Spend Visibility in Procurement: Why Transparency Is More Than a Reporting Dashboard
In the late 2000s, I had the opportunity to work as a business analyst for a newly appointed CPO at an automotive supplier. At the time, procurement was strongly plant-driven. The sites operated largely autonomously, cross-plant exchange was rare, and many decisions were optimized locally rather than for the company as a whole.Then the global financial crisis hit. Margin pressure increased noticeably, sales expectations weakened, and the mandate for procurement was clear: contribute meaningfully to offset declining volumes. In that period, price negotiations were often successful. Energy and commodity prices were falling, suppliers were under pressure themselves, and in many categories there was genuine leverage. From the outside, it looked like procurement was delivering.
The CPO decided to track savings systematically. It was no longer enough to say that “we saved somewhere”; the organization needed to understand where it stood — per plant, per category, month by month. I was tasked with building a global reporting setup. A clean template, a clear KPI logic, consolidated data. On paper, it was rigorous. In Excel, it worked.
Reality, however, exposed two weaknesses that may sound simple but proved decisive in impact. First, target levels were not sufficiently aligned with the responsible stakeholders. Targets existed, but they were not consistently owned, understood, or anchored with the same level of commitment across the organization. Much more critical was the second point: there was a lack of transparency regarding the specific measures that were supposed to generate those savings in the first place.
I collected numbers from all plants and could consolidate them into a monthly report. But outside the individual sites, hardly anyone knew how those results had been achieved. The reporting showed outcomes, but it did not explain the path. It showed that something happened — not why it happened, what drove it, and whether it could be repeated.
This led to situations that seemed almost absurd at first glance, but were economically highly relevant. Prices with the same supplier went down in one plant while they increased in another. Positive effects and negative developments neutralized each other at the corporate level. The company saw activity, and it saw pockets of success — but it did not have a controllable lever at scale. Local optimization remained local. Learning remained local. And competitive effects that could have been replicated across sites disappeared because the organization did not know the measures behind the numbers, and therefore could not intentionally reproduce them.
In the end, savings targets were missed — even though good work was being done in many places. That experience shaped my thinking because it revealed a common misconception: transparency is not a reporting topic. Transparency is the prerequisite for targets and measures to truly fit together. Reporting can show whether something happened. Steering only becomes possible when you understand what needs to happen, who owns it, which measures are planned, and how those measures actually play out across plants, categories, and time.
Fast forward to 2026. This is exactly the connection we set out to build with cusoso Target. The goal is not to create “another reporting layer,” but to make target steering operational. Procurement targets are directly linked to concrete measures — from tenders and auctions to supplier evaluations, dual sourcing initiatives, demand bundling, and even the structured sell-off of remaining inventory. The principle is always the same: target owners and execution owners can see at any time where they stand, which measures are working, where things are becoming critical, and where there is still room to maneuver. That’s not transparency for transparency’s sake — it’s decision capability. And in more volatile environments, decision capability is often the difference between hitting targets and missing them.
This raises a question that is surprisingly difficult for many organizations to answer clearly: How do you ensure today that savings targets and concrete procurement measures are truly connected — across sites and in a reproducible way?