After fifteen years on stage, one thing remains constant: procurement leaders’ willingness to share what is real. Behind every new technology lies an ongoing question. Every shift in expectation prompts how to focus, connect, and act when everything seems important at once. At CPO Outlook 2025, that honesty took center stage again. The conversations and […]
SEB | From Complexity to Clarity — Building a Fact-Based Procurement Function
At CPO Outlook 2025, Michael Hansén, Chief Procurement Officer at SEB, shared a candid and inspiring story of transformation. With over two decades of procurement experience across industries, he joined SEB in 2021 to build a procurement function almost from scratch — within one of the Nordic region’s largest financial institutions. From a blank slate […]
Yanfeng | From Ambition to Action in Procurement
At CPO Outlook 2025, Gunnar Büchter, Executive Director, Global Head of Sustainability at Yanfeng, shared how a global automotive supplier is embedding sustainability and risk into procurement’s everyday decisions — not through slogans, but by linking data, systems, and people. Enabled by Prewave, the journey shows what happens when visibility and collaboration turn ambition into […]
SSAB | Turning Complexity into Clarity for Buyers
At CPO Outlook 2025, Lisa Lidén, Procurement Director at SSAB and Henrik Nyberg Sales Director Northern Europe at Ivalua shared insights into a headache most teams share. Namely, how to operationalize many facts at once — risk, sustainability, sanctions, audits, and cost — in a way buyers actually use. Context and ambition SSAB is transforming […]
From Electricity to AI: Why Transformation Always Feels Impossible — Until It Isn’t
We tend to think of our current challenges as unique — multiple systems, fragmented data, siloed processes, and organizational inertia that seem to make change nearly impossible. But history shows that every technological leap — from electricity to the internet — started in confusion, disbelief, and fragmentation. What looks inevitable in hindsight often felt incomprehensible […]
CPO Outlook | What do procurement spend time on
This year Anna Bjärkerud co-hosted a workshop during CPO Outlook 2023. Together with René Wienmann, CO, Chr. Hansen and Patrik Andersson, Senior Advisor at Deloitte. The topic was “How can procurement improve task and outcome efficiency and effect ahead?“. Probably on most functions but not the least procurement. The idea was since the task overload […]
CPO Outlook 2023 | How do you evaluate and understand what type buyer-supplier relationship is best fitted?
“We have to collaborate more” and “We depend on our suppliers”. But then – rigid Service Level Agreement’s, prolonged payment terms and power empowered relationship terms. It is no wonder many buyer-supplier relationships end on a bad note. It sometimes seem it is in the corporate DNA to try and control those you rely on. […]
CPO Outlook 2023 | How do you realize changed procurement focus and ways of working?
How can it be that category management is still juggling corporate minds? That although it has been around since forever, most companies have not succeeded with their category strategies as intended. On October 18th & 19th you who join CPO Outlook 2023 in Stockholm will come one step closer to understanding why. Why companies still […]
How to master supplier communication and data
If you could line up all the supplier data in your critical and non critical systems – how many miles would they reach? How much time is spent managing poor data? How many decisions may have been conducted based on non optimal information? The discussion about how to tackle the often thousands of suppliers and […]
EBG | Play: Resilience and Sustainable Procurement
Is there a correlation? Between being resilient and sustainable? EBG | Network had the pleasure of hosting a webinar where Pete Rau, Operations Manager at EcoVadis shared his view in the matter. What did the audience think? As always with live poll questions there are additional questions and reflections coming up after poll results are […]