From Strategy to Practice When Linda Grubbström, Head of Strategy & Way Office at Scania, opened Day 2 of CPO Outlook 2025, the focus shifted from theory to lived experience.Day 1 had presented models, data, and visions of procurement’s future. Now the conversation turned to what those ambitions mean for people — for the teams […]
CPO Outlook 2025 | Performing While Transforming – A Vision for 2040
A Reflective Close to Day 1 The first day of CPO Outlook 2025 ended as it began — with realism and courage. After a full day of data, debate, and lived experience, the final session invited delegates to pause and look forward. The goal was not philosophy but perspective: to acknowledge how much is changing […]
CPO Outlook 2025 | From Reality to Reinvention
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 […]
Future‑Ready Procurement: Managing More With Less
Throughout CPO Outlook 2025, delegates returned to a paradox: procurement’s workload is multiplying, but resources are not. Roundtable discussions on operating models, supplier management, and AI kept circling back to the same question: How do we cope? In his keynote, Yannick Thiry at Bain & Company answered that question with clarity — not by downplaying […]
From Cost Controller to Strategic Platform: Procurement’s Expanding Mandate
At CPO Outlook 2025, one theme dominated the conversations across roundtables, workshops, and keynotes: the workload keeps growing, but expectations grow even faster. CPOs and procurement leaders across industries spoke of fragmented data, limited resources, and expanding demands from the business. These demands include resilience, sustainability, innovation, and now AI. Against that backdrop, Yannick Thiry, […]
The Human Side of Digital Evolution: Why Our Brains — and Our Companies — Struggle to Keep Up
When we talk about transformation, we tend to think in systems: technology stacks, processes, AI platforms, and operating models.But beneath it all, there is one constant — the human brain. It has powered every revolution since the Industrial Age, yet remains largely the same.And perhaps that’s the most important insight of all. A note from […]
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 […]