Procurement Data Unlocked

Hear perspectives on the opportunities and challenges that data presents in modern procurement, in decision-making and the importance of data in a clear business context. From breaking free of fragmented systems and “spreadsheet culture” to building the business case for investment, this candid conversation will spotlight how to frame the value of data at the executive level and the path forward.

• Where are the gaps?
• Building a procurement data strategy that delivers value
• Why data matters now: The strategic role of data in driving procurement’s value proposition
• CPO realities: Stories from leaders who are still grappling with data complexity, silos, and quality issues
• Building the business case: How CPOs position data strategy to CFOs and other executives to unlock budget and prioritize resources
• Using data to unlock opportunity - accelerate supplier optimization, enhance spend visibility, and fuel rapid decision-making
• How to leverage AI  - turning messy, disconnected data into actionable

Panellists include:

Syed Naqvi, Procurement Analytics & Data Leader

Jonathan Clarke, Global Procurement Director, Kantar

Susan Walsh, MD & Founder, The Classification Guru

Jeffrey Fasegha, Co-founder & CEO, Deducta

From Firefighting to Future-Ready: How Western Digital Is Scaling Procurement Through Data, Automation, and Collaboration

• • A Clear Automation Vision
    Targeting automation of ~80% of procurement transactions under a $50K–$100K threshold, freeing teams from tactical work and enabling greater strategic focus
  • Data as the Foundation for Scale
    Cross-team collaboration to enable a virtual data layer that connects distributed systems without centralization, supporting a maturity shift from manual firefighting to supplier self-service
  • Reducing RFQ Friction With Better Intelligence
    Minimizing human “touches” in RFQs and leveraging high-quality supplier performance and SLA data, for procurement to gain stronger negotiation leverage and measurable cost reductions
  • Unlocking Savings in Untouched Spend
    With ~70% of transactions under $100K, autonomous sourcing targets tail spend leakage, recaptures lost value, and eliminates hours of wasted labor spent navigating fragmented tools
  • Building the Roadmap: Orchestration and Integration
    Using data orchestration and intake automation, and complementary tools—to streamline upstream processes and enable autonomous sourcing at scale

Conrad Smith, Founder & CEO, Graphite Connect

& Sherri Schaufele, Sr Director, Strategic Sourcing, Western Digital

•  Defining what we mean by a “usable” repository for procurement and business
• Collaborating with different departments to ensure relevant data points are captured – filling the gaps
• How do you balance accessibility with data protection?
• Turning contract data into proactive risk intelligence
• Meeting cyber security requirements - having good visibility into your data for risk management

Establishing a database of contractual languages that procurement can use

• How we can approach and manage this concept
• Gain a clear roadmap for building, structuring, and maintaining a contractual language database that becomes a living, trusted resource for procurement.

Panellists include:

Host: Erwann Couesbot, Co-Founder & CEO, FlipThrough

Dexter Maceus, Supply Chain Contracting Manager, Ally Bank 

A clear and well-structured taxonomy is the foundation for effective procurement. Without it, spend analysis, supplier categorization, and strategic sourcing become inconsistent and difficult to scale. This session will provide a practical look at what makes a taxonomy “good” and why it is essential for data-driven procurement.

• The role of taxonomy: Why consistent categorization underpins spend visibility, compliance, and supplier management
• Key elements of a good taxonomy: Standardization, hierarchy, clarity, and adaptability to business needs
• Common pitfalls: Overly complex structures, lack of governance, and misalignment with business objectives
• Practical applications: How a strong taxonomy enables better reporting, more accurate analytics, and stronger strategic decision-making

Chantal Schweizer, Head of SDS, Practice Director, Taxonomist, & Product TaxMOMinist, Pivotree

Ensuring your category map works for your organization

NAICS and other standard industry categorizations provide a framework, but they rarely reflect how your organization actually buys, manages, and reports spend. In this session, procurement will explore how to partner with finance, operations, and other stakeholders to design a custom category map that unlocks better analytics, supports decision-making, and enables more strategic spend management. A category map built with stakeholders — not for them — becomes a living asset that turns raw spend data into powerful, actionable intelligence.

• How can procurement work better with finance and key business stakeholders to build a category map which works best for their organization?
• How a good category map enables powerful “slice and dice” spend analysis

David Wild, Co-Founder, Sivuno

Mike Simms, Co-Founder, Sivuno

Before organizations can unlock the full potential of AI and digital solutions, they need a strong data foundation. Centralizing data changes the game, but only if the data is clean and accurate.  Once data flows through technology rather than being locked in it, organizations gain flexibility to build modern, scalable technology stacks. But challenges remain: capturing data accurately, ensuring quality, and governing it effectively. This session will dive into practical approaches to building and governing a solid data foundation using Susan's COAT framework, and explore how AI is beginning to reshape data cleansing and classification.

• Data quality as a prerequisite: Why quality and access are fundamental to scaling AI and digital initiatives.
  • Challenges in procurement data with quality
  • Common data quality issues in procurement data
  • The consequences of poor data quality on procurement data
• Governance in practice:
  • What is governance?
  • The COAT framework
  • Centralized master data teams vs. distributed ownership models
  • Where to start
• AI’s role in cleansing and classification:
  • How AI is being used for cleansing, classification, and enrichment
  • The reliability concerns and current limitations
  • Examples of where AI is showing promise and where human oversight remains essential

Session presenter: Susan Walsh, Founder & MD, The Classification Guru

Supplier visibility is often obscured by messy, inconsistent vendor master data and fragmented contract records. As a result, organizations miss opportunities to optimize relationships with suppliers already under contract. This session explores how to leverage data to uncover the full spectrum of what suppliers can provide—beyond current purchasing patterns—so procurement teams can repurpose existing supplier relationships more strategically.

• Data product thinking for untangling vendor master data: Addressing disjointed supplier records and fragmented contract visibility
• Use case and persona based approach to reveal the full scope of supplier capabilities, not just current spend and to drive business impact
• Collaboration & Relationship Management to co-create scalable value through optimized information flow with suppliers

Session presenter: Tiankai Feng, Director, Data & AI Strategy, Thoughtworks

For enterprise organizations

For organizations running multiple ERP systems, spend visibility is often compromised by fragmented data, inconsistent categorization, and siloed reporting. Many teams attempt DIY analytics solutions but run into bandwidth and skill constraints, resulting in partial or unreliable insights. Unpack the challenges of harmonizing spend data across disparate systems and explore practical strategies for establishing a centralized, trusted view.

• Overcoming fragmented ERP data and the lack of a single source of truth
• Upstream challenges, downstream impact: How poor categorization at the ERP level erodes spend classification, reporting accuracy, and confidence
• Why internally built (DIY) solutions often struggle to scale or meet analytical demands
• Practical approaches to centralization - unify data, establish standards, and improve classification accuracy.
• Building the business case: Framing the ROI and organizational value of investing in scalable, enterprise-grade solutions.

Session presenter: Jeffrey Fasegha, Co-founder & CEO, Deducta 

Robert Copeland, Experienced CPO

Procurement data decays fast. New suppliers, ERP changes, buying-channel drift, and weak intake controls quietly break dashboards and distort AI outputs. If you don’t spot issues early, you end up making confident decisions on the wrong numbers. This session shares a practical way for monitoring and sustaining procurement data after the “big clean” and go-live, your data stay trustworthy. You’ll learn the minimum health metrics to track, the alert thresholds that catch drift before it spreads, and a simple operating mechanism to triage and fix defects. We’ll also cover how disciplined data maintenance makes AI reliable; and how AI can automate detection, classification, and exception handling to keep your data “alive” with less manual effort.

• “It was clean… until it wasn’t” - why procurement data decays
• What to monitor: the minimum data health metrics
• Alerts: what triggers action
• Detect, fix, prevent
• How monitoring and maintenance helps AI
• How AI helps monitoring and maintenance
• Key takeaways

Session presenter: Lydia Ray, Data & AI Technologist (Fortune 100 advisor)

AI is already transforming sourcing.  It's surfacing hidden suppliers, benchmarking in minutes, and identifying millions in overlooked spend. But the real revolution happens when AI makes vendor switching fast, low-risk, and cheap. Tropic's Michael Shields and Ivanti's Scott Johnson make the case that continuous evaluation and higher churn will become competitive advantages as switching costs collapse. The challenge? Most procurement teams aren't ready.  They lack the right tools and AI training.

Michael Shields, VP of Procurement, Tropic

Scott Johnson, Global Head of Procurement, Ivanti