Procurement Transformation

Category management is a vital procurement function, aligning strategy, business needs, and market dynamics. A key aspect is defining categories that suit your organization while ensuring they align with available suppliers and their offerings. This foundational decision is crucial for building an effective category management function.

A strong foundation, guided by principles, supports procurement strategies that define goals, KPIs, and expectations. Clear category distinctions and strategic alignment become even more essential as organizational complexity grows. 
 
At KPMG, we’ve helped hundreds of clients optimize category management by segmenting categories, defining buying channels, ensuring proper governance, and prioritizing procurement efforts. With clear vendor segmentation and strategies, your procurement function can drive efficiency, accelerate contracting, and maximize supplier value.  

With our Powered methodology, we help you save time by leveraging world-renowned best practices. Our methodology includes hundreds of tested, pre-built assets—both tech-agnostic and platform-specific for Coupa, Ivalua, SAP Ariba, Oracle, and Microsoft.

Our deep industry insights enable benchmarking against competitors, ensuring best practices. As your trusted partner, we don’t just develop strategies—we help implement them, keeping you in control of contracts and supplier performance.

Digital procurement transformation empowers you to implement the necessary solutions and initiatives to address the many disruptions affecting today's business environment. The growing number of product variants, rising costs, and increasing competitive pressures are further intensified by severe disruptions in global supply chains caused by geopolitical and economic shocks. As your procurement team navigates these challenges, digital transformation becomes a crucial factor in building resilience and efficiency.

By leveraging best-in-class technologies, our digital procurement services streamline your Source-to-Pay (S2P) processes to enhance performance, reduce costs and complexity, and drive overall business value. You will benefit from optimized procurement operations, greater transparency, and improved contract compliance, ensuring that you maximize efficiency while mitigating risks. In addition to technology implementation, we support you with process and maturity assessments to uncover opportunities for optimization and establish a clear roadmap for transformation.

Through partnerships with leading technology providers such as Coupa and Ivalua, we bring a structured methodology that supports your entire S2P transformation journey, including risk management, analytics, treasury, and Travel & Expense (T&E). Whether you need a comprehensive S2P transformation or targeted projects like Source-to-Contract (S2C) or Procure-to-Pay (P2P), our approach ensures you have the flexibility and expertise needed to achieve your strategic goals.

Strengthening your procurement function requires deep insights into relevant data to identify pain points and improvement areas. However, extracting these insights often demands advanced analysis and alignment with corporate management’s priorities, not just the procurement function.  

Some of the most common pitfalls include:

• Misalignment between corporate management and procurement on key goals and KPIs.

• Tackling too many improvement areas at once, leading to slow, inefficient implementation.

• Lack of access to structured, relevant data linked to KPIs. 

• Insights that don’t drive action due to insufficient specificity or data volume.

With extensive project experience, we help you navigate these challenges. Our support includes spend analysis, assessing and enhancing your data, and structuring insights to ensure they lead to actionable improvements aligned with management’s reporting needs.

Our robust tools and proven track record allow us to design reporting insights and assess whether robotic process automation (RPA) or artificial intelligence (AI) can further enhance them. Depending on your IT portfolio, these tools may already be available and ready for use. By combining your existing IT systems with our expertise in best-practice reporting design and master data governance, we guide you in implementing the highest reporting standards.

Supplier relationship management covers all aspects of supplier interactions, including legal, performance, finance, risk, improvements, and strategic alignment.

Evolving business demands—ESG, cost efficiency, and high performance—require new supplier strategies, especially for previously overlooked areas. Critical suppliers should be treated as strategic partners, and global regulations, particularly in the EU and Denmark, now impose stricter risk due diligence and reporting requirements.

From onboarding and performance monitoring to strategic partnerships, procurement professionals play a vital role in preventing disruptions and fostering stronger supplier collaboration.

But where do you start? Some of the most common challenges we see with our clients are:  

• Cumbersome and manual processes to collect reliable supplier data and insights.

• Lack of complete, real-time and validated data to drive more effective decision-making.

• Lack of business-defined KPIs, metrics, weightings and thresholds to provide truthful ratings of the supplier relationships.

• Strong 'silo culture' in the organisation, leading to decreased cross-collaboration and overlapping work between the different departments. 

With hundreds of global implementations, we’ve developed proven methods, technology, and tools to accelerate your supplier relationship management transformation. We provide strategic insights and collaborate with you to shape a mature procurement operating model. We assess your current supplier relationship management capabilities and offer actionable recommendations. Through gap assessments, we review areas such as contract management, governance, metrics, process improvements, and technology integration.

Additionally, we support your team with tailored training, develop future roadmaps and business cases with detailed work packages, and offer supplier relationship management as a managed service, supporting your procurement department at every step.