From Reactive to Ready: How Procurement Teams Are Getting Ahead of Inflation

Insights from Beroe’s In the Know Product Showcase: Turn Global Market Volatility into Confident Decisions. 

Inflation never really left the procurement agenda. It just got more complicated. 

When the drivers of cost volatility were limited and relatively predictable, procurement teams could manage with a spreadsheet, a few indices, and a quarterly review. That model is no longer fit for purpose. Today, commodity swings, geopolitical disruptions, trade policy reversals, and supply chain redesigns do not arrive one at a time – they compound. Energy impacts raw materials. Trade impacts energy economics. And by the time the numbers make it into a budget, the market has already moved on. 

In Beroe’s recent In the Know webinar, Hemant Bansal (Principal Product Manager at Beroe) walked Sunny Makhija (Associate Director of Product Marketing), through how procurement teams are using Inflation Watch to shift their position: from explaining what happened to proactively managing and responding efficiently. 

The real problem is a lack of clarity

One of the more counterintuitive arguments Hemant made early in the session was this: procurement teams are not suffering from a shortage of data. They are suffering from an excess of it, without the context to act on it. 

CPI, PPI, commodity indices, supplier reports, market feeds – most procurement teams have access to all of it. The problem is that generic macro indicators do not reflect the actual cost structure of a specific category. When a supplier walks in with a 14% price increase request citing “raw material inflation and energy surcharges,” a category manager armed only with headline indices cannot validate that claim at driver level. They are left negotiating instinctually rather than backed by evidence. 

What Inflation Watch does differently is break cost visibility down to the components that actually drive spend in a given category: the specific raw materials, the energy mix, the labor weighting, the margin structure. Rather than applying a flat percentage assumption to last year’s actuals, procurement teams can see exactly which drivers are moving, by how much, and why – and present that to finance or a supplier with a methodology behind it. 

As Hemant put it: “The point is simple, procurement cannot afford to rely on instinct or poor data when the stakes are this high.”

Three scenarios where this changes the outcome

The session was built around three use cases that most procurement professionals will recognise immediately.

Budget season: building a forecast that holds up 

The typical budget-season process starts with last year’s actuals, adds a generic inflation assumption, references a few indices, and produces a number that looks reasonable on a slide but has limited defensibility. When finance pushes back, or when the market moves in a direction the assumption did not anticipate, the category manager has little to stand on. 

With Inflation Watch, the starting point is different. Instead of applying a flat percentage, procurement teams build cost structures at the driver level – for direct categories, this might mean specific raw materials, energy components, and labor; for indirects, the equivalent breakdown for that category’s economics. The platform draws on over 7,800 pre-built cost structures and 22,000 cost drivers, or teams can build their own. The output is a category-level forecast grounded in the underlying economics, not a macro assumption. 

The practical difference in a budget conversation: instead of saying “a category is up 4%,” a category manager can walk finance through which underlying cost drivers are moving, what the expected impact on spend is across the next 12 months, and where the uncertainty sits. That is a fundamentally more defensible position. 

Monday morning: quantifying exposure before the CPO asks 

The scenario Hemant walked through here was deliberately familiar: a major supply disruption overnight in a key energy corridor, a CPO already in the inbox by morning, and a request for a credible view of exposure by end of day. In the traditional model, building that view means pulling data from multiple systems, checking which categories have energy in their cost structure, and calculating impact manually across a portfolio. By the time an answer is ready, the moment has often passed. 

What the scenario planning capability in Inflation Watch enables is immediate simulation. A sourcing manager can define the disruption, e.g. crude oil up 10%, and within seconds see which categories across their entire portfolio are affected, what the dollar exposure is at portfolio level, and and how much of the total business spend is exposed to crude oil. They can then save and name that scenario, export it for a leadership briefing, and run alternative simulations to test hedging strategies. 

The value here is not just speed, though speed matters. It is the shift from telling the CPO “energy prices are up” to walking in with a specific, quantified answer: here is our total exposure, here are the categories most at risk, and here are three options for how to respond.

Supplier negotiations: meeting a 14% increase request with data 

This is perhaps the use case with the most immediate commercial impact. A procurement manager handling packaging receives a supplier price increase request of 14%, justified by raw material inflation, energy surcharges, and trade costs. The question is not just whether to accept it, it is whether it is justified, and if so, by how much. 

Inflation Watch approaches this by bringing everything together in one place: market data, contract terms, tariff impacts, and internal spend, to give category managers clear, actionable intelligence before they walk into the room. With a single click, the platform generates a ready-to-use view of the latest inflation metrics, projecting total spend after factoring in market, contract, and tariff impacts, quantifying the inflationary or deflationary effect on the budget, and identifying the specific cost drivers behind the movement. 

The shift in dynamic is significant. Instead of a negotiation where one party has the cost data and the other is responding to it, procurement enters with its own driver-level view of what the market justifies. That changes the conversation from “what is your price?” to “why is it moving, and where does the data say we should land?”

The question nobody asks enough: what about deflation?

One of the sharper moments in the Q&A came from a question about whether failing to forecast deflation is as risky as failing to forecast inflation. 

Hemant’s answer was direct: often more so, because the risk is invisible. When inflation hits and procurement missed it, the impact shows up quickly in budget overruns. When deflation arrives and procurement missed it, the supplier captures the upside, the organization continues paying yesterday’s price, and nobody flags it as a loss because nothing looks different. 

The implication is that inflation intelligence is not purely a risk management tool. It is equally a value capture tool. Knowing when the market has moved in procurement’s favor, and being able to go back to suppliers with data to support a price reduction, is part of what proactive inflation management looks like in practice.

What Siemens Energy built with it

The most concrete illustration of what this looks like at scale came from Siemens Energy, which co-created Inflation Watch with Beroe and has had it running across the organization. 

The starting point was familiar: rapid commodity price shifts after COVID, geopolitical disruptions compounding daily, and traditional cost transparency approaches that could not keep up. Today, more than 2,000 professionals across procurement, finance, and legal teams at Siemens Energy use the platform every day to align on strategy and prepare for negotiations. 

The outcomes are specific: contract creation time dropped from over 30 hours to under 10 minutes. Spend under active management tripled from $500 million to $1.5 billion, without additional headcount. In one quarter alone, the team logged over $1 million in savings in a single raw material category. 

What Siemens Energy built is not a dashboard used by a few category specialists. It is a shared intelligence layer that procurement, finance, and legal teams draw on together, which addresses one of the structural problems Hemant identified across the industry: that procurement and finance are too often working from different data sets, arriving at different conclusions, and losing time reconciling them before decisions get made.

The gap most teams are still closing

Audience polling during the session pointed to speed as the most pressing challenge – by the time intelligence arrives, the moment for action has often already passed. Hemant’s response framed this well: the goal is to have intelligence early enough to act on, not just late enough to explain with. 

That distinction is the design principle behind Inflation Watch. It is not built to produce reports that document what happened. It is built to surface signals before they hit the budget, quantify their impact before the supplier meeting, and give procurement teams something to act on rather than something to react to. 

Watch the webinar recording here. 

Beroe’s Inflation Watch is available as part of the Beroe Live.ai platform. To see it in action for your categories, request a demo.