On September 24th, the very first Nordic Procurement Awards were handed out live on stage at Sentralen in Oslo, closing this year's Nordic Procurement Summit.

Why we created the Awards

Procurement work often happens behind the scenes, and the people doing it rarely get recognized outside their own organization.

We created the Nordic Procurement Awards to change that. The goal is to celebrate the people and teams doing outstanding procurement work across the Nordics, to recognize real business impact, and to bring the community closer together through shared stories.

The categories and winners

Procurement Impact of the Year

This award recognizes a team that delivered a project or initiative with clear, measurable impact on the business. It celebrates procurement that changed how the organization works.

Winner: TGS

Following a merger, the TGS team faced a complex problem: three separate ERP systems, dozens of legal entities, and thousands of suppliers, with no single view of what the combined business was spending or with whom.

In just 12 months, they brought it all together into one clear, classified view of spend, built a shared way of categorizing it that both legacy organizations could get behind, and moved everything onto a single platform. They set up category management across both companies for the first time, and embedded procurement's data directly into the company's financial reporting, making its contribution visible right up to board level.

What stood out was how much this small team achieved, at pace, in the middle of a merger, turning procurement into a strategic voice in the business.

Also shortlisted:

• Aibel, whose team turned supplier information scattered across systems into a single, easy-to-use view of how their suppliers perform, making supplier management structured and data-driven rather than guesswork.

CPO of the Year

This award recognizes a procurement leader who has driven real change and elevated the function. It celebrates leadership that expanded procurement's influence and earned it a bigger seat at the table.

Winner: Luiz Novaes, Statnett

Luiz leads procurement for Norway's national power grid, at a time of enormous investment in modernizing that infrastructure.

Under his leadership, procurement has been repositioned from a back-office function into a strategic capability central to delivering that mission. He has strengthened the team, brought procurement into decisions much earlier than before, and built an operating model designed for the scale of what's ahead.

What stood out was the ambition of the transformation. Procurement is now treated as business-critical, not just a purchasing function.

Also shortlisted:

• Cecilie Rossavik, Boreal, who built a central procurement function from the ground up at one of Norway's largest mobility companies. She introduced a common way of working, brought supplier, category, and contract management into one place, and quickly lifted procurement to a more strategic level.
• Marius Jensen, Firesafe, who leads procurement across the group with a deliberately lean setup, coordinating category specialists across markets. His focus on category development delivers more than savings, improving quality and spreading best practice across the group.

Rising Star

This award recognizes early-career talent making an impact well beyond their role. It celebrates the people who are shaping the future of Nordic procurement, earlier than anyone expected.

Winner: Rodrigo Lara, GE Vernova

Promoted to Project Procurement and Logistics Manager after just one year, Rodrigo now runs procurement for projects across Norway, Denmark, and Sweden.

He has consistently gone beyond his own responsibilities to fill critical gaps in the business, and changed how the company works with suppliers, building relationships based on accountability and results.

That work hasn't gone unnoticed. He has received several internal awards, and his contribution has even been recognized by his main client's leadership.

Also shortlisted:

• Arttu Itänen, MSK, who leads a purchasing team across Finland, Germany, and Slovakia. He guided his team through recent supply chain disruption without stopping production, and led the shift from separate local teams into one global organization.
• Simon Hedell, Heras, who built a group-wide view of supplier spend from the ground up, so procurement decisions across the group can now draw on shared, comparable data rather than fragmented local views.

Most Value Created with Ignite (customer-only)

This award recognizes a customer that turned procurement insight into real results. It celebrates teams who didn't just adopt a platform, but changed how they work and what they deliver.

This category was judged by our Customer Success team rather than the independent panel.

Winner: NG Nordic

Formed through a merger, NG Nordic brought together five operating platforms, each running on its own legacy systems and tracking savings in their own spreadsheets.

The team had already proven they could deliver, but only by consolidating the group picture by hand every week, from data that was hard to trust. So they moved everything into Ignite in one go, rather than run the old and new side by side.

Now all five platforms work from the same data, review progress together on a regular cadence, and can see their savings pipeline and supplier terms clearly for the first time.

What stood out was how quickly this team brought a newly merged group together, and turned five ways of working into one.

Also shortlisted:

• OBOS, whose team built the group's first complete view of what it buys and from whom across a fully decentralized business, and got leadership aligned on where to take it next. The work to define how the future function should look is only just getting underway.

How the winners were chosen

Procurement Impact of the Year, CPO of the Year, and Rising Star were judged by an independent panel, using published criteria and a structured process. To keep things fair, submissions in these three categories were anonymized before judging.

Company names, individual names, and identifying information were removed, so the panel scored on the quality and impact of the work alone, not on who submitted it.

Most Value Created with Ignite was judged separately, by members of our Customer Success team, since it draws on how customers work with Ignite day to day. The independent panel wasn't involved in that category.

The judging panel was made up of:

• Benny Hall, Senior Consultant at Procuart, with experience spanning AstraZeneca, Getinge Group, and MTR Nordic Group. He has led major procurement transformation programs at multinational organizations, with a particular focus on the people side of change.
• Thomas Haver, Partner at EY Consulting, who leads EY's Supply Chain and Operations practice across the Nordics and brings two decades of experience in procurement and strategy.
• Sigbjørn Nome, CEO and Co-founder of Ignite, who spent years leading procurement transformation projects as a consultant before founding Ignite.

Looking ahead

Congratulations to every winner and every shortlisted team! The standard of work across all four categories made for difficult decisions, and everyone on the shortlist should be proud.

This is just the beginning. We look forward to celebrating even more of the Nordic procurement community in the years to come.

The Nordic Procurement Awards are hosted by Ignite as part of the Nordic Procurement Summit.