In October 2025, procurement leaders from across the Nordics gathered at the CPO Outlook 2025 summit in Stockholm to discuss the evolving challenges facing their function. The summit, held on October 15-16, brought together senior leaders from major organizations including NCC, Scania, Länsförsäkringar, Handelsbanken, Equinor, Solar, and Essity. Through surveys conducted from September through November 2025, 58 responses from 47 companies provided insights into the current state of procurement leadership.
Among the questions posed, one struck at the heart of a persistent organizational challenge: “What challenges arise from promises or expectations set by Sales, R&D, Finance or other functions that procurement needs to fulfill?”
The responses reveal a fundamental organizational tension: procurement operates in a web of dependencies yet often lacks the collaborative infrastructure to effectively navigate these relationships.
Core Challenge Clusters
The Misaligned Incentives Dilemma
The most striking pattern across responses centers on divergent functional goals. As the survey data shows, procurement faces challenges when “different functions optimize for different goals — Sales for revenue, Finance for cost savings, R&D for innovation speed, and Procurement for total value and compliance.”
This challenge manifests in several ways:
Short-termism versus strategic value creation – The pressure for immediate cost reductions conflicts with procurement’s role in building sustainable supplier relationships and long-term value. Respondents noted “focus on short-term wins instead of long-term wins” and “high expectations on savings while we have limited access to R&D resources supporting redesign/relocation.”
The price-focused perception problem – Survey participants highlighted that “other functions often have a limited understanding of procurement’s strategic role, leading to narrow expectations focused only on price.” This reductionist view overlooks how procurement decisions impact company risk, revenue, and operational efficiency.
The Late Involvement Syndrome
A recurring theme reveals procurement being brought into decisions too late to add strategic value. Respondents specifically mentioned:
- “I wish they would start asking to find something new instead of asking us to contract a supplier that provides faster horses”
- “We are involved too late, and therefore cannot do our part in a good way”
- “Lock in effect in supplier base”
This pattern suggests a reactive rather than proactive procurement function, constrained by decisions made upstream without input on supplier capabilities, market dynamics, or risk factors.
The Specification and Requirements Gap
Several responses point to inadequate preparation from stakeholder functions:
- “Customer requirements that are impossible to fulfill. Legacy products that have old specifications that aren’t updated”
- “Could be local in reach and world class”
- “The stakeholders are not used to provide proper specifications for sourcing”
This gap forces procurement to either delay processes while gathering information or make sub-optimal decisions based on incomplete requirements.
Capacity, Complexity, and Control
The operational burden emerges clearly from the data:
- “Complex/Controlled supply chain that some time may appear as time consuming and not value adding activities”
- “Many projects to be managed simultaneously by the project department and the operations organization”
- “Procurement having to bridge all gaps between Sales, R&D, Finance etc while ensuring regulatory adherence, supplier reliability, and customer trust”
Procurement becomes the integrator of last resort, managing complexity created across multiple functions without necessarily having the authority or resources to address root causes.
The Systems Gap: CRM vs. SRM
Sales functions have evolved sophisticated CRM platforms that provide end-to-end visibility, predictive analytics, and cross-functional coordination. This enables sales to anticipate needs, manage pipelines, and demonstrate value in ways that procurement often cannot.
The lack of equally robust SRM (Supplier Relationship Management) systems means procurement struggles to:
- Build compelling business cases in real-time when urgent requests arrive from sales or R&D
- Demonstrate strategic value through data-driven insights about supplier capabilities, market trends, and total cost implications
- Anticipate rather than react to internal customer needs
- Create visibility into the full supplier ecosystem and relationship health
This systems deficit reinforces the perception of procurement as transactional rather than strategic, creating a self-reinforcing cycle where late involvement leads to reactive responses, which further diminishes procurement’s strategic credibility.
Windows of Progress: Opportunities in the Challenges
Despite these formidable challenges, the responses reveal several pathways forward:
Re-framing Through Shared Metrics
The economic environment creates an opening. As survey respondents noted, the “economical situation drives businesses to find more savings.” Rather than viewing this as pure pressure, forward-thinking procurement functions can use this moment to advocate for cross-functional KPIs that measure total value creation rather than siloed metrics.
Building the Business Case for Early Involvement
The “faster horses” comment highlights procurement’s potential role as market intelligence and innovation broker. When procurement is involved early, the function brings external market perspectives on emerging technologies and supplier capabilities, cost and feasibility realities that shape better initial requirements, and risk assessments that prevent downstream problems.
Transparency as a Strategic Asset
The call for “transparency & simplicity” from survey respondents represents more than operational efficiency—it’s an opportunity to make procurement’s value visible. When procurement processes are opaque, stakeholders see delays and constraints. When transparent, they see the complexity procurement navigates on their behalf.
The Integration Role as Competitive Advantage
While “bridging all gaps between Sales, R&D, Finance etc” creates burden, it also positions procurement uniquely to see enterprise-wide patterns and opportunities that siloed functions miss.
Moving Forward: From Transactional Fulfillment to Strategic Partnership
The responses paint a picture of procurement stretched across competing demands, often without the authority, resources, or timing to optimally fulfill them. Yet within these challenges lies procurement’s strategic opportunity.
The function that learns to navigate cross-functional complexity, that builds systems rivaling sales’ CRM sophistication, that makes its value transparent and compelling, and that positions itself as the essential integrator rather than the constraint to work around—that procurement function becomes indispensable to organizational success.
The glass-half-full perspective? These challenges exist because procurement matters profoundly to organizational outcomes. The very tension described in these responses proves that procurement sits at the nexus of value creation, risk management, and operational excellence. The task now is building the systems, relationships, and credibility to fully realize that potential.
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