP today by downloading our free LAP Alliance Whitepaper: Boost Your SAFe Implementation with Lean-Agile Procurement and explore the LAP Competency to see how SAFe organizations are already scaling flow across their ecosystems.
Because agility doesn’t stop at your organization’s edge—it starts where collaboration begins.
For any questions, feel free to contact me:
Mirko Kleiner, Thought Leader & President, LAP Alliance – mirko.kleiner@lap-alliance.org
FREE Download the LAP Alliance Whitepaper
Want to learn more?
This LAP Alliance Whitepaper is inline with other publications such as:
The future of Procurement: From Function to Capability - A survival Guide for Leader that want to transform their procurement organization (co-published with WorldCC)
Complex sourcing with faster and better outcomes - Lean Agile Procurement (LAP) is a rapid and highly collaborative sourcing methodology. Practitioners are benefiting from enhanced outcomes (co-published with CIPS)
Lean-Agile Procurement Competency - Knowledge Paper for SAFe (co-published with ScaledAgile)
Get the official Book:
„Lean-Agile Procurement - How to get Twice the Value in Half the Time“
Get certified:
Check out our Curriculum of Certification Courses
Get coaching: Check out our experts & trainers at LAP-Alliance.org/trainer/find-your-trainer
This announcement was co-published with Scaled Agile inc. the creator of SAFe.
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