About
Victoria Folbigg is a strategic adviser specialising in indirect procurement, digital operating models, and sustainable value chains. With nearly 30 years of experience across financial services, FMCG, healthcare, technology, and professional services, she has built and led procurement functions across Europe, Asia, and the United States. Her earlier leadership roles at Barclays, SAP Ariba, PwC, and Procter & Gamble focused on procurement transformation, sourcing governance, and technology implementation in complex regulated environments. Today, she advises global procurement leaders on ESG integration, supplier governance, and resilient operating models that align procurement with measurable business outcomes.
About This Interview
In this interview, procurement strategist Victoria Folbigg shares perspectives gathered from seven senior procurement leaders across industries, including manufacturing, energy and utilities, healthcare, and semiconductors. Together, their experiences reveal the growing operational pressure facing indirect procurement functions – from broken data foundations and rising ESG demands to increasing workload complexity and digital friction – and explore what organisations need to change to build more resilient, effective operating models.
You’ve spent nearly 30 years in procurement as a practitioner, a CPO, and now as an advisor. What has fundamentally changed in how organisations think about indirect procurement, and what hasn't changed that should have by now?
What’s genuinely changed is that indirect procurement is no longer invisible. Organisations are starting to understand that leaving it unmanaged carries real cost, real compliance risk, and real operational consequences. That recognition is meaningful, and it's taken time to arrive at.
But then it moves straight to: what savings can procurement deliver? And that’s where progress stalls. Unit cost savings, while real, often should not be the primary value lever in indirect procurement. The bigger opportunity is in the operating model: what happens to processing costs when orders flow through a governed channel? What happens to invoice volume? To exception handling? How much time does a category manager spend correcting free-text orders versus doing something strategic? That total-cost picture is where the real business case lives.
The real value of getting indirect procurement right isn’t in shaving a few percentage points off the price of a catalogue item. It’s in what changes when you fix the operating model — when processing costs drop, when finance touches fewer invoices, when end users stop going rogue, and when ESG compliance stops being a manual exercise. That’s a whole-of-cost story, and it's a much more compelling one.
What makes this harder is that procurement often reinforces the wrong frame. The function still largely defines itself through negotiation — being visible in every deal, owning every approval, demonstrating value through price movement. It’s a reflex built over decades. But it's also self-limiting. When procurement positions itself as the organisation's chief negotiator for indirect spend, it sets up a performance conversation it can't win — because the numbers are rarely large enough to move the needle at that level.
In the report, you argue that procurement isn’t broken; it’s overloaded. What do most organisations still misunderstand about this distinction?
Let's take the numbers from the Unite-HTWK 2025 study: A typical procurement team manages 5,618 hours of annual process effort, 30 sourcing cases, around 250 suppliers, and a 20% increase in workload driven solely by ESG requirements. That's the baseline before your account for the geopolitical disruptions, the regulatory expansion, or the growing expectation that procurement leads on supply chain transparency and risk.
And yet headcount isn't following. If anything, the pressure is moving in the opposite direction, and teams are being asked to consolidate, to offshore, to do more with what they have. So, the question isn't why indirect procurement is struggling. The question is how any team could realistically keep pace with that rate of demand growth without something fundamental changing in how the work gets done.
The answer most organisations have reached for is technology. And the tools have improved, but they've also consistently underdelivered on the promise. The reason, I think, is structural. Most enterprise procurement platforms are built around a standardised process logic: one intake model, one approval hierarchy, one catalogue framework. But the organisations trying to use them are anything but uniform! An R&D-driven environment where engineers need fast access to thousands of specialist items runs nothing like a manufacturing operation managing a tight supplier base on long-term contracts. Forcing both through the same process architecture creates friction at every step; friction invites workarounds, and workarounds mean the tool stops being the system of record and becomes one more thing to manage alongside everything else.
That's what some of the interviewees were sharing in the Expert Report. Digitalisation hasn't reduced the load because it hasn't been designed around the actual diversity of how indirect procurement operates. Until the tools flex to fit the operating model, rather than the operating model contorting to fit the tool, the gap between what's promised and what's delivered will stay stubbornly wide. I used to remember the old saying fix the process so that the tool can work — but sometimes the process can't be ‘fixed’; it is how the operation functions.
The Expert Report highlights broken data foundations as one of the root causes of inefficiency. Why is data still such a persistent challenge for procurement teams today?
It's not just unglamorous, it's genuinely hard, costly work, and I say that from experience. I did it myself; started a project as a CPO to implement a four-tier taxonomy into a hundred-year-old organisation with multiple independent business units, each with their own cost centre owners, their own buying habits, and their own very firm views on how things should be done. What that experience taught me is that you only have a chance of getting data and taxonomy foundation right if the C-suite is actively behind it, not nominally supportive, but actively behind it, and if the organisation has committed to a multi-year programme with realistic expectations about when value materialises. Because the savings are considerable, but they will not show up in year one. They show up when the catalogue is trusted, when the automation starts working cleanly, when the exceptions stop accumulating. And that takes time.
The problem is that no one wants to fund time. You can't walk into a board update and point to a taxonomy as evidence of progress the way you can point to a new S2P platform or an AI pilot. There is no pretty interface to show. So, the business case erodes, the programme loses momentum, and the organisation learns to live with the consequences instead.
And the consequences are significant and compounding. Manual workarounds become the default; people stop using the catalogue and start going around it. Institutional knowledge is concentrated in individuals rather than systems, which means when those people leave, the knowledge goes with them. And most worryingly, every subsequent procurement investment, every tool, every marketplace, every automation initiative, gets built on unstable foundations. Any new system can only be as good as what sits underneath it.
Procurement becomes the manual buffer holding everything together, correcting, chasing, guiding, absorbing the workload that was never meant to sit with the function. One CPO I interviewed reported that 81% of indirect materials were uncoded. Another described a codification programme that ran significantly over time, delaying marketplace adoption by months. These aren't cautionary tales from underperforming organisations. These are the lived realities of capable leaders working within systems that were never given the foundations they needed to function properly.
Many procurement teams are managing growing complexity without additional resources. How’s this impacting team performance and long-term capability?
It's creating a function that's permanently reactive. When your execution capacity is fully consumed by daily transactional volume. e.g., exception handling, supplier queries, free-text order corrections, and ESG documentation, there is no bandwidth left for the work that would reduce that volume over time. It's a structural trap.
The performance impact is visible. Sourcing cycles lengthen. Catalogue governance slips. Supplier relationships become transactional rather than collaborative. Strategic projects get delayed or descoped. And because procurement is visibly firefighting, it loses credibility with the stakeholders it most needs to influence, such as finance, IT, operations, and the board.
The long-term capability risk is more insidious. Experienced practitioners burn out or move on. And the function struggles to attract people coming in with modern expectations of what work should look like. You can't retain talent by asking them to spend their days in spreadsheets and inbox queues.
What the best-performing teams I spoke to understood, and what I think is still underappreciated more broadly, is that the answer isn't just better tools or a bigger taxonomy project. It's pairing the right technical infrastructure with services that absorb the operational load procurement shouldn't be carrying alone: catalogue governance, supplier content quality, ESG credential assessments, master data management. It’s about creatively assessing and leveraging your supplier and partner ecosystem to deliver the results your team needs, so they can focus on the truly critical, high-value work.
Based on your interviews, how would you describe the current state of supplier management, particularly regarding digital maturity and collaboration?
Uneven is the most honest word. The gap between the digital expectations of buying organisations and the actual capability of many of their suppliers, particularly SMEs, is one of the most underestimated constraints in indirect procurement today.
When a supplier can't provide structured, accurate catalogue content, procurement absorbs the cost. Items arrive miscoded, descriptions are incomplete, and pricing is inconsistent. The buyer must correct it, or work around it, or just stop trusting the catalogue entirely. And when the catalogue isn't trusted, users bypass it, leading to supplier proliferation, maverick spend, and increased downstream manual effort.
The most progressive organisations I spoke to had recognised this and started treating supplier digital enablement as a shared responsibility rather than the supplier's problem alone. That's the right instinct. Collaboration on data quality, by supporting suppliers in maintaining accurate, complete, up-to-date content, directly reduces procurement's operational load. It’s a smart investment into efficiency, just like we are helping smaller suppliers understand and impact ESG objectives. But it requires deliberate investment and, often, external capability to do it consistently at scale.
Sustainable procurement is adding a significant workload. How can organisations balance ESG requirements with already stretched procurement teams?
That builds nicely from the point I made in the last question. The teams that are managing it well aren't ‘balancing’ it; they've embedded it in their automated workflows wherever possible. That's the critical and clever distinction. When ESG criteria are embedded in the catalogue, the supplier qualification process, and the approved channel design, every purchase decision automatically carries those attributes. Compliance happens at the point of transaction, not as a separate documentation exercise bolted on afterwards. Unite is a good example of this in practice: when sustainability data is part of the catalogue content itself — supplier origin, certifications, scope 3 attributes — the ESG workload doesn't land on the procurement team because the system is already carrying it.
The teams that are struggling are the ones treating sustainable procurement as a reporting function layered on top of existing operations. If supplier assessments, scope 3 mapping, and regulatory documentation are all happening in parallel with everything else, they add to a workload that was already at capacity. That's where the 20% increase in workload identified in the HTWK study comes not from ESG being hard, but from ESG not being embedded.
There's also a repositioning opportunity here that the best CPOs I spoke to were actively exploiting. ESG gives procurement a direct line to board-level conversations that savings alone can't open. When you can connect every buying decision to the organisation's sustainability commitments, you're no longer a cost function; you're a governance and client-understanding function. That's a different conversation, and a much more powerful one.
The Expert Report touches on how outdated tools and processes affect talent retention. Are we at risk of losing the next generation of procurement professionals?
Yes! And it's already happening in some organisations, quietly. The young people entering procurement today have grown up with seamless digital experiences in their daily lives. They expect tools that work, data they can trust, and work that feels meaningful. What they often find instead is manual workarounds, legacy systems, catalogue content nobody believes in, an inbox full of exceptions to resolve, and outdated interfaces.
As European procurement leader, Torben Link, put it quite strongly in our interview: if we keep younger buyers tied up in paper-based compliance routines, we shouldn't be surprised when they look elsewhere. That's not a management problem. It's an infrastructure problem.
The longer-term risk is a compounding capability gap. Experienced practitioners leave a function that's overloaded and underinvested. Younger professionals don't stay long enough to build deep expertise. And indirect procurement — already under-resourced relative to its growing complexity — becomes even harder to staff well. The fix isn't a recruitment campaign. It's building the operating model that makes the work worth doing.
Dive into insights from the Expert Report
What’s really driving procurement overload, and how can organisations respond?