How NG Nordic shows procurement's value to management and finance with Ignite

NG Nordic is a Nordic leader in circular solutions and environmental services, turning waste into valuable resources across around 90 sites.

Their roots go back to 1926, but the company as it is today is much newer. In 2024, Summa Equity acquired Fortum Recycling & Waste through NG Group. The deal brought a large group of companies together and created one of the region's largest players in Nordics.

That scale of consolidation creates a challenge for procurement. Dozens of companies came together, and so did their systems and ways of working, with spend spread across different spend sources. To start, they needed one clear view of it all.

The procurement team, supported by Marjut Siekkinen in her role as Procurement Excellence Manager, took on the task of shaping procurement for the combined business. The team came together to create a new foundation for procurement across the combined business.

Together, they established the operating model, common processes, and enabling systems, transforming procurement from a fragmented setup into a shared capability across NG Nordic.

The challenge: Proving procurement's value through numbers

For a new procurement function, showing value quickly matters. At NG Nordic, that value is measured in savings, and savings reporting is a big part of how the team shows their value to management and to the group's owner.

Before Ignite, building that report was slow and manual. The team pulled numbers from 5 separate business units by hand and tracked everything in spreadsheets. The reporting took close to a full working day per person each week, with two people doing much the same work.

Marjut describes what that was like: “It often felt like we were spending more time assembling and verifying the data than actually analyzing it or acting on it. Creating a consolidated view of savings required a lot of manual effort, which increased the risk of inconsistencies and made it difficult to get real-time visibility into performance.”

The team needed one place to bring savings data together across every system. It had to separate pipeline, contracted, and verified savings. And it had to support reporting by both category and business unit.

What changed: One place for savings

Working closely with Marjut and Pekka Toppi, Senior Buyer, we refined the savings tracker around the way NG Nordic actually reports. The team's input helped shape how the functionality works in Ignite.

A clear three-tier savings view

The tracker splits savings into three stages: identified, contracted, and verified. These are the same 3 numbers NG Nordic reports to management and finance. Matching that structure means people outside procurement read the numbers the right way.

As Marjut explains, the three stages let the team show management where value is coming from, what is still in progress, and what has been delivered. For finance, the structure creates a clear link between procurement activity and actual financial impact.

Verified savings give confidence that value has been realized and can go into financial reporting, while identified and contracted savings show the future pipeline and support forecasting.

Marjut says, “In management reviews, the conversation shifts from ‘Can we trust the numbers?’ to ‘How do we accelerate delivery?’ The stage-gate approach gives everyone a common language, improves governance, and makes it easier to track progress from opportunity identification all the way to realized business value.”

Reporting by category and business unit

A single category initiative, like transportation, can be split across the business units it benefits. This was important for NG Nordic, which reports across both categories and business units at once.

The team also gets a monthly and quarterly view of expected impact. This is used when planning for the current and next years budgeting.

Confidence in the numbers

To confirm savings are genuine, the team compares old-supplier and new-supplier invoices and attaches them as evidence to each initiative. Every saving is backed by proof.

Sortable columns and clear status views also let the team spot missing or incorrect data at a glance during weekly reviews. Instead of assembling numbers, they now spend their time keeping initiatives up to date.

Knowing the savings are based on a clear process and verified data has built trust with both management and finance, and lets procurement show the value the team is delivering confidently.

Marjuts explains, “Instead of spending time explaining or defending the numbers, we can focus on the results, business impact, and next opportunities.”

From savings to working capital

Savings is only half of how NG Nordic shows procurement's impact. Payment terms and working capital come up in every management discussion. The team reports on them alongside savings, using data from Ignite.

Bringing supplier payment data into one place also revealed problems the team would not have caught otherwise. In several cases, payment terms had been set up incorrectly in ERP-solutions. Some due dates were even recorded as far out as the 2080s. That blocked any meaningful working capital analysis.

With suppliers structured by payment terms in Ignite, the team could see where actual terms deviated from what had been agreed. Correcting those cases in ERP-systems released working capital directly.

"Fixing those gaps," Marjut says, "gave us a much more accurate view of our payment terms and working capital position. We can now spot deviations more quickly and focus improvement efforts where they have the greatest impact, leading to better visibility, better control, and more informed working capital decisions across the business.”

“Today, we can manage payment term performance based on reliable data rather than assumptions.”

Key results

NG Nordic now has one source of truth for savings across every system. The reporting that once took days is now a fraction of the time.

As Marjut puts it, the team can show the business a clear savings pipeline, verified financial impact, supplier performance insights, and progress against targets in real time, all of which used to take manual work and was hard to consolidate.

• Reporting effort cut from roughly a working day each for Marjut and Pekka to about 30 minutes each
• A savings pipeline running 25% above their annual target
• A single source of truth across several spend sources and counting, with new ones added quickly as NG Nordic acquires and grows
• Faster, cleaner reporting to finance, with a monthly-impact view what is used when planning current and next-year effects

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