State of Nordic Procurement 2026: What the data shows

Procurement is expected to save money. 40% have no target to measure against.

The first State of Nordic Procurement report is out. We built it with EY and Silf Competence, drawing on a survey of 156 Nordic procurement leaders and anonymized procurement data from 154 organizations representing €41 billion in spend.

Here's what stood out to us.

Cost reduction is the top priority, but measurement hasn't kept up

Sixty percent of respondents name cost reduction and savings as their most important priority.

But forty percent have no formal savings target.

So the result procurement is most expected to deliver is the one many teams can't prove they delivered. Savings you can't measure are hard to defend when budgets are set, and harder still to build a case on when you're asking for more mandate. Sigbjørn Nome, CEO and co-founder at Ignite, notes:

"Procurement is meant to create value. Yet many organizations haven't set up a clear way to measure whether they're succeeding at procurement's most important job."

Where Nordic procurement stands today

The report introduces a Nordic Procurement Maturity Index, scoring procurement functions from 0 to 100 across five dimensions:

Strategy and mandate. Whether procurement has clear goals, and the authority to act on them.
Organization. How the function is set up, and how it works with the rest of the business.
People and capabilities. The size of the team, and the skills it has.
Process. How consistently the work gets done, from sourcing through to follow-up.
Tools. The systems and data procurement runs on.

The Nordic average is 43.

One thing splits that average more than anything else. Organizations with formal savings targets average 48. Organizations without them average 35.

Strategy and mandate is where Nordic teams score highest. Tools is where they score lowest, which says the foundation hasn't kept up with what procurement is being asked to do.

Maturity shows up in output. The highest-scoring teams handle two and a half times the spend per employee. As Thomas Haver, Partner at EY, says:

“Procurement is playing an increasingly strategic role. Better measurement, clearer targets and more disciplined follow-up can unlock substantially more value. What separates the leaders is not primarily scale, but how the function is managed and how it works.”

You can score your own team against the same index in about two minutes. Score your procurement function here.

Most Nordic teams are working with AI. Very few have it embedded.

Seventy-seven percent of respondents use or are exploring AI in procurement. Fifteen percent have moved past pilots and testing.

According to the report, fragmented and unreliable procurement data is what stops teams going past the pilot. When data sits across systems and has gaps in it, the answers come back too uncertain to act on. Sigbjørn Nome, CEO and co-founder at Ignite, adds:

"Many organizations want to adopt AI, but the technology is never better than the data it's built on. When procurement data sits across different systems and lacks quality, it also becomes hard to document value and make good decisions."

What teams say is holding them back

49% point to a lack of staff or competence
48% point to organizational silos and weak cross-functional collaboration
42% point to poor data quality or limited visibility into procurement

While capacity is what teams name first, the three are connected. Silos and unreliable data add to the load on a team that's already stretched.

Only 6% name capability development as a priority for the year ahead. So the thing teams say holds them back is the thing almost none are working on. Sofia Andersson, CEO at Silf Competence, says:

"One of the most interesting findings is the gap between what procurement describes as its biggest challenge and where it chooses to invest. Almost half say a shortage of people or capability is holding them back, while only a small minority prioritize capability development. In an increasingly volatile world, capability becomes a resilience factor."

Six places to start

The report sets out six priorities for organizations that want to strengthen procurement:

Set clear savings targets
Measure value systematically
Improve procurement data quality
Connect the systems you already have
Build better visibility into spend and suppliers
Invest in skills and development

Most teams don't need more resources to improve. The biggest gains come from clearer targets, tighter follow-up, and better use of the data they already have.

How we built the report

The findings draw on two datasets, analyzed separately and not linked at organization level:

A survey of 156 procurement leaders and buyers across the Nordics, conducted in June 2026.
Anonymized procurement data from 154 Nordic organizations using Ignite, together representing €41 billion in procurement volume.

Get the full report

The full report has the complete maturity index, the numbers behind every finding, and what the highest-scoring teams do differently.

Download the State of Nordic Procurement 2026

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State of Nordic Procurement 2026: What the data shows

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