Built during the merger, not after it

Keynote · Day 1 · 14 October

On 29 January 2024, Novozymes and Chr. Hansen became Novonesis, in one of Denmark’s larger mergers. Industry and market reports on M&A describe a familiar pattern: companies use a merger to stabilise procurement and defer the bigger transformation. Novonesis used the moment to strengthen the function instead. Louise Noer, Head of Global Indirect Procurement, gives the keynote at CPO Outlook 2026 in Stockholm on 14 October.

What usually happens to procurement in a merger

A merger is the one moment when almost everything in a company is open to redesign, and also a moment when many decisions wait for the organisation chart. Two supplier bases, two catalogues, two sets of contracts and two ways of raising a purchase order sit side by side. Industry and market reports on M&A describe a familiar sequence: most companies focus first on stabilising the procurement function and capturing the synergies that follow directly from the deal, such as price harmonisation, and defer decisions about a larger functional transformation until the integration is complete.

The same reports tend to count procurement among the largest sources of synergy value in an integration, with much of it capturable within the first year. Indirect categories such as travel, IT, marketing and facility services stand out, because a large share of their synergy comes from managing demand rather than renegotiating price. Which is to say: the spend most likely to be deferred is also the spend where the merger pays back fastest.

The programme describes the Novonesis case in one sentence: while mergers often distract from business operations, Novonesis used this transformative moment to strengthen its procurement function. The keynote is about what that involved, with a new way of buying rolled out while the company around it was still being decided.

The merger, in the public numbers

The combination was announced in December 2022 and completed on 29 January 2024, bringing together roughly 10,000 people and a revenue base of around EUR 3.7 billion. Novonesis set a target of EUR 80 to 90 million in annual cost synergies, to be reached within three to four years of completion.

By the first half of 2025 the company reported the cost synergies at a 100 per cent run rate, up from 80 per cent the previous quarter. The 2025 annual report describes that as one year ahead of time. In the same year Novonesis grew organic sales by 7 per cent to EUR 4.16 billion, with sales synergies contributing about one percentage point. The H1 2025 interim report also notes that integration costs ran alongside the implementation of a new global ERP system. Two of the largest systems changes a company can make were in motion at once.

These are company-level results. What they do is set the stakes: the integration was measured in public, on a clock, and the company reached the target early. The session describes what indirect procurement built inside that window.

The session

The keynote is one of two places in the programme where Coupa, whose platform Novonesis rolled out during the integration, is present: here as the enabler of a customer’s story, and later the same day as host of a Theme Discussion on where automation belongs.

The front door

The word in the session title worth pausing on is supermarket. Indirect procurement is the spend that does not go out of the door to a customer: software, services, facilities, travel, lab consumables. In a company of 10,000 people it is bought by nearly everyone, most of whom do not think of themselves as buyers. Value in indirect spend is decided at the moment an employee chooses where and how to buy, and the best category strategy still leaks there.

The leak, in Coupa’s numbers

Coupa’s own data puts numbers on that leak. Its 2026 Total Spend Management Benchmark Report, calculated from more than USD 10 trillion of transactions across 11 million buyers and suppliers, finds that a company with no structured intake process can expect to handle 47.7% of its invoices manually, and that structuring intake alone, with no other change in the platform, cuts the manual review rate by 19.5 percentage points. Of more than 800 variables tested, structured intake is the strongest predictor of accounts-payable efficiency, three times stronger than the next one.

Two further findings sit close to the Novonesis case. On-contract spend and structured spend move together month by month within the same customer, the strongest link in the whole dataset: when contracts are visible and enforced, structured buying rises with them. And the report states that a company with 10,000 suppliers can be as frictionless as one with 100, provided those suppliers are governed by structured intake, which is the question a merged supplier base asks in its first year. Structured spend is also the KPI fewest Coupa customers have managed to improve, 42% against 71% for invoice approval time.

That is the problem a supermarket is meant to solve. One place to go, the right suppliers already on the shelf, the price already agreed. The AI front door is what has changed since the last wave of procure-to-pay rollouts: the system meets the request in plain language and steers it, instead of teaching thousands of people where the catalogue is.

Where a person still has to decide

The platform side of this is moving quickly. In June 2026 Coupa reported more than 20 persona-based Navi agents generally available, with 65 planned by January 2027, and its September 2026 release extends the agents across sourcing, invoicing and supplier management. The company states that more than 450 customers now run its agents in production. The interesting question for a procurement leader is not which agent exists, but where in the process a person still has to decide.

That is the question Coupa brings to the tables later the same day.

A question to bring to Stockholm

The session is built around one idea: that a procurement function can build its new way of working while everything around it is still being decided, and that indirect spend, bought by nearly everyone, is where that shows first.

The practical question to bring to Stockholm: what in your organisation is waiting for a decision that does not have to come first?