The numbers every CPO already knows
At the end of 2025, McKinsey published the results of a survey among more than 300 procurement leaders across industries including finance, life sciences, energy, technology, logistics and infrastructure. The headline numbers are hard to ignore:
Two-thirds of procurement leaders now report directly to the CEO or CFO. Procurement is no longer a back-office function; it has become a boardroom topic. Third-party spend per FTE has increased by 50% over the past five years. More spend managed by fewer people — while savings targets continue to rise. 55% of procurement leaders report flat or shrinking budgets, despite growing expectations. 40% are actively experimenting with generative AI. McKinsey estimates AI could make procurement functions 25–40% more efficient.
The message is clear: procurement has become more strategic than ever, but teams are expected to deliver more with the same number of people. And the market is not slowing down — energy crises, sanctions, freight volatility, FX fluctuations and geopolitical disruptions are happening faster than any quarterly cycle can keep up with.
This creates a gap. A gap between what the ERP shows you (what happened yesterday) and what procurement teams actually need today (what is coming next, and what the right response should be).
The problem is not the tools. The problem is the speed.
Most procurement organizations already have the basics in place. ERP systems run. P2P is largely automated. Spend analytics sit inside BI dashboards. Yet CPOs still see margins slowly eroding.
Why? Because margins are no longer lost in transactional processing. They are lost in four areas where the ERP remains silent:
Supplier price claims — “Our raw material costs increased by 8%, so we need to pass this on.” Three hours of research per claim — or acceptance without proper validation. Blind spots in the supply chain — An earthquake near Yokohama. An attack in the Red Sea. Which suppliers are affected? What is the operational impact? Compliance moving faster than contracts — CBAM, CSDDD, sanctions, ESG regulations. One missed update can result in fines, bans or supply disruption. Missed signals from the network — The trade fair where your supplier introduced a new product line. The conference where your industry is moving. Missed entirely.
McKinsey points out that the winners in this new landscape are organizations that reorganize procurement — separating strategic and operational procurement, building Centers of Excellence, and creating direct reporting lines to CEOs and CFOs. One specialty chemicals company achieved 13% raw material savings through a COE-driven pricing model. A power OEM realized 11% cost savings within twelve months.
But reorganization alone does not solve the speed problem. A COE with three analysts manually collecting market data is still a COE that reacts too late.
From dashboard to radar
This is the core shift McKinsey describes: moving from AI as an individual use case (summarizing PDFs or reviewing contracts) to AI running end-to-end workflows. From reactive — waiting for someone to open a report — to proactive: signals being pushed directly to procurement teams.
Procurement no longer wants another dashboard. It wants a radar.
A radar works differently from a dashboard. A dashboard answers a question you ask. A radar pushes a signal before you even realize you need it. In a world where supplier claims arrive at 06:42, an earthquake hits at 11:15, and your colleague tells you at 14:30 about the trade fair you missed — the difference between reactive and proactive becomes the difference between protecting margins and losing them.
What this means in practice
For procurement teams in SMB and mid-market companies — organizations managing between €500k and €10M+ in annual spend — the challenge is not to fully implement McKinsey’s vision of “agentic procurement.” That is a multi-year transformation for large enterprises.
The challenge is solving the three biggest pain points without replacing the ERP.
Gap 1: Supplier claims without validation
A supplier emails: “+8% due to raw material costs.” What actually happened to the index? How much exposure does the supplier really have? What is a fair counterproposal?
An AI layer that reads the claim, combines it with live market data, and generates a data-backed response within minutes replaces hours of manual research.
Gap 2: No early warning system for disruption
A proper radar scans news feeds, commodity indexes, freight data, FX movements and AIS vessel tracking 24/7 — filtered to your suppliers, your routes and your categories.
Not “global steel news,” but:
“A rolling mill in the Ruhr region is offline, and it is part of your tier-2 supply chain.”
That is the difference between opening Reuters when you have time and receiving a signal before your supplier even calls you.
Gap 3: Compliance changing every week
Since 2022, the EU has introduced more than twenty sanctions packages. Anti-circumvention rules continue tightening. CBAM deadlines keep shifting.
For most procurement teams, compliance is not a full-time role — but one missed change can still have serious consequences.
A second radar — alongside the market radar — that pushes regulatory changes based on severity and deadlines fills this gap.
The business case is conservative, but compelling
McKinsey sees a strong correlation between procurement operating-model maturity and EBITDA impact. Top-performing organizations can improve EBITDA by five percentage points or more after multi-year transformations.
For a mid-market company with €2M in annual spend, the first layer is far simpler:
win one supplier claim per month, reject one unjustified surcharge, negotiate one indexation more effectively.
Realistically, that can represent 2–4% of procurement spend — €40k to €80k annually — against a platform subscription cost below €600 per year.
This is not an ERP replacement. This is not full agentic procurement.
It is an intelligence layer on top of existing systems, focused specifically on the areas where the ERP stays silent.
Where Orbecta fits
Orbecta was built around exactly this observation.
One platform with two radars — market intelligence and compliance intelligence — powering multiple outputs:
a live feed (Pro Scan, updated three times daily from 2,400+ global sources), a morning briefing, AI-powered Claim Check analysis, vessel tracking, research insights, and a procurement-focused network layer for events and talent.
No ERP integration required to get started. No three-month onboarding process.
The idea is simple: an individual buyer or a procurement team should be able to open an account today and send data-backed counterproposals tomorrow instead of spending hours on manual claim research.
That aligns directly with McKinsey’s core conclusion: the procurement leaders of tomorrow are the first movers of today.
Waiting for the perfect enterprise implementation is a luxury margin pressure no longer allows.
Procurement spend per FTE has grown by 50% in five years, two-thirds of procurement leaders now report directly to CEOs or CFOs, and AI makes it possible to complete tasks in minutes that previously took hours.
The strategic importance of procurement has changed. The tools now exist. And the market is not slowing down.
The question is no longer whether procurement teams will use AI.
The question is whether they will use it as a radar — proactive, filtered and action-oriented — or as just another dashboard left open until someone finally has time to look at it.
A radar beats a dashboard the moment the market moves faster than the reading cycle. And the market is already moving faster.