We were basically walking past €1.3M every year.
AGRA transformed indirect procurement from a function that negotiated savings into one that could systematically identify, execute and prove value across the business.
Negotiating savings was never the hardest part
AGRA is one of Scandinavia’s largest branded food groups.
Its procurement team knew how to negotiate.
The harder problem was everything around the negotiation.
- Which opportunities were worth pursuing?
- Where should category managers spend their limited time?
- Did factories actually switch to the suppliers procurement had negotiated with?
- And did negotiated savings ultimately become savings the business realized?
With invoices sitting in PDFs and only a rough taxonomy in place, answering those questions required enormous manual effort.
Finding an opportunity meant working through invoice after invoice. Building the evidence behind a sourcing proposal could take months. Even strong recommendations could stall because stakeholders did not fully trust the underlying data.
“Solid proposals were turned down because basically they didn't trust the data we were presenting.”
AGRA estimates that approximately €1.3 million in opportunities were going uncaptured each year.
Mithra changed that operating model.
How AGRA moved from finding savings to proving them
Three months of analysis became a few hours
Before Mithra, a major sourcing initiative could begin with three months of preparation.
Not negotiation.
Not supplier engagement.
Just finding and structuring the information needed to know where to act.
“Traditionally, huge projects would typically start off with three months of going through PDFs and trying to dig for information. That's gone. Now it's two, three hours in Mithra to do the same work.”
Mithra gave AGRA a trusted decision layer across its transactions, suppliers and business units.
The team could quickly understand what was being bought, where spend was concentrated, which suppliers were involved and where category action could create value.
What previously took months could now happen in hours.
That changed more than efficiency.
It increased the number of sourcing cycles the team could run every year.
Negotiated savings are not realized savings
This is where many procurement organizations lose value.
A contract gets signed.
A saving gets reported.
But the business does not always change how it buys.
A negotiated saving only matters if factories, teams and business units actually adopt the agreement.
Previously, AGRA had limited ability to verify that this happened.
With Mithra, procurement can go back into the transactions and see exactly where the new agreement has been adopted and where old buying behavior remains.
“It's two minutes in Mithra and I have a full report detailing out which factory has moved to the new supplier and what factories are still with the old suppliers.”
That gives AGRA a closed loop from opportunity to execution to realized savings.
Procurement no longer has to assume that a signed agreement created value.
It can verify whether the change reached the business.
More procurement output without adding more procurement capacity
Once the team stopped spending months assembling the evidence behind each sourcing decision, the economics of the function changed.
AGRA could run more sourcing events.
Savings output per FTE increased to close to twice the previous level.
The company was also able to reduce FTE capacity within indirect procurement and reinvest that capacity into stronger category management capabilities.
The objective was never to help procurement do the same work a little faster.
It was to increase the amount of value the function could deliver with the resources it already had.
Trusted data changed the conversation with the business
Speed alone does not make procurement strategic.
Trust does.
Before Mithra, category managers could spend weeks building a proposal only to lose momentum when stakeholders challenged the numbers behind it.
Now, procurement can move from the recommendation all the way back to the underlying transactions.
“The anxiety is gone because you know that you have full control of the data. You know that you know every detail. Therefore, we predominantly get a yes answer.”
That changes the stakeholder conversation.
Instead of debating whether procurement's numbers are right, the business can focus on whether to act.
The real outcome: AGRA doubled its ambition
The biggest impact was not faster analysis.
It was what AGRA believed indirect procurement could deliver.
Mithra gave the team a more systematic way to identify opportunities, prioritize category work, drive adoption after negotiation and verify whether savings were actually realized.
AGRA responded by increasing its targets for indirect procurement by a factor of two.
“Our ambitions for indirect procurement today are much higher than they were two years ago. We now have the data to build a strategy and build the targets with confidence.”
That is the shift from procurement analytics to procurement performance.
For AGRA, Mithra became part of the operating system for how the team decides where to act, how it executes and how it proves the value delivered.
“Mithra was a cornerstone to actually do a transformation with increased ambitions on indirect procurement.”