Chief Procurement Officer – the role is currently changing faster than ever. New means, such as digital transformation, but also new challenges, such as global delivery bottlenecks or CO2 neutrality, require additional skills and an expanded repertoire. What is the best positioning of the CPOs of the future? What characteristics and leadership skills are particularly required for this role?

Cross-Industry Navigation through Procurement Transformation Innovations, Challenges and Successes. The disruptive journey of the paper-shuffling, excel-crunching call center agent to strategic partner, digital native and #1 value creator. New roles in an ongoing culture shift to agile, responsive and future-proof procurement. Summary: A synthesis of insights, best practices and a possible future of Procurement Transformation.

Hire new employees or strengthen existing staff? More and more companies are investing in the development of young leaders and this is proving successful. Three teams, consisting of mentor and mentee, provide insights into their programmes and experiences.

As part of compressed collegial case consultations, we make exciting (solution) approaches and a collaboration format on the topic of People & Culture in Procurement tangible.

What makes a good team and how do we demand and promote a lasting learning culture?
How do we increase visibility and our image in times of skilled labor shortages?
How do we position purchasing as a driver of sustainability, digitalization and innovation?
And how does personnel development work in these future skills?

Part-time leadership? Yes, it works out! In many companies, leadership roles are still rarely filled by women. One reason for this is often the inability to combine full-time work and family. But does it really have to be like this? In this panel, head of procurements talk about their personal experiences and show that job sharing models can also work wonderfully and what adjustments have to be made to achieve this. And what other reasons are there for a low proportion of women in leadership roles?

Leadership, sustainability and AI are THE buzzwords in procurement. How do you build a relevant operating model in procurement and what skills do we need for this? Simone and Nils give us an outlook on the next three years and show us which topics we need to tackle now in order to become even more relevant. They also talk about the influence AI (e.g. ChatGPT) has on our processes.

For several years now, we have been presenting young ideas and innovations at the Procurement Summit. In the meantime, some ideas are no longer so young and the startups have become great players. Is there always a exemplary story behind it or was the one or other path more rocky than expected?