Expert Report 2026 | Registration

You’ve digitised. Consolidated suppliers. Negotiated harder.
And yet your procurement team is still buried in workarounds, catalogue chaos and firefighting.

The instinct is to add more tools, more automation, more pressure. But what if the problem isn’t effort? What if you’re building on top of foundations that were never designed to carry the weight?

Former CPO Victoria Folbigg interviewed 7 European senior procurement leaders to find out. They all identified the same 5 root causes behind indirect procurement overload. And every one of them sits at the foundation level – long before the technology decision.

You’ve digitised. Consolidated suppliers. Negotiated harder.
And yet your procurement team is still buried in workarounds, catalogue chaos and firefighting.

Why procurement leaders and also CFOs and CIOs should read this report?

Because it reveals:

Where the real EBITDA lever sits beyond ‘savings per order’.
Where the most hidden constraint of digitalisation sits.
How five root causes compound into a cycle that erodes credibility.
Why ESG is a capacity crisis, not a strategy conversation.
How weak data foundations block automation and raise compliance risk.

We won’t spoil it here. The full report has the answers – and the evidence to back them up.

This report starts with the Unite–HTWK study, a quantitative study conducted jointly by Unite and the Leipzig University of Applied Sciences, surveying 181 procurement organisations across Europe. The study measures the real workload of indirect procurement teams across Europe and quantifies how process effort grows as responsibilities expand – without a matching increase in capacity.

The interviews with 7 senior indirect procurement leaders from Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and Sweden, across manufacturing, automotive, energy, semiconductors and telecommunications in the report validate what those numbers point to.

This is the evidence. The report shows which foundations must be in place before any of it gets better.