Smart Procurement: Powered by People, Accelerated by Tech
Summit survey insights from 58 procurement leaders across 47 companies reveal a profession at an inflection point—caught between operational firefighting and strategic transformation.
What does it take to build a supplier risk management approach that's both robust and usable?
SSAB is transforming how it sources—not only to comply with increasing demands, but to enable procurement to act with clarity, confidence, and control. This session followed SSAB's journey from vision to implementation.
Together with Ivalua, SSAB has integrated multiple risk indicators, compliance inputs, and supplier data into one simplified system—making it easier for buyers to operationalize ESG and risk goals without friction.
What does it take to operationalize sustainability in procurement—across regions, regulations, and thousands of suppliers?
At Yanfeng, a five-year transformation has integrated ESG into sourcing, supplier engagement, and contract execution. This keynote shared how sustainability becomes real when it supports competitiveness, mitigates risk, and enables confident decisions from strategy to buyer level.
How can you drive transformation in a highly regulated industry?
SEB is on a journey of procurement and AP transformation. Powered by the Coupa Spend Management Platform, they aim to provide a best-in-class experience to end users, whilst ensuring solid cost control and risk management.
What does it take to lead in an era where strategy, structure, and skills are all being redefined?
As AI reshapes business models, decision-making, and the way we work, leaders face a new mandate: adapt faster, lead differently, and rethink how people and technology create value together.
During CPO Outlook workshops, participants used colored dots to map their organizations' positions across critical dimensions. Here's what the mappings revealed.
Organizations have built strong data and analytics capabilities, but questions remain about optimal application. Stakeholder Management emerged as both critical and well-developed—placed in the "strategic advantage" zone. Meanwhile, Data & Analytics showed high readiness but uncertain relevance, suggesting possible over-investment in technical skills without corresponding business impact.
Workshop hosted by NCC, Scania & Länsförsäkringar
A clear pattern emerged: leaders (personal experience) cluster in "Performing & Transforming" while organizational reality spreads toward "Performing but Stuck." This validates the survey finding of 62% resource overload—personal capability exists, but organizational systems constrain transformation bandwidth.
Workshop hosted by NCC, Scania & Länsförsäkringar
IT procurement shows concentrated success—clustered upper-right indicates organizations have cracked IT governance. Professional Services shows the widest spread, indicating this remains the "wild west" of indirect spend. Tail spend in lower zones confirms this remains the persistent challenge—visibility doesn't equal control.
Workshop hosted by Handelsbanken
The gap between policy commitments (green dots in upper zones) and daily operations (blue dots) exists but is less dramatic than anticipated. Most organizations have achieved moderate-to-good alignment—sustainability is considered in decisions, just not yet at the same intensity as policy commitments.
Workshop hosted by Essity, Solar & Equinor
Digital Tools & AI Enablement clustered in upper-left: high impact potential yet low enablement level. This perfectly visualizes the survey finding that 78% are at "developing" maturity—high hopes, low delivery. Spend Analytics in upper-right shows proven value as the most mature enabler.
Workshop hosted by Handelsbanken
Interactive peer exchange sessions where practitioners and experts tackled real challenges together. 17 topics, each running twice for 34 total discussions.
Each topic ran twice with different participants—17 topics, 34 discussions—enabling maximum peer exchange across the Nordic procurement community.
Highlights from keynotes, panels, and roundtables across both summit days.
Emma Papakosta explores how NCC is balancing digital transformation with human-centered leadership in procurement.
Linda Grubbström shares how Scania is building procurement capabilities that balance immediate performance with long-term transformation.
Key takeaways from the opening day—navigating complexity, conflicting priorities, and the path forward.
Moving beyond functional KPIs and cost savings to create value that resonates at the enterprise level.
The technology and advisory partners who joined the EBG Xperience program and shaped the conversations at CPO Outlook 2025.
Ivalua is a leading provider of cloud-based Spend Management software. Their complete, unified platform empowers businesses to effectively manage all categories of spend and all suppliers, increasing profitability, improving ESG performance, lowering risk and improving employee productivity. Trusted by hundreds of the world's most admired brands and recognized as a leader by Gartner and other analysts.
ivalua.com →Prewave heralds a new era of supply chain transparency, resilience & sustainability. With the mission of improving supply chains at heart, Prewave uses publicly available data from local news, social media and other databases to discover every link of the supply chain and understand and report on risks impacting suppliers and commodities along every tier. Their AI algorithm analyses sources in more than 50 languages across 100+ risk categories.
prewave.com →Coupa makes margins multiply through its community-generated AI and industry leading total spend management platform for businesses large and small. Coupa AI is informed by trillions of dollars of direct and indirect spend data across a global network of 10M+ buyers and suppliers. They empower you with the ability to predict, prescribe, and automate smarter, more profitable business decisions to improve operating margins.
coupa.com →EcoVadis is the world's most trusted provider of business sustainability ratings. Global supply chains, financial institutions and public organizations rely on EcoVadis to monitor and improve the sustainability performance of their business and trading partners. Industry leaders such as Amazon, Johnson & Johnson, L'Oréal, and BASF are among the 90,000 businesses that collaborate with EcoVadis.
ecovadis.com →GEP delivers AI-powered procurement and supply chain solutions that help global enterprises become more agile and resilient, operate more efficiently and effectively, gain competitive advantage, boost profitability and increase shareholder value. Fresh thinking, innovative products, unrivaled domain expertise, smart, passionate people—this is how GEP SOFTWARE, GEP STRATEGY and GEP MANAGED SERVICES together deliver procurement and supply chain solutions of unprecedented scale, power and effectiveness.
gep.com →JAGGAER is a global leader in enterprise procurement and supplier collaboration, and the catalyst for enhancing human decision-making to accelerate business outcomes. They help organizations manage and automate complex processes while enabling highly resilient, accountable, and integrated supplier base. Backed by 30 years of expertise, their proven AI-powered industry-specific solutions serve direct and indirect, upstream and downstream.
jaggaer.com →Zycus is the pioneer in Cognitive Procurement software and has been a trusted partner of choice for large global enterprises for two decades. Zycus has been consistently recognized by Gartner, Forrester, and other analysts for its Source to Pay integrated suite. Zycus powers its S2P software with the revolutionary Merlin AI Suite—taking over tactical tasks and empowering procurement officers to focus on strategic projects.
zycus.com →Kodiak Hub is an end-to-end Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) platform that leverages big data, smart automation and AI to drive precision in procurement and power in partnerships. Its innovative cloud-based SRM software helps global procurement and sourcing teams buy smarter, drive sustainable supplier relationships, and unlock value in global supply chains.
kodiakhub.com →SAP's strategy is to help every business run as an intelligent, sustainable enterprise. As a market leader in enterprise application software, they help companies of all sizes and in all industries run at their best: SAP customers generate 87% of total global commerce. Their machine learning, IoT, and advanced analytics technologies help turn customers' businesses into intelligent enterprises.
sap.com →SPARETECH's enterprise MRO software leverages the industry's largest spare parts catalog, proprietary matching technology, and tailored AI-powered recommendations to effectively serve maintenance and procurement teams in their daily decision making. They enable customers to source parts inside or outside of their production network, stop buying parts they already have, and reliably reduce inventory.
sparetech.io →Accenture is a leading global professional services company that helps the world's leading businesses, governments and other organizations build their digital core, optimize operations, accelerate revenue growth and enhance citizen services—creating tangible value at speed and scale. With approximately 801,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries.
accenture.com →The ServiceNow AI Platform for business transformation enables organizations to digitize any process across their organization with pre-built and customizable workflow solutions. Finance and Supply Chain solutions on the ServiceNow AI platform help organizations simplify and accelerate the source-to-pay process, enabling seamless purchasing and streamlined fulfillment.
servicenow.com →Sievo provides actionable procurement analytics based on data you can trust. Designed for large enterprises, praised by key analysts, they provide a future-proof solution with immediate ROI. Sievo empowers Procurement, Finance, IT, and Sustainability teams to overcome data chaos and capture all insights, drive bottom-line savings, improve ESG performance, and streamline budgeting and forecasting.
sievo.com →Beyond external pressures, procurement organizations face internal friction that prevents strategic progress.
These top three bottlenecks form an interconnected challenge. Resource overload prevents teams from addressing data quality issues. Poor data makes it difficult to justify system consolidation investments. Fragmented systems create more manual work, exacerbating resource constraints. Breaking this cycle requires strategic intervention—not just more resources, but smarter deployment of technology to automate routine work.
Beyond technology adoption lies a deeper challenge: creating the conditions where skilled professionals can actually lead change.
Workshop mappings revealed a critical pattern: teams possess the competencies needed for transformation, yet cluster in zones where empowerment to act remains low.
The barrier isn't capability—it's decision rights, approval processes, and organizational trust. Leaders who invest in skills development without addressing empowerment frameworks risk creating frustrated teams unable to execute on their knowledge.
Organizations show high transformation momentum but unclear processes and roles. Teams are changing how they work before establishing stable frameworks to support that change.
This creates organizational stress as enthusiasm meets structural friction. Sustainable transformation requires deliberate operating model design—clarifying decision rights, cross-functional workflows, and role definitions.
This isn't about replacement—it's about elevation. The vision is clear: free procurement professionals from administrative burden to focus on supplier relationships, risk management, innovation, and strategic stakeholder engagement.
Yet realizing this vision requires more than technology deployment. It demands leadership that can guide teams through uncertainty, build psychological safety for experimentation, and create clarity when operating in imperfect conditions.
"How do you lead procurement forward when everything is uncertain—and everything matters?"
— The central question explored at CPO Outlook 2025
The data tells a story of a profession in transition—caught between operational demands and strategic ambition, between technology promise and data reality, between individual capability and organizational constraints.
But the workshop mappings reveal something equally important: no one has figured it out yet. Zero organizations claim "leading" maturity. This levels the playing field—and creates space for those willing to lead differently.
The CPOs who will shape procurement's future won't just be technology adopters. They'll be the ones who create the conditions for empowerment, who build structures that support rather than constrain change, and who understand that transformation is fundamentally a human challenge enabled by technology—not the other way around.
SMART PROCUREMENT
Powered by People, Accelerated by Tech
EBG | Network has been bringing procurement leaders together since 2010. Whether you want to share your expertise on stage or partner with us to reach this engaged community, we'd love to hear from you.
Anna: +46 73 581 93 02 · [email protected]
Lars: +46 73 350 03 43 · [email protected]
