Predictive procurement — what it takes to see ahead

Peer Lab · Day 1 · 14 October

Dnyanesh Sarang, Head of Global Supply Chain at Optinova, hosts a case-led Peer Lab at CPO Outlook 2026. One result sits at its centre: a regulatory pricing escalation, buried in a supplier agreement, surfaced fifteen weeks before the supplier’s own notification window. The lab is about what it took to see it coming.

Risk and cost are hygiene. What comes next?

Most procurement functions find out about a price increase when the supplier tells them. The contract allowed it, the clause was there, and the work that follows is damage control: renegotiate what can be renegotiated, explain the rest to finance. That is risk management done well, and by 2026 it is expected rather than rewarded.

EBG’s own surveys show why the next step is hard: 74% of Nordic procurement leaders still struggle with poor data, and only around 5% have integrated AI into their decisions. The harder question on every CPO’s desk is how procurement shows value going forward, in a form that lands on the finance scorecard rather than in a procurement report. Predictive procurement is one answer: reading the exposure that is already written into the contract estate, before the event, and acting while the terms can still be changed.

What one practitioner built

Dnyanesh Sarang is a sharp case on exactly that question. At Optinova he holds the executive mandate for the global supply chain function: procurement, planning, logistics, warehousing, inventory management, supply chain risk, sustainability, digitalisation and AI. Before that he built a working structure for predictive procurement on top of the contract estate: a method written as four pillars of risk and resilience, and an AI-enabled diagnostic he built himself that reads the estate and flags exposure ahead of time.

In one case the diagnostic surfaced a regulatory pricing escalation buried in a supplier agreement fifteen weeks before the supplier’s own notification window. The commercial terms were restructured before the increase landed, with roughly fifty million dollars of revenue protected, visible on the finance scorecard rather than in a procurement report.

Two things make the case worth an hour of senior peers’ time. The structure is not proprietary. And it was built by a practitioner with sixteen years across biotech, pharmaceuticals, medtech and industrial procurement, not bought as a platform. What the room will want to know is concrete: how the method is put together, how the diagnostic reads a contract, and what it takes to do the same in a function that runs on different systems and different data.

Why this lab runs differently

The Day 1 Peer Labs at CPO Outlook are built around practitioners with skin in the game, not a podium. Most run open-floor. This one is case-led by design: a short case, the structure shown with its actual artefacts, the diagnostic shown being built on a fictional supplier contract, then structured discussion around three questions. EBG lists it openly as different from the other labs, so participants know what they are walking into. Like every lab, it runs twice across the afternoon with a new group of peers each time.

The lab also feeds Day 2. At 09:15 on 15 October, Dnyanesh joins Alisha Bloodworth (Perstorp) and Nils Holm Andersson and Isabel Carlebom (Orkla) for the Lab Recap on risk, resilience and the regulatory load: where the rooms converged, and where they split.

A question to bring to Stockholm

The takeaway EBG asks every lab to leave people with is something you can write down and bring back to Monday. For this one: name one domain in your function, risk, price, supplier or regulatory, where seeing three months ahead would have changed a decision this year. Then ask what would have had to exist for you to see it.