Rafael Ramos Mejia, Head of Corporate Procurement at Adium Pharma, discusses how procurement is helping the business scale across Latin America
Most organisations talk about growth as an aspiration. At Adium Pharma, a Latin American pharmaceutical company with operations across 18 markets, growth arrived faster than the structures designed to support it. The question was never whether to grow, but whether procurement could evolve fast enough to turn that growth into lasting strength.
As its manufacturing footprint, commercial operations and therapeutic portfolio have expanded, Adium has to manage multiple regulatory frameworks, currencies and commercial priorities. That expansion has changed the role of procurement inside the business.
For Rafael Ramos Mejia, Head of Corporate Procurement at Adium, that growth has changed what the function needs to deliver for the business. “The key driver behind this transformation was not cost pressure, but growth itself,” he says. “As the organisation expanded, we began to see that growth was creating duplication, inefficiency, and hidden risk.”
To solve this, Adium designed its One Procurement model. Its purpose is to help the company turn scale into a source of strength, rather than allowing complexity to build across countries, categories, and supplier relationships.
From fragmentation to regional coherence
Adium’s procurement redesign was unusual because the function was already performing well. Local teams were close to the business, supplier relationships were already established, and execution was strong. Instead, the pressure came from the size and complexity of the organisation.
“As we expanded across 18 countries, growth began to expose structural limits,” Ramos Mejia explains. “Similar categories were being negotiated independently, supplier relationships were managed without regional visibility, KPIs varied by country, and spend data was fragmented.”
Initially, the problems this caused were difficult to spot. “When you’re standing inside one market, everything looks fine,” he adds. “It’s only when you step back and see the region as a whole that the patterns emerge — and with them, the opportunity.” Growth was outpacing Adium’s ability to coordinate. Without an intentional operating architecture, scale was creating parallel efforts rather than shared momentum.
It was clear that incremental improvements wouldn’t be enough to overcome the challenges of scaling. While the team didn’t need restructuring, the company needed to change how procurement operated. “We didn’t wait for operational complexity to become a limitation. We recognised early that sustained growth required a more integrated procurement model.”
The diagnostic process was deliberately cross-regional. “What emerged was a pattern: strong local execution operating in parallel rather than as a system,” Ramos Mejia says. As a result, Adium didn’t replace local knowledge with a distant regional model. The restructuring connected expertise across countries, allowing procurement to deliver greater value across the business.
An integrated procurement model for Latin America
“Latin America is a region defined by diversity,” explains Ramos Mejia. “Different regulatory frameworks, currency volatility, infrastructure gaps, and political shifts all coexist simultaneously. Operating across 18 markets means we cannot rely on uniform conditions.”
Because of this, local understanding remains essential. Teams need to stay close to regulation, business stakeholders, and market conditions. However, broader regional visibility gives procurement a better chance to manage volatility before it becomes a hidden risk.
“The complexity shaped our strategy,” says Ramos Mejia. “In highly dynamic markets like Latin America, greater coordination helps organisations respond more effectively to volatility”.
“For us, procurement strategy had to evolve towards integration — for example, unified governance, shared visibility, regional category strategies, and aligned objectives. In Latin America, operating in a coordinated manner offers a competitive advantage…”
