Research · Deloitte

Unlocking procurement value: what Deloitte's CPO Survey says the winners do differently

TraceIT Research · July 2026 · 6 min read

Every year, Deloitte asks hundreds of Chief Procurement Officers what separates the winners. The 2023 Global CPO Survey, nearly 350 senior procurement leaders across more than 40 countries, is one of the clearest pictures available of how top-performing organizations actually operate.¹ Its central finding: a group Deloitte calls Orchestrators of Value consistently outperforms everyone else, and the gap is widening.

What the winners do differently

Three behaviors define them. First, they get out of transactional work: top performers deliberately pull themselves out of tactical processing to focus on strategy and supplier collaboration.¹ Second, they digitize aggressively. Orchestrators are three times more likely to be involved in digital transformation, the third most cited procurement priority of the year.² Third, they automate the repetitive: high-performing teams use AI and robotic process automation three times more than others, cutting transactional tasks by nearly half.³

The priorities driving all this are stark: driving operational efficiency (74%), enhancing ESG (72%), digital transformation (72%), and improving margins through cost reduction (71%) top the CPO agenda.⁴ And when asked what blocks improvement, the most cited barrier, tied at 41%, is inadequate technology, alongside conflicting internal priorities.⁴

The gap is compounding

Deloitte's 2025 survey shows what the divide produces over time: organizations that invested correctly in technology and talent beat their plans across every metric, 96% met or exceeded their cost savings plan versus 80% of followers, with even wider gaps in stakeholder satisfaction and innovation enablement.⁵ Meanwhile, the skills problem persists: 42% of CPOs cite data and analytics as their top talent gap, up seven points from 2021.³

What this means for your store room

Read the survey from a factory floor and a pattern jumps out: everything the Orchestrators do maps to removing manual, unrecorded, transactional work, exactly the work that dominates a typical store room. TraceIT attacks that layer directly. The self-service kiosk removes clerical request-taking entirely, a worker's badge and taps become a pre-filled transaction. Issue, replace, and return happen on one screen instead of three ERP transactions. Every movement writes its own audit record, so month-end reconciliation, the most soul-destroying transactional task of all, stops existing as a separate job.

And the survey's biggest barrier, inadequate technology, usually means one thing in the mid-market: enterprise tools priced and specced for someone else. That's precisely the wedge TraceIT's model was designed for, $1 per tracked unit per year, unlimited users, everything included, so the digital transformation Deloitte's leaders run with consulting armies is available to a factory group at the cost of a stationery order. The intelligence layer now rolling out builds on the same foundation: analytics grounded in a ledger every CPO can trust, because nobody can quietly rewrite it.