Buying stuff,
but better.

Procurement was seen as capable tendering support, but far more was expected of it as a business partner. Category management and unified supplier management were missing, contracts were scattered with no shared solution, and spend data was under-used in decisions.

We built the strategy from interviews with the team and internal stakeholders, distilled it to three focus areas, and took it from team launch to leadership sign-off — then made it executable as six strategic projects, each with a named owner, a project charter and a three-wave roadmap, tracked through status reporting.

In eighteen months procurement moved from interview findings to an approved strategy and measurable outcomes: eight category strategies, a Vendor Management Office, a chosen contract-management solution, and a piloted analytics solution with machine-learning spend classification.

Senaatti wanted to map the current state of its procurement technologies, identify where development was most needed, and assess the market's options. Systems worked, but in a fragmented way — a shared data architecture and integration layer were missing, forcing teams into manual patch-work.

We ran a current-state analysis from seven interviews, held an RFI market dialogue with nine suppliers, and built three development scenarios with cost-benefit analysis. At the core was raising AI architecture to a strategic selection criterion — not just which AI features a vendor has, but who controls the AI development path and how decisions stay traceable.

The steering group received a clear, staged plan covering all critical requirements and preserving Senaatti's long-term control of its own AI architecture. The recommendation rested on genuine market research and structured scenario comparison — a practical plan, not a report left on the shelf.

The group's IT-procurement organisation faced demand spikes its own team couldn't cover — regulatory reviews and the supplier and contract work required by DORA piled on top of the everyday workload.

Zeal supplied a flexible resource pool scaling from one to three person-months as needed. The pool integrated into the client's team and took ownership of the overflow: regulatory reviews, DORA-driven contract and supplier mapping, and IT-procurement support through the peaks.

The engagement has run for 12 months and covered about 3,000 expert hours. The client gets capacity exactly when it's needed, without the commitment of a permanent hire, and its own team can focus on its core tasks.

Metso's global IT management services had been bought piecemeal from several suppliers with no unified ownership, leaving Metso's own IT organisation carrying integration responsibility that the service contract should remove. The existing framework had to be renewed to cover eleven IT service areas — while a SAP S/4HANA migration and other major changes were underway.

We designed and led the tender as a three-stage, scheduled RFP: a shared current- and target-state workshop for all bidders, staged shortlisting, and negotiation ending in a binding final offer (BAFO). At its core was a modular contract architecture — a framework plus numbered annexes that let new service areas be added without reopening the master agreement — with a four-tier penalty structure and a tiered governance model.

A new global service agreement was signed about seven months from launch, for a 60-month term plus an option year. The contract architecture proved a durable asset: its frame was taken almost as-is as the basis for Metso's separate global network-service agreement.