An agenda built through deep collaboration with our community to ensure every session delivers substance over soundbites. You’ll hear from true subject matter leaders via candid case studies, collaborative roundtables, and varied panel discussions —providing clarity on what’s driving success across the marketing landscape.
Registration and breakfast open from 7:30am, followed by facilitated networking from 8:15–8:45am.
This session is designed to support efficient, high‑value peer connections through a series of light‑touch formats, including:
• Optional 1:1 peer connects based on shared challenges
• Curated conversation stations
• 'Find someone who' networking game where you grab a persona pin, swap sticks and stories, meet new people
The objective is to enable meaningful conversations and connections early in the day, setting the tone ahead of the formal programme.
Peer‑led discussions on current sourcing pressures, capability gaps, and risk exposure.
Each pod takes one question:
1) Where is your biggest sourcing exposure right now, and does your CFO know?
2) Which procurement decisions are you making today that you couldn't have made two years ago?
3) Where is your team the bottleneck, and where is it the solution?
Pods report back one insight each. Sets the room's agenda for the day.
• Forge a tariff resilience playbook by translating new trade scenarios into procurement decisions that are ready to execute before cost exposure escalates beyond what contractual levers can recover
• Close the supplier opportunism gap by designing agreements that lock in cost-sharing obligations, escalation rights, and trigger clauses before the next trade shock forces renegotiation from a weaker position
• Equip leadership with a sourcing geography strategy that moves beyond reactive nearshoring and into a structured, board-ready view of supply chain exposure across friend-shoring, reshoring, and dual-sourcing optionsÂ
• Concierge Meetings Service: pre-matched 15-minute conversations with solution providers
• Challenge + Solution Exchange Groups: self-selected small groups organised around a live procurement challenge
• Exhibition walk with guided context: solution providers briefed to lead with use cases, not capability lists
• Close the false confidence gap in procurement's spend data by applying a diagnostic framework that maps where supplier master data, spend categorisation, and maverick spend capture are creating commercial risk, before that risk surfaces in a tariff exposure report the CFO cannot trust
• Accelerate the data clean-up by sequencing intervention around the categories, supplier relationships, and spend pools where inaccuracy is most costly right now, so the team prioritises what matters most without halting the day job
• Unlock a credible finance alignment conversation by defining what ""good enough"" looks like for procurement data to support CFO-level decisions on tariff exposure, working capital, and supplier concentration, and what shared ownership of data quality between procurement and finance actually requires in practice
• Strengthen supplier transparency under cost pressure by building the relational and contractual foundations that make suppliers more, not less, willing to share tariff exposure before it becomes a crisis
• Protect supply continuity in a tight market by developing the dual sourcing intelligence, backup supplier relationships, and rapid activation protocols that turn options into operational reality
• Deliver what strategic suppliers demand from a procurement partner by closing the gap between what most teams offer and the three things, technology, stability, and performance, that determine which customers suppliers protect first when capacity is constrained
1) Make vs. Buy, Vertical Integration, and the Capital Trade-Off: When does bringing capability in-house stop being a resilience decision and start being a capital allocation mistake?
2) Supplier Collaboration and Innovation, Moving Beyond Risk Management: You call them strategic partners. Do they call you a strategic customer?
3) Board-Level Governance, Decision Rights, and Procurement's Seat at the Table: If procurement isn't in the room when the capital decision is made, whose fault is that?
4) Pricing Volatility, Rare Materials, and Unplanned Cost Increases: How do you govern the ungovernable?
• Concierge Meetings Service: pre-matched 15-minute conversations with solution providers
• Challenge + Solution Exchange Groups: self-selected small groups organised around a live procurement challenge
• Exhibition walk with guided context: solution providers briefed to lead with use cases, not capability lists
• Accelerate time to contract by deploying AI across supplier shortlisting, automated intake, and negotiation scenario modelling, removing the manual bottlenecks that slow sourcing without removing the human judgment that protects it
• Close the ROI gap by building the business case for AI in procurement on cycle-time data, cost avoidance metrics, and contract compliance improvements, not on capability demonstrations that never reach production
• Strengthen procurement's strategic position by embedding AI in contracting and execution workflows so the function delivers faster, more defensible decisions at every stage of the sourcing cycle
• Build a long-lead sourcing strategy that locks preferred-supplier positions across power infrastructure and specialty materials before capacity constraints make availability, not price, the primary competitive variable for industrial buyers
• Close the supply visibility gap by extending E2E mapping into the semiconductor, specialty chemical, and energy infrastructure tiers most exposed to reshoring displacement and grid reliability shocks
• Deliver procurement resilience against the infrastructure supercycle by designing dual-sourcing and nearshoring models that can absorb fab expansion demand signals without triggering cascading cost and lead time failures across the supply base
Registration and breakfast open from 7:30am, followed by facilitated networking from 8:15–8:45am.
This session is designed to support efficient, high‑value peer connections through a series of light‑touch formats, including:
• Optional 1:1 peer connects based on shared challenges
• Curated conversation stations
• 'Find someone who' networking game where you grab a persona pin, swap sticks and stories, meet new people
The objective is to enable meaningful conversations and connections early in the day, setting the tone ahead of the formal programme.
• Transform global Scope 3 from reporting burden into ethical sourcing advantage by mapping supplier exposure across EU California and Tier 2 Tier 3 supply chains embedding reduction targets in contracts and qualification frameworks
• Elevate global supplier verification from compliance exercise to competitive differentiation by adopting LCA recycled content and circular sourcing criteria delivering cost resilience credibility and regulatory readiness
• Forge greenwash‑proof ethical sourcing standards by aligning global supplier claims to taxonomy consistent evidence frameworks ensuring every claim to customers boards regulators survives EU California scrutiny
• Build a live shadow supplier programme that functions as an operational alternative, qualifying parallel sources, stress‑testing transition playbooks, and defining activation triggers so continuity risks are solved before primary suppliers fail
• Accelerate regional and dual‑sourcing decisions through a delivery‑assurance lens by stress‑testing logistics, capacity, regulatory exposure, and lead‑time volatility first - ensuring diversification reduces outage risk rather than reallocating it
• Redesign supplier portfolio risk governance by linking concentration thresholds, single‑point‑of‑failure risks, and contractual flexibility directly to sourcing strategy, so resilience is engineered into supply decisions, not managed reactively
• Build surge capacity into supplier agreements before virality strikes - designing procurement frameworks that can absorb a 10x demand spike in 72 hours without triggering stockouts, emergency sourcing premiums, or margin-destroying spot buys
• Accelerate sourcing cycle times for short-lifecycle categories by embedding flexible MOQ structures and fast-switch supplier options into category strategies that are built for trend-speed, not annual planning cycles
• Equip procurement leadership to translate GLP‑1, wellness, and seasonal demand signals into credible sourcing and reformulation roadmaps, so the function leads category pivots ahead of Christmas and launch windows rather than reacting after NPD commitments are locked
Registration and breakfast open from 7:30am, followed by facilitated networking from 8:15–8:45am.
This session is designed to support efficient, high‑value peer connections through a series of light‑touch formats, including:
• Optional 1:1 peer connects based on shared challenges
• Curated conversation stations
• 'Find someone who' networking game where you grab a persona pin, swap sticks and stories, meet new people
The objective is to enable meaningful conversations and connections early in the day, setting the tone ahead of the formal programme.
• Build surge capacity into supplier agreements before virality strikes, designing procurement frameworks that can absorb a 10x demand spike in 72 hours without triggering stockouts, emergency sourcing premiums, or margin-destroying spot buys
• Accelerate sourcing cycle times for short-lifecycle categories by embedding flexible MOQ structures and fast-switch supplier options into category strategies that are built for trend-speed, not annual planning cycles
• Equip procurement leadership to translate GLP‑1, wellness, and seasonal demand signals into credible sourcing and reformulation roadmaps, so the function leads category pivots ahead of Christmas and launch windows rather than reacting after NPD commitments are locked
Supplier Management Infrastructure: What you actually need to build before the relationship can work
• Build a single, trusted view of your supply base by centralising supplier onboarding, risk signals, performance data, and ESG compliance into one system, so your team spends less time chasing information and more time acting on it
• Forge supplier partnerships that deliver genuine value by creating structured collaboration frameworks that track improvement commitments, surface innovation opportunities, and move key relationships beyond one-way governance
• Drive supplier performance improvement through structured scorecards and transparent KPIs that move conversations from anecdote to accountable, improvement-focused dialogue across quality, delivery, and commercial outcomes
• Build risk-based category segmentation that ends the blanket resilience-versus-cost argument by giving procurement a structured method to determine, category by category, where depth, diversification, or a hybrid model delivers the best risk-adjusted outcome under real working capital constraints
• Strengthen category strategy credibility across finance and marketing by designing portfolio decisions around inventory exposure, cash cycle impact, and supplier concentration risk from the start, not as a retrospective justification for sourcing choices already made
• Drive category evolution from reactive cost management to proactive risk optimisation by establishing the trade off thresholds, governance triggers, and finance alignment protocols that allow procurement to shift category posture as market conditions, tariff environments, and demand signals change
• Drive procurement talent strategy beyond reactive hiring by building structured capability frameworks that map hybrid skills, commercial, analytical, geopolitical, and digital - to the expanding decisions procurement is now expected to own across sourcing, risk, and data governance
• Strengthen the centre of excellence from coordination layer to capability engine, setting standards, developing talent, and extending procurement’s operating model beyond internal teams to include structured supplier enablement and training programmes that accelerate system adoption, data visibility, and collaboration at scale
• Transform AI from a threat narrative into a workforce multiplier by redesigning roles around what humans do best with AI support, while equipping procurement teams to onboard and train suppliers onto shared platforms, freeing professionals from transactional work and positioning the function as the organisation’s commercial intelligence core
