Analysis of CPO Outlook 2025 Open-Ended Survey Responses | EBG Network

When asked what would most help ease their workload or make their role more impactful, procurement professionals offered candid responses that reveal both persistent frustrations and clear pathways forward. What emerges from these responses is not a list of complaints but rather a coherent picture of what procurement needs to move from operational firefighting toward strategic contribution.

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Key Findings

• Data quality is the foundation: 74% struggle with poor or missing data, and respondents emphasize that data quality requires human literacy and cross-functional agreement – not just better systems.
• Organizational friction consumes strategic bandwidth: 36% cite cross-functional friction as a top bottleneck, with time lost to internal debates rather than supplier engagement.
• The gap is utilization, not tools: Professionals want full functionality from existing tools before adding complexity – 78% remain at “developing” digital maturity.
• Strategic ambition requires strategic authority: Requests for board representation and independent budgets reflect the tension between growing expectations and limited empowerment.

• Challenges are interconnected: Breaking into the cycle at any point – better data, clearer governance, stakeholder alignment – creates positive ripple effects.

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The responses cluster around interconnected themes – data quality, organizational alignment, governance clarity, and resource constraints. Together that illuminate why 62% of survey respondents cite resource overload as their top operational bottleneck. These open-ended insights add texture to that statistic, showing what lies beneath the numbers.

Data as the Foundation for Everything Else

The single most prominent theme across responses relates to data – its quality, accessibility, and strategic application. This pattern emerges consistently across practitioners of varying seniority and organizational contexts.

One respondent captured the essence of this challenge: “Better data literacy – the data procurement enters in the systems will affect the digital capabilities/insights.” This observation reveals a nuanced understanding of the data challenge. It’s not merely about having better systems, but about the human behaviors and competencies that shape data quality at the point of entry.

Others expressed similar priorities:

• “Having earlier cross-functional alignment and a single source of truth for data would ease the workload”
• “Relevant resources (either in terms of digital tools or headcount) to boost data analytics capability. Unified data repository to allow easy access to standardized procurement data”
• “Set a clear foundation of master data on category and supplier level. That can enable focusing on the strategically important areas”
• “To be more data driven”

These responses align directly with the broader survey finding that 74% of respondents struggle with low-quality or missing data, and 67% face disconnected systems. What the open-ended responses add is the recognition that data quality is not merely a technical problem to be solved by IT. It requires foundational work on master data, human literacy, and cross-functional agreement on data standards.

The connection between data and strategy appears repeatedly. As one respondent put it: when master data foundations are clear at the category and supplier level, professionals can “enable focusing on the strategically important areas.” This suggests that data chaos doesn’t just slow work down. It actively prevents the strategic focus procurement professionals seek.

The Weight of Organizational Friction

A second cluster of responses points to organizational dynamics as a significant barrier to both efficiency and impact. One respondent was particularly direct: “Less organizational infighting over ownership of responsibilities.”

This theme of internal friction appears in various forms throughout the responses:

• “Closer collaboration with business stakeholders and clarity in their priorities”
• “Internal alignment and understanding of procurement”
• “Less internal discussions, more focus on suppliers”
• “Strategic alignment”

The broader survey found that 36% cite collaboration friction with Sales, R&D, and Finance as a top bottleneck. These open-ended responses suggest that friction manifests in multiple ways. Unclear ownership of responsibilities, misaligned priorities between procurement and business stakeholders, and time consumed by internal discussions that could otherwise be directed toward supplier engagement.

What’s particularly striking is the direct link respondents draw between internal alignment and external impact. When energy flows into resolving internal conflicts, less remains for the supplier relationships that create actual business value. The response “less internal discussions, more focus on suppliers” encapsulates this trade-off with refreshing clarity.

Governance, Tools, and the Promise of Automation

Several responses focus on the intersection of governance clarity and digital enablement. One respondent articulated this connection directly: “Clear procurement governance and user-friendly digital tools for decentralized indirect procurement.”

Another offered a perspective that resonates with anyone who has experienced the gap between technology investment and technology utilization: “Get full functionality in the tools we already have – with limitations due to security constraints”.

This observation cuts to a practical reality. Organizations often have access to more capability than they utilize. Security policies, change management constraints, and implementation gaps mean that purchased functionality sits unused. Before pursuing new solutions, there may be significant value in unlocking what already exists.

Other responses touched on similar themes:

• “Procurement would be more impactful with more automation and right-sized tooling”
• “Faster system including AI”
• “Better systems”
• “Awareness of policies and processes and visibility of procurement, based on data accuracy and automation (system enabled)”

The phrase “right-sized tooling” merits attention. It suggests that the solution isn’t necessarily more technology or bigger platforms. Rather tools proportionate to the organization’s actual needs and capacity to implement them effectively. This connects to the survey finding that 78% of organizations describe themselves as “developing” in digital maturity. Past basic digitization but struggling with integration and automation. The implication is that adding complexity before mastering current capabilities may compound rather than solve the problem.

The Question of Strategic Position and Resources

A subset of responses addressed procurement’s position within the organization and the resources required to deliver on growing expectations. These ranged from structural to personal:

• “Being part of the board”
• “Independent budget allocation”
• “More power to myself in terms of decision-making and more people reporting to me”
• “More resources in IT/data analytics roles to help build and implement scalable tools”

The request for board-level representation and independent budget allocation speaks to a deeper tension: procurement is being asked to deliver strategic outcomes – risk management, sustainability compliance, innovation partnerships – while often lacking the organizational authority and resources that strategic functions typically command.

The candid acknowledgment of wanting “more power to myself in terms of decision-making” reflects a frustration that surfaces elsewhere in the survey data. The workshop mapping exercises from Stockholm revealed a “skilled but stuck” phenomenon where teams possess necessary competencies but lack empowerment to act. This response puts individual voice to that collective pattern.

The Desire to Escape Administrative Burden

Several responses expressed a straightforward desire: less administration, more strategic work.

• “Less administration and more insights”
• “Remove operational tasks from the procurement organization”
• “Speed up development by innovative ideas”

These responses echo the broader survey finding where, when asked what they would stop doing, professionals cited “firefighting and reactive work,” “excessive meetings and internal politics,” and “manual transactional work” as primary time drains.

The aspiration is clear: procurement professionals want to move from administrative processing toward insight generation and strategic contribution. The barrier, as the data suggests, is that operational demands consume the bandwidth that strategic work requires. Breaking this cycle – through automation, clearer governance, better data foundations, or resource reallocation – emerges as a central challenge for the profession.

What These Responses Reveal Together

Reading these responses as a collection rather than individual data points, several patterns become visible.

First, the challenges are interconnected. Poor data quality makes automation difficult. Lack of automation keeps teams in operational mode. Operational overload prevents attention to data governance. Organizational friction consumes energy that could address any of these issues. Breaking into this cycle at any point – improving data, automating processes, clarifying governance, aligning stakeholders – would likely create positive ripple effects.

Second, the desired end state is consistent. Across responses, procurement professionals describe wanting to be more data-driven, more strategic, more focused on suppliers than internal politics, and more empowered to act on insights. This shared vision suggests the profession has reasonable clarity about where it wants to go – the challenge lies in the path.

Third, solutions must address both technical and organizational dimensions. Better systems alone won’t solve problems rooted in organizational friction, unclear governance, or insufficient empowerment. Similarly, organizational changes without supporting tools and data infrastructure will struggle to deliver lasting improvement. The responses implicitly argue for integrated approaches that address multiple dimensions simultaneously.

Continue Networking with EBG

The patterns that emerge from these open-ended responses underscore why peer learning remains valuable for procurement professionals navigating transformation. Individual organizations face unique constraints, but the underlying challenges – data quality, organizational alignment, governance clarity, strategic positioning – appear with remarkable consistency across the Nordic procurement community.

Through EBG | Network summits and forums, practitioners exchange experiences on how they’ve approached these challenges. What worked, what didn’t, and what they’re still figuring out. This kind of professional community interaction allows individuals to reconstruct their understanding of problems and solutions through dialogue with peers facing similar realities.

The responses analyzed here represent just one dimension of the CPO Outlook 2025 research. Combined with quantitative survey data and interactive workshop mapping exercises, they offer a multi-faceted view of Nordic procurement’s current state and the practical pathways toward greater impact.

Make sure to register to join EBG | Xperience 2026 and CPO Outlook 2026 for the only gatherings of its kind in the Nordics.

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Source: CPO Outlook 2025 Pre-Summit Survey | 58 responses from 47 companies | EBG Network, summary available for attendees taking the survey